Live and Learn - A life and struggle for progress

INTRODUCTION

Like other QueenSpark books, we made this one collectively. Rather than being produced by a solitary ‘author’, a team worked on it – sometimes working as individuals, more often in groups of anything from 2 to 8.

QS first met Les through his struggles to get justice. Practical efforts – getting rooms in his council house re-decorated, getting welfare benefits enough to pay for extra trousers he needed because of ill-fitting artificial legs, keeping an adequate invalid carriage, in the face of the state’s decision to phase them out, writing letters, telephoning, finding out about the drug Lucofen which was given to him – these have not all been successful. But some have.

We have learned what Les always insists on, the hopelessness of working without any organisation behind you, the hopefulness of working together. This book is part of the struggle, above all to get Les adequate compensation for loss of his leg after going into hospital for a hernia operation, but also for simpler matters like getting Home Helps. We have come to see the growing necessity for street or area unionism, to complement trade unionism.

The book began with tape recording evenings, with Les and various combinations of 8 people asking him questions. Then another overlapping team of 10 people (including Les) formed to edit and work on the tapes. These had already been transcribed by yet another group of associated workers.

The main work was to form Les’s words into a book. Tape recording sessions are creative rather than mechanical questions and answers. The form of an interview is usually such that one question of a very factual nature sparks a much longer dialogue and from that dialogue comes further questions. We have found that people are always shocked when they see word-for-word transcripts of their conversations. They seem jumbled and incoherent: but that is how interesting talk goes. We talk much more like half-finished poems than polished prose. Les was exceptionally careful, logical, and to the point. But all the same there was a lot of re-arranging, asking again, cutting, punctuating… to do to make the book coherent. There were also documents written by Les at various times to weave in, for example in the ‘War and Engineering’ chapter.

The section, which deals with Les’s life after 1966, was done more from letters and documents than from the tapes. We have a large file of things Les has written since 1966, for various individuals and organisations. We have taken what we think to be the most important bits from this and stitched them together, then added the tapes and things Les has said since.

The life story, experiences and opinions in this book are those of Les Moss and those, such as Walter Hannington, from whom he has learned. In that sense the book is ‘his’. It is ‘our’ book in the sense that we have put Les’s words into an order which makes his life into ‘your’ (the reader’s) book by making it flow. We, as an editorial collective, have not introduced our own comments, analysis, or political viewpoints into the text. The book would not have existed without all of us working: equally, if any one of us (including Les) had sat down and wrote it all by ourselves it would have been utterly different. We all feel it to be important: it says something profound about the society we live in, from an unaccustomed angle of vision, and it makes serious personal, and hence in the proper, full sense, political demands.

Last summer when we were doing the basic work on the text, we met every day for two weeks, then more intermittently after that. At each stage we met with Les, reading him or giving him what we’d been putting together, asking him further questions, taking his corrections and additions. Even at the final stage of reading the entire book to him (a method he preferred) there were exciting additions. A way of describing our way of working on this book is that Les spun the wool and provided it for us, then we weaved it into the final cloth, so that it could go out into the world and be used.

The Collective

Gallery

Chapter One – A London Childhood

I was born in 1901 just inside the borders of St Pancras. A hundred yards higher up, the Hampstead district starts. It turned out to be a damp house we lived in. My sister, when she was 9, developed rheumatic fever for the first time and the doctor said, ‘get out of this house quickly’. And we did. Then we moved into the Hampstead district. I liked Hampstead better – we were better off there though we never owned a house, never.

My father had had a rather unlucky life insofar as when he was a youngster, his father owned two boot factories, in the Croydon district. The old type of boot factory, where they used to make them by hand. I’ve got a picture at home of the factories where they produced them and the shop with the name “Moss” over the top. He had owned them since 1830, but Northampton started up with the mass production boots and he was broken completely. My father has often told me about the sad time they had when they had to sell everything up – all of a sudden: their house, various carts and carriages which they had for transport in those days. All had to be sold up, the house, the furniture, everything.

So, my father couldn’t be a boot-maker’s apprentice. He became a cabinet maker in his younger days. But we never discussed that very much although I’ve still got his cabinet making tools at home.

But music, he was passionately fond of music. In fact it seemed to be his whole life. He was always talking about music and all that sort of thing. And that’s really all he knew. It was all he ever spoke about. I can’t think why he was so very interested in this thing, because no one ever taught him, and it wasn’t a musical family he came from. That’s the peculiar thing. He started in a drum and fife band as a youngster when he was in the Boys’ Brigade. He had a silver concert flute worth £50 and that was in the days when a penny was worth a penny. He started playing flute and piccolo professionally when he was 21 years old. And he never had a master. That’s a strange thing. He taught himself. All he paid for was just a few finishing-off lessons and that was it.

About the time I was born, my father was playing at the Old Bull & Bush. You’ve heard about that song – ‘Down at the Old Bull & Bush’ – well my father was playing it there when that song originated. There’s big grounds there and they used to play in the open air. The first time that I heard my father playing professionally was there. Prior to that he played at different clubs, mostly Conservative Clubs to tell you the truth, and that’s how he came to know Harley Dicks who composed ‘The Trumpeter’. They became great friends – boozing pals actually.

There wasn’t much money in it at all then. I don’t know what money he received for doing the job at the Old Bull and Bush, but I do know that as he moved on to the music hall and played first of all at the Camden Theatre he got 27s 6d a week. That was for doing two shows a night, six nights a week.

He used to play for Marie Lloyd before she went on the legitimate stage. This was before 1900. There was a hall near Camden Town where amateurs used to play to try their luck. Marie Lloyd was among them. I saw her at the Bedford. And the comedian who never laughed, Sam Mayo. He used to go on with a pram with bells on it, sing out a tune, look dopey and he’d bring the house down. He got about one hundred pounds a week, going from hall to hall. Workers’ wages were probably then from 18s to £2 a week. But he never impressed me. And Ernie Mayne, the fat comedian from the Midlands…

This was all before the First World War. He went to the Camden after he’d done those other jobs, like the Old Bull and Bush because those were only individual engagements – once or twice a week, not nightly, like so-called shop jobs. So he went to the Camden Music Hall and when that became pictures in 1911 he went to the Bedford (Camden Town) which was just a bit higher up the road. You were tied to a shop job.

During the War, my father had formed his own band called the Mossonia Quadrille Band with a partner called Mr Harper. They had these shop jobs but if they heard of a better job they would get one of the soldiers to do their regular job while they went and did the better one for the extra money. There was a musician’s union at the time but they weren’t strong enough then to interfere.

My father also ran a book for the Prudential at that time during the day. Penny-a-week death hunters they used to call them. The insurance job was a morbid job. But his book was worth £150 for the right to sell, and I remember him once mentioning to me that the job was worth about 2 guineas a week. And with his 27/6 as a musician, well £3 9s odd a week that was. That was a lot of money – a hell of a lot of money in those days. I’ll tell you how to compare it: there was a chap who used to live near to me only just down the road, and his father used to drive the drays for the Hampstead Brewery, those blessed great horses, beautiful horses. But I remember him telling me that his father got 18s a week.

My father used to go out in the morning and come home somewhere about 2pm or a bit later than that sometimes. You see he went to the pub. They were open all day. If you wanted a rum and milk, costing only 1½d when I was young, you could get it at midnight. That’s how the pubs were then. They never shut, or if they did only for about one hour in twenty-four. I can remember I used to dread what was going to happen when my father came home. I was frightened to death to tell you the truth.

I remember when I was very small my father was out drinking with Harley Dicks, who I never saw sober. He even died drunk, poor fellow. Fell off a bus. He suited my old man all right. On one occasion I remember my mother saying, ‘Now you’ll come home sober, won’t you, Dad’ and the old man chuckled. When my mother came home about six o’clock she asked ‘Is your Dad home yet?’ ‘No, he hasn’t come home’. And we go on waiting, talking, waiting. Anyhow, it got to about 10 o’clock at night and he still wasn’t home. Then eleven o’clock…and my mother says, ‘let’s go and look for him’. So she got hold of my hand and took me down the pub known as the Mansfield in Mansfield Road, Hampstead. As we approached it there were two blokes holding one another up and I could hear my old man saying ‘Well gernight Harley’ and Harley saying ‘Well gernight ‘Owie’. They were nearly kissing one another! Well my mother goes up and says ‘You dirty old so and sos’. Luckily a Mr Ryder, living opposite, happened to come along, otherwise we wouldn’t have got him home, as he and my mother carried him. But I can still remember, although I was only that high, how he crawled up the stairs.

It was the business he was in – musicians were always drunk – and those boys on the Prudential were about the same. I used to go to a Mr Groves, the boss of a little district for the Prudential and he always had a bottle of whisky on the table when I was there. And he always had his eyes half closed while he was doing his books. Everyone drank in those days, and my father was no exception by any means. The only thing was, he couldn’t take it very well. As soon as he’d had a few he showed it. In particular he used to lose his speech and you couldn’t understand what he was talking about. And that gave my mother every opportunity. He couldn’t answer her back then.

My mother was the one that ran everything. My father knew nothing except music, so he could be prevailed on to do anything. My mother was very strong willed. If she got an idea it had to come off. But with all this I had two good parents, there’s no shadow of a doubt about that. My father would have done anything for me, I only had to ask him for something and he bought it for me if I needed it. My mother was the same. She’d do anything for me and I didn’t even have to ask her. If I got a tear in something she wouldn’t say ‘Oh look what you’ve done’, she’d just go and repair it. That was the attitude within the family.

But there were two great weaknesses within my family. My father was a drinker and my mother was a jawpot. She couldn’t seem to be enjoying herself unless she was jawing at something. If it wasn’t my father or my sister it was the cat. But she couldn’t do this with me. I was a bit of a rebel. I used to have no end of trouble with her when she tried this stuff on me – I couldn’t stand it. I used to say to my father ‘Why do you put up with it?’ and he would reply, ‘Oh well, she’s ill you know’. And I’d say ‘Yes, you’re making her ill by putting up with it’.

But she was a good mother, I keep on impressing that. I couldn’t have had a better mother. But she had this one weakness which spoilt everything in the family. As for my father’s weakness, beer, he was never aggressive. He used to come in after the Prudential job and if my mother had just given him his dinner, which was always ready for him, and let him have a bit of a sleep, there wouldn’t have been any trouble. He only wanted to sleep before he went to the music hall for his nightly job. But as soon as he came in my mother used to go for him hammer and tongs and that led to all kinds of trouble. This used to go on night after night after night. I was so feared of what was happening in the family I used to shrivel up. My sister was just as frightened as I was.

I don’t doubt that that’s what brought on St Vitus’ Dance. It was a nervous complaint, I had it very badly. I can still remember the sort of fits I used to get into. All they prescribed for it was Parrishes Food and I drank gallons of this stuff, but as far as I know it didn’t make any improvement. What did cure me was going to work and meeting more people.

Dr Reece was our family doctor when we lived in St Pancras. He was a show-off man, rosettes, top hat and the smile. He smiled all the time and everybody said he had a good bedside manner. Our Hampstead doctor, Dr Fletcher was more of what I’d call a doctor. I think he did attempt to do something about things, with the limited knowledge there was in the profession in those days.

But I don’t think that the medical profession was very advanced. The great changes have all happened in the last 30 years or so. When I had tonsillitis I was taken to a hospital in Kentish Town and I can still remember the Doctor saying ‘What do you want?’ He was our commander, he didn’t want to talk to us. He just wanted to tell us, and do the job. That is, if they could do it. I don’t know how many people died under small operations in those days.

Although my father was doing reasonably well, we were still down in the dumps, because my father drank a lot of beer. A large proportion of his wages went on this wallop. These musicians, they’re rather generous people – they don’t worry about money – and they do go making mistakes. At odd times, I used to say to my father ‘Give us a half penny, Dad’ and he’d always give me the money. I did get pocket money but very very little. And I had to earn it. I used to clean the silver every weekend and all the knives, and for that my mother used to give me about a penny.

But my mother did all the kitchen chores. She never did impose that on us. We had all the freedom that we could have had, although my mother did have the old-fashioned Victorian ideas, about church and various institutions of that kind. If my sister wanted to go anywhere she’d go anywhere at all, there wouldn’t be any objections raised. Whereas I remember many men wouldn’t let their daughters go anywhere after nine o’clock in those days. I never asked if I could go anywhere, I just went. And when I came back they’d say, ‘Did you enjoy yourself? Where’ve you been?’ And I’d tell them. I must say that in our family there were no secrets.

My mother’s family, the Babbs, were undertakers in Highgate in the 1850s and 1860s. But in her young days they were in the theatrical clothing business, and things were pretty tough. They spangled clothes for theatres, Moss Empires in particular used to employ them. It was rather skilled work, this spangling. They used to work directly for wardrobe mistresses at certain theatres and they would be given a pattern to do for this, that and the other. I remember her telling me how competitive it was, how she had to work her guts out to get a few bob.

Yet I had a really bourgeois upbringing, my people were steeped in it. My mother, for instance, joined me to the church choir when I was a kid. She marched me up and I had to be a member of it. And then that wasn’t enough. That meant church in the morning and church at night. But of course I had to do much more than that. I had to join the Sunday School in the afternoon and even that wasn’t enough. Because when I got mixed up with the Boys Brigade I had a meeting following the afternoon Sunday School. So I finished up this way: church service in the morning at quarter to eleven, rush home for your dinner, come back for this bible class or whatever they called it, in the afternoon. Then, when that was over, rush into the other one, the Boys Brigade one, rush home to tea and then back I went again to the evening service, 6 to half past 7. All this lasted from the age of 7 until 16, even after I was at work.

My first recollection of anything at all was going to Aunty Brown’s with my mother. I had strict instructions that if I went to see my aunt I had to act and talk in a particular way. I mustn’t deviate at all. I mustn’t be rude, I mustn’t say this and I must say that. They had a boat there, a little model boat. They gave me it and while I was playing with this boat, they wanted to take my photo and tried to take the boat away from me. I was only about 2½ years old, looking over the top of the table saying ‘No, you won’t have this boat’. These people had their own camera, which was unusual in those days. This Aunty Brown was one of those jumped up people. I thought she was God Almighty when I was under the influence of my mother. But I have seen since that she was a jumped-up type. And I shall ever remember her wanting to connect herself with certain important people – proper bourgeois idea. She wanted to connect herself with the D’Oyly Carte, the Gilbert and Sullivan people. She’d been to the library and she’d done all sorts of things. And she’d found out all sorts of things to do with her family’s past. She wasn’t even my proper aunt, but I just grew up always calling her ‘Aunty’. She was a blood relation of some kind, but a very distant one. I was told exactly what to do – you mustn’t deviate at all. But I did deviate over that boat.

That’s how my life was, and I used to hate it, hate it.

My mother was entirely under the influence of all the institutions of capitalism, like the church. And the education system and the whole solid system which reflects capitalist economics. I hated school from the first moment I went there until the moment I left. I wanted to get out of it quick and that’s why I went engineering when I was fourteen years old. My people wanted me to stop at school until I was sixteen but I didn’t want to.

Because I was born in a higher class area I went to a Higher Grade school – Fleet Road in Hampstead. If I’d been born a few hundred yards away, I’d have gone to Gospel Oak. They called it a Higher Grade school, but only because it was in Hampstead apparently. Mind you, in relation to those other schools it was a higher grade school – they taught us French for about seven years, but I couldn’t speak a work now if you asked me. They also taught me mathematics, Euclid and the easy theorems from the age of seven. I can still remember theorem 4, because you can apply it to reality.

In this particular school they had specialists. They had a Frenchman teaching French, one person taking history, one taking mathematics and that sort of thing. So that in the course of a week we had 3 or 4 people teaching different subjects. I hated it all the time, and I used to have finger aches. That’s what I told my mother in order not to have to go to school. And then she’d say, ‘Which finger is it?’ And I’d say ‘That one’. Then later on she’d say, ‘Which finger is it?’ And I’d show her the wrong one…that’s how much I liked school: I would do anything to get away from it, anything.

I wasn’t much of a reader. Many boys used to bring Gems and Magnets, all those comics. They’d be looking at them under the desk, but I never was a reader of that kind. I did go to school to try and learn, but I couldn’t learn because of the outlook of the masters. I hated the discipline. In my young days it was a nasty business, really spiteful. I think I would have liked the subjects if there had been decent people teaching us those things. I learned to be a rebel at school. I always was a rebel, without knowing why.

As I grew up, as I was approaching 12 or 13, I knocked about with about 5 boys. One of them was a half-caste. I don’t know just where his father, Mr Kennedy, came from. But I used to go into his house sometimes, and the father was a coloured man. The wife was white, but she was dead by the time I used to go there, so it only left the father, my pal, and his sister. But this man, although he never told me so, must have been a socialist. He put all kinds of socialist, and especially atheist ideas to me. Mind you, he did it very cleverly, very cleverly indeed. I expect he knew the way I’d been brought up, and he tried to change me by rational thinking.

He showed me the peculiarities of the fantastic ideas written in the Bible, such as the immaculate birth and all the funny things like feeding the 5,000 with 2 loaves and 5 fishes. And he said ‘Well do you believe that then?’ And I started to think for the first time. I hadn’t thought before, just accepted it, because everyone accepted the old institutions. We didn’t trouble to think. They always said that religion is faith, didn’t they? You must accept it without reasoning about it at all. You mustn’t reason, that’s the last thing you must do. But this bloke put the logical point to me. Everytime I went he’d find a method of opening up on these things. I’m very pleased he did, he gave me vast education though I didn’t quite see it in the same light at that time. I remember him putting the case of the Titanic: can you imagine, if you were God, looking down and seeing these people drowning, would you just watch it happen? I didn’t know what to say, but I went home and thought. I gradually changed my mind completely, and I became an atheist just like he was.

The only time we all went out as a family was to visit friends at St Johns Wood, which wasn’t very far away. Every now and again we used to have tea over there. These visits would be properly arranged. We’d write to them, and they’d reply and make a firm date. And that was about the only time I went out with my sister. My sister was six years older than me and she only used to take me out in my very young days. But then she outgrew my interests. We still got on well together. We could trust one another – that was everything.

I would trust anything to my sister and she would with me. And that’s a very great thing, because I have seen one family where the women used to say to me ‘I have to keep my handbag with me or else it would be robbed, in my own house mind you’. Her brother would pinch whatever she’d got. But there was trust and confidence in our family. We’d never have dreamt of doing anything of that kind. Although we got on so well together in the house, I never went out with my sister. She had her own friends and her own type of amusement. In her young days, when my father used to run dances in the Hampstead district, she’d go regularly. This never appealed to me. I used to like to be out with the boys.

Most of the time we used to go out drinking. I could pack away so much beer they used to call me ‘sponge legs’. They didn’t know where I put it. In my younger days I was a strict teetotaller. I’d always made up my mind I wouldn’t drink beer, having seen all the trouble at home as a youngster, which upset me. I thought to myself, I won’t drink at all, but as a matter of fact when I got to 20 years old, knocking about with five boys who did drink, I fell in with them and did the same. I’d even signed the pledge in the Band of Hope. It was the custom in those days, because they taught you the horrors of drink – the path to hell, until you were frightened to death of it. I never did enjoy church anyway, and the situation was aggravated because of my nervous complaint, sitting in church, blinking my eyes and twitching.

Sometimes the Band of Hope used to take us on outings. It made quite a change, something to look forward to. Every year they used to take us to Epping Forest. I shall ever remember one outing – going and looking at an apple tree and deciding that we’d better have some of those apples. So we got some bricks and we chucked them and got a few apples. But we’d only got one or two when a farmer came along. He raised the roof and you’ve never heard such language in your life. So we ran and he couldn’t catch us. Good job he didn’t. He had a dirty great stick with him. I don’t know what he’d have done with it. I used to scrump quite a lot. We did most of our scrumping on a railway siding where the signalmen used to grow their stuff.

Most of my young life was spent in that field by the railway siding. We used to play cricket and football there at times. We had a leader, a little fellow. He never grew to be more than 4’11” but he could command blokes nearly twice as big as him to do whatever he wanted. Sometimes he’d pin a medal on us! A milk bottle top with something written on it! It was me who put a stop to it at about the age of ten. I just asked how it was that we did everything he said – and after that we disregarded him. Rather than not command us, the little fellow left us and led little kids half his age. He had to be a leader. One day this little fellow went into the Post Office and when he came out again he was 2 guineas richer because he’d found a purse on the counter. He told us what had happened. He said ‘Let’s go down to this shop’. In this shop you could buy quite a good looking pistol, one of those which shot blank cartridges, for half a crown. He bought us one each, about 6 or 7 of us. Now, how were we to tell our mums? Someone said, we’ll say we exchanged it for cigarette cards. My old lady swallowed it alright. I suppose the others did too.

In that field there were apple trees and all sorts of things. We used to climb over a gate and get into this area, pinch what we wanted and go off again. I never went scrumping after I went to work, oh no, we were too high and mighty once we got money in our pockets. We didn’t have to scrump then, you see. We weren’t kids any more.

Chapter Two – Starting Work

ENGINEERING

At 14 I was only too anxious to get to work. I went as an apprentice to a general engineers’ workshop. My parents, all the way through, never tried to suggest that I do anything, they always let me do what I wanted to. I simply put the idea that I wanted to be an engineer and they were quite prepared to assist me, although they’d wanted me to stay on at school until I was 16.

I remember how they took me to work. They bought me a bowler hat and a new suit. When I walked into this old engineering firm, everyone laughed at me because of this bowler hat. I did not know the customs. So I did not start very well from that point of view. My people were a bit showy and I had to have that bowler hat before they would let me go to work. It wasn’t very long before I got rid of the hat and bought a cap like the rest of them. It only shows that my people didn’t understand workshops at all, nor did I, before I went.

The firm were general engineers. After making enquiries, I thought it best to go to a place like that because you got wide experience. They were machine-tool makers in particular, but they also did many other things. I remember they used to make convex and concave pieces for grinding lenses. The workshop was a pretty good one for that time. Some workshops I went into later on were just ramshackle old places. You would never have thought it was possible to work in some of the workshops of that time. But this one, although nothing like a modern factory, was more up-to-date. The place was kept a bit clean. They used to sweep it and stack stuff, instead of leaving it all over the floor, as happened in some places. As a result it wasn’t too bad to work in for its time.

The apprenticeship was supposed to be for 5 years. My father signed indentures on my behalf. They were the legal method of becoming an apprentice. The worker agreed to work for 5 years, if the apprenticeship was for that long, for so much, like 5 bob a week (that was all I got), and learn the trade. The guv’nor was supposed, in law, to teach the trade. They didn’t always do that, the other workers did it of course. As an apprentice, they put you all round the shop. I learnt the trade very well.

The time I was there, I was always in trouble with the foreman. He was an awkward sort of chap and I was a bit sensitive. Every time he used to say something to me that didn’t sound very nice, I used to get upset over it and tell him off, and all that sort of thing. The situation got so bad that I had to come home sometimes and tell my dad about it. On two or three occasions he went down to attempt to put things right, but finally after 2½ years there was a general agreement and off I went.

Now this is where my life gets completely changed. In 1917 I went to a little firm called the Beta Engineering Company in Kentish Town. I had a foreman and this foreman was the most peculiar foreman that I’ve ever had in my life. He didn’t care about the firm, he only cared about the workers there, and he was Walter Hannington.

WALTER HANNINGTON

This was the man who led the hunger marches, back in the 1920s. That’s where I really got my political education because Walter Hannington was a man on our side.

Walter Hannington was nothing like other foreman. Not, for instance, like the foreman I’d had in the last place. Walter was a bloke who used to cheat the management and assist us if we didn’t do much work. He used to say, well you can’t do any more, can you? He also liked us and we got on very well.

The thing about Walter Hannington was that he was a great propagandist, as you may know if you’ve read any of his books. He was a wonderful lecturer too. He’d sit us down every night and preach Marxism to us nearly through the night, and it’s true we hardly did any work sometimes. And I got on very well with Walter, we all did really, but I think he took more interest in me because he could see I was learning from him. And as a result of that, he took me down to the old Social Democratic Federation in St Pancras Malden Road. Before the Communist Party was inaugurated in this country in 1921 the SDF was the Marxist organisation. He took me to various places and the great thing was that he gave me the best education that I’ve ever had. He changed my whole outlook. I’d just been the ordinary type, had the old bourgeois education and my people were steeped in it.

It was Walter Hannington that made me an atheist. I had to be scientifically informed before changes really came in my mind. There were only preliminary ideas with the first man, that dark man – I hadn’t really changed my mind but he set me thinking. Walter Hannington put the scientific case, the analysis of capitalism as Marx stated it. Then, I found that I couldn’t argue with him. All the cases that he gave were so scientific and correct that there was no argument against them.

I first got impressed with him before he started the lectures because he was on our side. That was the greatest thing. He was on the workers’ side and certainly not on the bosses’ side. Everything he did showed you that that was his outlook. Now to a man like that of course you get fully attached – a man who you know is your real friend, so that anything he asked me as a youngster I’d do for him. When he said ‘Look, let’s sit down and let’s talk Marxism’ I was only too eager and anxious to sit down and learn from a man of that kind. It was pretty obvious that I was the one most affected by his propaganda. So he took me all over the show with him to these different political meetings and so forth.

Walter Hannington was responsible for me reading more. It was he who pointed out the need to read, and especially to read the right stuff. It wasn’t very long before he brought me the Communist Manifesto to read and suggested that I go to the library in the SDF rooms and borrow such books as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It was through that book that I got much more interested and started to get the historical understanding of movements. I’ve read all Marx’s books of course. I’ve got the whole Marxist Leninist library at home and I’ve read them all, but many years ago.

When the Russian Revolution came in 1917, Walter Hannington was the man who showed us what an enormous progressive change that was. For the very first time you may have socialism in the very first country in the world. He stressed this very, very much. Otherwise I myself, without his propaganda and understanding of events wouldn’t have known. The Press was dead against it. They were going to send all kinds of munitions to the White Russians. Fortunately the dockers in particular stopped the “Jolly George” from taking these weapons to the White Russians who were opposing the Communist forces in Russia. I used to take the Daily Herald. George Lansbury, who was editor at the time, was as real a revolutionary as I. But there again it was only Walter Hannington that put this into my mind. I would have been the ordinary type, reading the Daily Mail or the daily something else. I had no Inspiration in my home to look for anything progressive at all.

After I left Beta in 1918 I kept up with Walter. I used to see him regularly up on Parliament Hill, Hampstead, where the CP held its meetings when it was first founded in 1921.

OTHER WORKSHOPS, SKILL & MASS PRODUCTION

In the early 1920s I worked at Dr Maw’s factory in Leather Lane. In those days, Leather Lane was a market place. There were all sorts there, sweet stalls, and market stalls. There was a street dentist who pulled people’s teeth in the street. I remember there was a place called Slauters where you could get steak pudding, three vegetables and a sweet for 4d. I remember a chap I called “Politics and Pills”. He would come on a horse drawn cart and talk his kind of politics. He was quite a speaker. After talking politics he would try to make his living, and he would bring out pills, supposed to cure everything, and try to sell them. I also remember a dark man turning up once who said he could pull out warts, and get rid of them in 10 seconds.

Down a yard off this market place was Dr Maws’s surgical instruments workshop. It was a dirty old place. No one, it seemed, ever swept the floor. The machinery was old fashioned. On one particular job I had to cut 2½” thick steel with a hand hacksaw, which was unbelievable, before I could put it into my lathe. After 2 to 3 months there, they said they couldn’t make it pay, and I had to leave.

The next job I had was at Sparks Garage. It was a nice job. The garage had two men out on the road, looking for breakdowns, who would advise the owners to come to the garage. It was very difficult to get spare parts in those days, so we often had to make the parts ourselves. We made all bits, even a set of pistons. This sort of work is no longer done now. We used to strip engines, repair gearboxes and back axles.

The garage also had its own fleet of five 1910 Rolls Royces for private hire. I was there for a little over a year. Then they ran into a bad patch, and me and another bloke got the sack. There was terrific unemployment in those days, especially for engineers. These were the only two jobs I had between Beta Engineering and General Motors. The rest of the time I was unemployed.

I couldn’t find a job so I went to General Motors in Hendon in 1924. I worked there for 3 years. The money was a bit better: 1s 4d per hour, plus a little bit of a bonus. It was that extra bonus that made up the difference. We were only doing an 8-hour day in 1921, but that was for 5½ days a week. At General Motors, they never produced anything, they only used to assemble it. All the stuff was made in America. A whole motor was sent in a case, they stripped the case down, and all the parts that were in it only had to be assembled. There was an assembly line, and you stood on it, doing the same old job. They always said that Ford, who started it, killed more people than had been killed in the wars – through boredom and quick working and through the hell of a strain. We never went on strike at General Motors, except during the General Strike of 1926 when the few trade unionists came out – although the plant went on working. They have had strikes since, of course.

Among skilled engineers, there was a bit more savvy. Whilst most of the boys up at General Motors were just sticking a door on every few minutes, one goes down and another one comes, and you do the same thing over and over again. You wouldn’t get anyone to do a job like that if you could get another job. But there were 4 million unemployed.

In engineering workshops in those days, especially before mass production, there was what was known as standard machinery. That is the centre lathe. Most people, like myself, went round all the other standard machines and learned to operate them, but ended up turners on centre lathes. When we were looking for another job we would call ourselves turners. The centre lathe is the most used general purpose machine, the most skilled machine. On this we did all our own tool making, tool setting, tool everything. We worked to perhaps two tenths of a thousandth of an inch, at least on ball race bits and things like that. The job was to make it from the drawing, get the casting, if it was a casting or a forging or whatever material. This would be drawn out of stores, and then machined according to the drawing.

Since the beginning of the mass production era the main development has been to manufacture one machine to produce one article but perhaps ten or maybe one hundred times faster than the standard machine. The men operating them are operating set machines. They are only semi-skilled. They need not be experienced at all, because everything is done for them. They are only turning handles. Take for example, a capstan lathe operator, he’s not a skilled man. The skilled man is the one who has produced and set the tools for it. You see the capstan lathe has large handles, for plenty of leverage for operating. The tools are either in a turret in front of the work or by the side of the work. The tools controlled by the handles then remove metal from the work piece, to a certain specification. The operation can be continuously repeated as long as the setter has set the tools and as long as the saddle stops are in the correct position.

The milling machine was another semi-skilled operation. Milling in a tool room could also be very highly skilled. But in a mass production situation they would set gigs or tools so that the operator only had to start the machine. So it all depended how the milling machines were used, whether it was skilled work or not.

Milling is the process where metal is taken away by a circular cutter of a particular size. If I had a flat piece of metal and I wanted to cut a slot through it, and the slot had to be one inch wide and two inches deep, I would need a fairly large cutter over two inches in radius and exactly one inch wide. The cutter revolves and an automatic feed (carrying the work) travels very slowly across the cutter taking the metal away. Finally when the traverse has gone right across the face, and the operator has wound it down to the correct depth, the slot has been made. Of course there are thousands of other aspects to milling, cutting gears for example. Turners would get about 2d an hour more than millers and slotters and such like. Also the tool room workers would generally get 2d an hour more than the production shops.

Mass production of motors didn’t start in this country until 1923, when Morris started. And that was the first sign in this country of full-scale mass production.

The consequences for the turners were great. The new machines, although not needing skill, so much, produced much more than the centre lathe. The position arose where these labourers, for that’s all they were really, were (by piecework method) earning twice as much as the skilled turner who had done a five year apprenticeship. In the 1920s that caused no end of trouble. That’s when toolroom workers started to get extra agreements. For example, toolroom workers were to get equal bonus with the highest production shop bonus, because they produced the skilled tools of production which made mass production possible. Outside on the semi-skilled machinery, they were just feeding them, or turning handles to control them.

Our position became weaker and weaker. Fewer turners were needed, and it is true now too. For example, in a motor factory, once there would have been one hundred or a thousand centre lathes, a skilled man operating each one. Now, with mass production there is a single machine, perhaps there are ten of them, repeating the same job much faster. The setter is planning the job, not the operator. He is simply executing it. There is a lot of strain through boredom and quick working and that sort of thing. I myself never worked on the special machines for doing one operation. I did mostly repair jobs, where I had to have a general purpose machine that will make anything to any specified size. That’s the difference between mass production and standard machines.

There are always changes. As Marx shows, the mode of production is always changing. As a result of competition machines have altered quite a lot.

I have an old lathe at home. It was built by Dempster Moore in 1917. It’s quite an efficient machine, but it was made at a time when there wasn’t much money in engineering. The guv’nors had to buy something cheap to even produce at all. A machine like mine was sold for around £80. Nowadays a machine with all its modern equipment and the increased weight made necessary by tungsten tools to stop vibration (tungsten is brittle), would cost much more, relatively speaking.

When I first started work tungsten tools were in their infancy. Before tungsten we had what is known as carbon steel tools made of carbon and steel, heated and cooled in water and tempered to allow it to harden correctly. Tungsten is an advantage to mass production methods because it keeps its cutting edge far longer than ordinary hardened steel tools. It was essential for machines cutting at high speeds or a vast quantity of parts in a short time. The very fact of using tungsten then, completely altered machines, it made them much heavier, even one as small as a six inch lathe. Of course they are still lathes, all the main features are the same.

The machine I have at home now, when I set it up for cutting twelve threads to the inch (on thread manufacture), might take a quarter of an hour to change up the gears, to have them set so that they are running properly. Now the machines have gearboxes on them, just put the levers for twelve or fourteen threads to the inch or whatever; a chart is provided to set them with. In one minute you’re all set for any number of threads to the inch that you need. These sorts of ideas have been the main alterations. But the machine is still basically the same.

Chapter Three – Brighton between the Wars

TO BRIGHTON

In 1924 my family left London and went to Brighton. I stayed in London working at General Motors, Hendon.

My mother was very strong willed. If she got an idea it had to come off. Where she got the idea from, I shall never know, but she made up her mind. She was going to have a boarding house somewhere and Brighton I suppose was a very well known place. We used to come on our holidays to Brighton. I suppose she picked on it from that point of view.

She was able to persuade my father to leave his two jobs, as a flute player and insurance agent, just at the time when things were going against his trade, just when the talkies were about to start and all those musicians were coming out of work. That was when he ran his own band, so coming away from his own band to a place like Brighton, made it almost impossible for him to get jobs. He used to play down at the Pier, and up at the Grand when they augmented the orchestra. They had only the smallest orchestra, and if something very special came to the Grand, only then did they augment the orchestra. That meant he might get one job for one week in six months. Most of the work he did after that in Brighton was with the Operatic Societies, Gilbert and Sullivan stuff in particular. How many times have I seen the Mikado through him! In London he had been what you might call a well-off working man. But there you are. My mother was able to persuade him simply to leave and take a boarding house in Brighton of which they knew nothing. And of course, they went broke.

The boarding house was at No 1 St James Avenue, the biggest house in the road. There was one great big room and people sometimes used to arrive from the Midlands, chaps who all worked together: they used to say ‘What about that big room, can we all fit in?’

We used to put about six beds in that room and do them very cheap, because this was the time of the Depression. It would be about 30s a week in those days for full board.

In 1931 they moved. My people got a certain amount of money out of selling the business and some of the furniture. That’s when we went into a shop in Edward Street, which was a general shop. But it was evident that it wasn’t going to pay because my father as I said knew nothing of business and when we got there, there was no stock. We had to spend everything we had to buy a bit of stock.

It was difficult to sell anything in those days. I remember the tins of milk we were trying to sell for about 4d. But the people up the road had got them for 3-3/4d, so we couldn’t sell them at all. It only lasted about a year, going down all the time. My old man was very soft hearted. He wasn’t a business man at all. Many a person came in and said ‘Can I have something until Friday?’ and the old man packed them up some stuff, but they never came back. That happened over and over again. So there you are. These musicians, they’re rather generous people and do not understand capitalist economy.

The next venture was selling fish but again it didn’t pay. Nothing paid, although we bought all the best local fish. It was so cheap, we used to sell local skate at 6d a pound, wings of skate, cod fillets about 5d a pound. But you couldn’t sell it, not enough to make the place pay.

I joined the family in 1927 and got a job with Southdown Buses as a turner, in Portslade. I fell out with the foreman and was sacked. I got another job at Allen West, as a tool designer, but I needed to get a reference. I returned to Southdown for a reference and I was asked to come back in a different department. I stayed at Southdown in Freshfield Road doing running repairs until 1933, when all single men were sacked.

Running repairs was the system whereby a driver entered any complaint about his vehicle into a book at the end of his shift and we would do the work before the next driver arrived to take the bus out. Dock shift was a job where the vehicle was over the pit and we would check it right through, replacing all faulty parts. That dock shift was from 6am to 2pm.

Southdown was then a completely non-union firm. Many men working there were the pets of either Cannon or MacKenzie, the owners. These little groups opposed one another. If you said one word wrong you would have the sack. There were only two labour-minded men at Southdown, Tostavin and myself. We both worked in the Labour Party in Whitehawk. But nothing could be done at Southdown.

Engineering was so bad that in 1933 I had to forget it. My old man had the fish shop at that time. I had an old motor that I’d bought for £4. I put a few bits in it, and made it so it went alright. I thought to myself ‘Well, you know, they don’t want to pay the dole if they can help it’. So I put some of my old man’s fish into a basket and ran it out into the country and found I was selling, with a good bit of canvassing. I don’t say it was easy. We had to canvas streets. My sister used to come with me and help. This continued until the war started in 1939.

POLITICS IN BRIGHTON

In 1929 I joined the Labour Party in Brighton but I was disgusted with it and its milk and water policies here. After being in the Lansbury section I was looking for some change. So when the Independent Labour Party set itself up in Brighton through a man called MacGhee in Whitehawk, who came round canvassing for members, I joined. That was in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. But it was no good. It was simply two men who were opposed to one another.

This MacGhee had the most peculiar mind – it was only set to oppose the Labour Councillor at that time. The only way this bloke MacGhee could really oppose the Labour Party was to set up the ILP. So that’s all it was really. MacGhee knew nothing of politics. When the election time came around, what do you think MacGhee wanted to do? He wanted to get associated with the Tory party and assist them! So of course when that happened I went down and joined the Communist Party.

The CP was quite an active party then. We did many things. We marched in London, many a time, and then came Cable Street – there’s plenty of historical records of that. I was up there, fighting the fascists. The CP was up there generally.

The ILP claimed they were a Marxist organisation, but they never used the theories of Marx. They never set up meetings like they did in the CP to propagate his ideas. When I joined the CP I was still on the old fish game and I was stopped by the police every day. They would try my brakes. Three of them would get at the back of me and say ‘Now put your brakes on’. And they’d try and move it and it wouldn’t move forward. I knew enough about it to keep my brakes good. Police persecution got so bad – up in Bolney once one of the cops took my name and address. He said I shouldn’t be selling fish with a private vehicle, it ought to be a van. So I said ‘It’s a funny thing because the police have never said anything about that in Brighton’, and he tore up the piece of paper and threw it away.

But it was all that sort of thing. When I had a motor bike for the same purpose they kept telling me I mustn’t leave it here and I mustn’t leave it there, mustn’t do this and mustn’t do that. It was really miserable. I had a really miserable time. So I told this to the CP and they sent me to a solicitor, who said he’d take the case. I don’t know what he did. I didn’t have to appear, but from that moment I was never stopped again.

Chapter Four – War and Engineering

When the war came, in 1939, I thought I’d better get out of the fish business – they’ll want us now. So in the first week of the war I went along to Allen West in the Lewes Road. They wanted me in the production shop for war work. This was a skilled production shop – No 27 Production Shop. ‘Yes, come in, we’ll pay you the top rate!’ and all the rest of it. So in I go. There was a difference, there was a war on and they needed us now, whereas they didn’t want us before. Millions out of work but there was no one out of work after that, during the war, only when the war was over again. And so they took you.

After that I went to 108 Machine Shop in Moulsecoomb and was elected shop steward. I was the shop steward because I had organised a union there. Every night I used to stand at the door, waiting for them to come and say ‘Are you a union member?’ ‘No’. ‘Well, you’re going to join aren’t you?’ Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were only too anxious then, they were mostly the blokes the army had turned down because they were unfit. They had never been in workshops before so that when I said ‘You’ll join the union’ they said ‘Oh yeah,’ so up comes the form. There were 113 in our shop and I got 111 to join the union. I didn’t do too badly. Then of course the firm got wind of this, and there was all kinds of trouble.

At the time when air raids were coming during the day, they used to get workers out in the air raid shelter and not pay them! Not pay them! Even on the slow rate as it was then, about one and sixpence an hour. They didn’t want to pay them for the time, so of course that was the first agitation. I got them all in the canteen. We held some night meetings, during the meal break time and we got them all shouting like this “We want to be paid”. I was talking about striking for it, and do you know what they did? They sent a great big bloke, bigger than me, to grab me and sling me out! Of course these blokes weren’t trade unionists, they were only new, they didn’t know anything about trade union organisation, so I couldn’t get a following. I might have done at a later date, but it was too early to expect them to come out and strike on my behalf. Attempts were made that way, but it didn’t work. So that was the end of me at Allen West, after about one year. I was slung out by the scruff of the neck like that.

I won a case against Allen West one year later on the day Russia came into the war. One day I looked on the mat at home and there was a letter from the Ministry and it told me I’d won the case. I could have gone back to Allen West, but I didn’t want to.

Then I was at Crawley Engineering, but after about a year I was made redundant because I had organised a trade union. We had gone to the Labour Exchange to report that the firm was underpaying the women workers. The firm was made to pay them the correct rate.

Next I went to Harrington’s. I went into the toolroom. I went there because they needed the tools of production whereas they didn’t always need those, not in the mass production method. They were supposed to produce for the aircraft industry. Before the war they were coach builders and they suddenly said they were engineers, in order to get war contracts.

There were a lot of agreements with the government in those days. Firms worked on percentage. On any work that was given to them they got 12½%, I think. It didn’t matter what bill they put in. They got 12½% whether it was £1,000 or £10,000. Though we were supposed to be working hard, working 12 hours a day, it didn’t matter what you produced. The guv’nors were quite satisfied. There was no competition at all. That was one of the great contradictions of capitalism during the war. Their main job was to see that militant people like me didn’t exist, well not in their factories anyway.

At Harringtons (this was in about 1942) conditions were anything but those desired by our union, and I will now give some examples of our struggles in some detail.

Engineers were working for time and a quarter in overtime rates, and a bonus of 5% was paid every month, instead of 27 1/2%, according to our agreements. No committees were in operation. There was not even a Canteen Committee. The toolroom was the first to be organised, and I was elected as shop steward. We immediately asked for Amalgamated Engineering Union rates to be put into operation. The firm suggested that a list of AEU members should be sent into the office, so that AEU rates might be paid to them. The first trouble came when a timekeeper, who was entrusted with the task of sending AEU members’ names to the office, held this job up, sometimes for a month, and I had to complain that this was against the Essential Works Order, and the firm was liable to prosecution.

A Works Council was formed, consisting of these unions: the National Union of Vehicle Builders, the AEU, sheet metal, Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers, and the Woodcutting Machinists. These unions were proportionally represented in this Council, which was to deal with working conditions. In the first place, this Council did not function very efficiently as the NUVB claimed prominence, and set up a constitution which took all power of decision from the other unions. It claimed that all decisions of the Works Council had to be endorsed by the Works Committee, which was composed solely of the NUBV. This constitution was challenged by the other unions, and a new one was set up which made the decisions of the Works Council final.

We attempted to negotiate with the management, and met with much opposition. One of the first subjects about which we complained to the management was ventilation. This was a general complaint from all aircraft workers. At the first three meetings we put the case in a spirit of cooperation. Promises were repeatedly made that some of the fixed windows would be made to open, but no results were obtained. At the fourth meeting, after two men and one woman had fainted, we again brought up the case, this time in a forceful manner, which led to high words with the management. After this we were told by the management that matters were going to be changed, and a new Works Council was to be formed. The ventilation was attended to shortly after this, and four fixed windows were made to open.

Just after this meeting a notice was posted announcing that a new Works Council was to be formed, and stating the scheme which Harrington wanted. Points had been selected from different union agreements – some out of Production Committee procedure and, in fact, anything that suited the management. These points were collected together to make the scheme. The management then asked for representatives immediately, and these people, although not necessarily union members, were called shop stewards in one clause of this scheme.

The Works Council met to discuss this matter and decided to see the National Service Officer. Edwards of the ASW and myself as the negotiating members with the firm were also elected to interview the NSO. In the opinion of the representatives, the NSO simply played with us, stating that help could not be given in any way, and we were advised to go to our unions, which we did. The organisers of the NUVB and the AEU met to discuss this, with the result that Mr Barnett of the NUVB contacted the management and set up a new trade union appropriate Committee. This consisted of the same Committee, with one woman in addition. A clause insisted upon by the management was that no production issues should be discussed.

Under the old Committee, a Firewatching Committee, a sub-committee of the Works Council, was set up, myself and Edwards being that Committee. We went round to all the Firechiefs of the town for information. We discovered that only half the firewatchers were needed during hours of daylight. The factory firewatching chief came to Harringtons and stated this to Harringtons representative. He later endorsed this in writing to the AEU District Secretary.

I tackled Harrington’s representative and without giving reasons he refused to put this into operation, in order to save manpower. A little later the firm posted notices stating that in future all firewatchers must state the time at which they arrive, as well as giving their signature. Our Committee was not informed consequently many men, including myself, did not state the time of arrival. One night I was late for firewatching after attending a trade union meeting, and they made this the excuse for taking me off the rota. I objected, and two days afterwards, the firewatching chief arrived at Harringtons. I explained everything to him in front of Harrington and he said that in his opinion I had committed no offence. Therefore I asked to be replaced on the rota. He said that he had no power to do this, and Harrington refused to replace me. The firewatching chief suggested that I should be kept on the Firewatching Committee but that was not done.

Many transfers of firewatchers were made, in nearly all cases to men against whom the firm had some grievance, and still without consulting our Committee. We therefore sent a note to the office asking if the firm intended to consult our Committee and if there was likely to be a mass transfer of firewatchers. We got no reply, and a day or so afterwards, the firm posted another notice stating that a new Firewatching Committee was necessary and that all firewatchers should attend a meeting in working time to elect this Committee. Trade unionists went to the meeting to oppose the formation of this Committee.

An AEU shop steward spoke against its formation, after which Harrington said that it was a Ministry of Supply order and if our members did not propose someone he would do so himself. There was no other alternative but to comply or else let the non-unionists run the Committee. The AEU District Committee was fully informed of this, but took no action. I brought this matter up again at a Federation informal conference, in which the AEU organiser promised to contact the Ministry of Supply, but that was not done.

Under the old Committee, a Canteen Committee, a sub-committee of the Works Council, was set up, consisting of two NUVB representatives. The Works Council decided that tea should be reduced from 1½d to 1d per cup as in all other works canteens, thicker sandwiches should be provided for workers, and that firewatchers’ breakfasts should be reduced from 1s to 9d. Our representatives arranged an inquiry about quantities of goods coming into the canteen. Unfortunately, a Mr MacGuiness, although carrying out the job fairly efficiently, told the management that because of cup breakages, tea could stay at 1½d per cup. The list of incoming goods showed approximately £50 a week clear profit, calculated on retail prices, on tea alone, allowing for cup breakages. At every meeting with the management we claimed the tea reduction, and also the firewatchers’ breakfasts reduction, but no results were obtained.

At the first meeting of the appropriate Committee, Harrington shouted that he would not have anybody interfering with canteen affairs and told us that this Committee must cease to function. I immediately told him that we wanted that Committee and if those meetings were run by dictators there was no point in our meeting. He suggested that if we wished we should leave. The meeting carried on. This stopped his dictatorial attitude at later meetings and he adopted a new attitude of listening to everything, and putting nothing into effect. The Works Council, which was still the directing power of the appropriate Committee, was so incapable of seeing important things that, under Harrington’s pressure, it allowed the Canteen Committee to go out of existence. Finally the firm, just to show us who was in charge, posted a notice stating that only one cake would be sold to each person during the morning. The Council discussed this, and decided to take no action, and later we lost the right to buy anything in the morning which we could eat, except tea at 1½ d.

During the three months while the appropriate Committee was negotiating, we repeatedly asked for tea and firewatchers’ breakfasts reduction, also for an inefficient machine to be corrected, for a new system of paying wages, and for boys doing dangerous jobs, such as welding, to be properly supervised. A petition was signed, asking for the removal of a foreman, proved over a long period of time to be incapable of supervising women. To most of these requests we had been given no answer. The answer to the petition for the reduction in the price of tea was that if the price of tea was lowered, the price of something else would have to be raised. On the bigger issues reported to the different unions, they let us down badly. Depression had set in with the Works Council. The firm would not see NUVB shop stewards and I had to steward the toolroom only, although I had previously negotiated for all members at Harringtons. This left 90% unstewarded for a time, during which time they robbed the workers in the Tank Shop of bonus and would not talk to me about this matter. We had a separate report on that which showed that man hours were cut from 160 to 100 hours per tank, which took all bonus away completely, and one month, on the old target, 38% was earned and only 25% paid!

Harringtons consistently opposed trade unions. After the First World War, we were told, every man who would not leave his trade union was dismissed. Men were dismissed and suspended for small offences, such as whistling or eating, and the AEU District Committee looked upon Harringtons as the black spot of Brighton. Wages were terrible. For instance, the foreman polisher got 1s per hour, and men under him 8d or 10d per hour. There were men there with fingers off, who received no compensation. Some years before, the Trades Council had been able to intervene and Harringtons lost thousands of pounds of Post Office contracts. This taught Harringtons a lesson and so the NUVB was set up. But still when men were taken on suggestions were always made to them against the trade unions. The first suggestion was “that the shop steward will be running after you, but you can do as you like”. Next they used the Bolshevik bogey and the last was to ask for the man’s trade union card, his card number and his old foreman’s name.

On one occasion, two good, experienced AEU members, Brother Reynolds and Brother Simmons, were transferred to Harringtons from Gatwick. In view of past experience, we joined forces to organise on better lines. The first move of the NUVB and their allies working on NUVB agreements, was to move away from us to their own trade section, but we maintained a link on the Works Council. We prepared a specially designed agenda to get answers to previous questions and to settle basic principles, for the fourth appropriate Committee. When the management saw that, it would not meet us and told us that those things were not important and that it had been arranged with the NUVB organiser Mr Barnett that our period of office was ended. Edwards of the ASW went again to see the NSO, whose main answer was that he could not interfere, as this was private enterprise. It was decided at the informal conference that this Committee should be set up again at a joint meeting of all the unions concerned, but our organisers had made no move after one month.

There was also victimisation of shop stewards. As a result of Harringtons pressing new workers not to join the union, an old man coming into the toolroom told me that he had promised Harrington not to join our organisation. I persuaded him to join, in line with all the others, and I found that he was 2 ¾d under the rate for the job he was doing, so I applied for the correct rate. The firm called him into the office and, as he said, placed him in an awkward position because he had joined the union. The firm pretended that this increase in pay he was about to receive had no connection with the union, but that the management was entirely responsible.

When he came from the office he was very perturbed and spoke of leaving the union. I assured him that I would speak for him on all future occasions, but as far as I knew he left our organisation. He mentioned this to another man, who also left, on the grounds that he would get more money. I called a shop meeting on this matter to attempt to isolate this man, but apparently the whisper of more money had gone round and I was opposed by a few members, all of whom were youths. The meeting agreed that this man’s action was bad, but that nothing could be done about it. The next day, I received a letter from the firm stating that I was intimidating and disturbing workers etc. and that next time, drastic action would be taken. All this was designed to prevent any future activity.

Two days afterwards our other shop steward was accused of sabotage, because he immobilised his welding plant before he left work on Saturday, in order to stop boys playing about with it. We had already put this case before the appropriate committee and the firm had done nothing. Later, we heard that the firm was trying to find an explanation for retarded production and that it had blamed our shop steward. A week later our shop steward was suspended for absenteeism, although he had asked permission for leave. When he, Brother Wilding, appealed against this, the firm used their accusations of sabotage and absenteeism against him. Absenteeism should have been brought before the appropriate Committee which Harrington had refused to meet. Anyhow, the shop steward almost won the case, and the firm had to pay him money for two days out of the three during which he had been suspended.

Shortly after this, a brother who had just been elected AEU shop steward (Brother Simmons) but not yet passed by the District Committee, was called into the office and told he was too slow and that he would be transferred to another department. He objected, and all the other AEU stewards formed a deputation to the District Committee. The only result of that was that our District Secretary sent him a questionnaire. The matter was also reported by the steward to the NSO, who sent him a final release form. We were pressing the matter with the union for quite some time.

Just after that, a member of the Boilermakers Union, who was just about to transfer to the AEU, came into conflict with the management on at least two important matters. This brother had kept all the notices issued by the firm over a long period, concerning the Tank Shop bonus. Those formed the basis of a report to reclaim the amount withheld by the firm. He saw the NSO on that matter and, I believe, registered a dispute.

This brother had also come into conflict with the management because they wanted to withhold four hours of his pay until the following week, as he forgot to clock in or out, although his explanation was that the cards were confused and therefore a mistake in clocking had occurred. This withholding of pay for a week was a sore point with all the workers there.

That man, in common with many others, had been in the habit of taking home small pieces of scrap wood for fires, which was the custom of the trade to carpenters. Apparently, he was warned not to take large pieces, and afterwards he had taken smaller ones. Just after that last incident with the management, the firm arranged for detectives to stop him at the gate. He was searched and charged and a fine of £5 was imposed. We had a collection for the brother in the works, and we saw him on a following Saturday, when he told us that he was still out of work after a month. Work which he had obtained through the Labour Exchange had been cancelled. Also he had been treated like a criminal in every way. His fingerprints had been taken and he had been photographed in three positions. An AEU brother sent a separate report of this to the “New Propeller”.

That report was delayed for a time, and there were new developments in the case of the recently elected AEU shop steward who had been transferred for being too slow. After our deputation to the AEU District Committee, something happened which brought a Ministry of Labour official to Harringtons. Members of the appropriate Committee were informed that their Committee would re-open until the new one had been formed. A foreman was sent to the shop steward’s shop to enquire who proposed and seconded this member as shop steward, and he took the names of all who said that they had voted for him. Immediately after this, Clifford Harrington left the Works. We believe he went to visit the Labour Exchange. Brother Simmons, the steward involved, had his shop steward’s credentials, but was not back in his shop.

Some time later, the firm communicated with our District Secretary and said that the monthly bonus would be withheld for a month. I told our members this and there was great opposition. There were many rumours about it, and so the AEU stewards asked the foremen of their departments to obtain a notice about it, as it was causing loss of production. The notice stated that that month the bonus would be paid a fortnight late, but the next month it would be with-held for a month. At the same time, another notice was posted, saying that in future, meetings could not be held without permission. The NUVB stewards saw the management about this, but no concession was obtained. The AEU stewards decided that it was useless to see the management, but they sent the following letter:

“We, the undersigned AEU Shop Stewards seek the management’s approval for a factory meeting to be held on Saturday, Sept. 18th, to explain the reason for sending, and to obtain the workers’ support for, a deputation of AEU members to be sent to the-House of Commons to demand a Ministry of Labour survey into the industrial labour troubles which now exist at T. Harrington’s and which we claim are retarding the war effort.”

The immediate result of this was that the Federation woke up and wanted to re-open the adjourned informal Conference soon after. All the things discussed when the Conference first opened came to nothing.

Here is another good example of the kind of things which happened at Harrington’s. A young boy met with an accident outside the firm. The hospital stitched up his head, and he was away for some time. His father, who worked at Harringtons, kept the firm notified of all this. Later, the boy came back to work at the discretion of the hospital authorities, who gave him instructions that if the firm wanted a doctor’s certificate, he was to ask them to phone the hospital. The firm would not do this and sent the boy home again. We advised him to see the NSO. This was the only time we had known the NSO to take action about anything. He ordered the firm to take the boy back at once, with payment dating from the day when he had appeared at the job. Thomas Harrington wreaked his vengeance on the father. A few days afterwards, the lad had to have the stitches taken out of his head and consequently was late for work. Although he explained this to the timekeeper, he was again stopped from working and was told to wait in the open until after dinner.

A NUVB shop steward found it necessary to see the NSO on a similar case. The NSO contacted the firm, and later Thomas Harrington asked to see her. He shouted and swore at her, telling her never again to interfere with the firm’s business.

I mentioned earlier that we put the case of an inefficient machine before the appropriate Committee. The machine in question was a sandblasting machine. When in operation, it threw dust everywhere, consequently nobody could work anywhere near it. The operator had dermatitis all over his face, and I had a doctor’s certificate which showed that as long as the cause was there, he could never get well. Months previously we had asked for the machine to be made efficient, and for proper protection for the operator. The machine was cleaned but that did not help efficiency, and the operator was given home made headgear. Neither of these things solved the problem.

A man working there, who, it was stated, had direct connection with the factory inspector, had been made Accident Prevention Officer. I saw him about that machine. He admitted that it was inefficient, and asked me to make a statement saying how it could be rectified. I said that the machine should be removed to an isolated spot, so that other workers should not be affected by it, that it should have an outside exhaust, and that the operator should be properly clothed in a suitable overall suit and headgear. He seemed to agree that that was necessary. The operator supported my statement, and it was reported to Thomas Harrington. The result was that Thomas Harrington approached the operator, slandered him for about 20 minutes for making a complaint, referred to his being dismissed when the war was over, and told him he was a scapegoat to the Union who were using their members to get at him, Thomas Harrington.

The appropriate Committee re-opened soon after, when I attempted to get the question raised in its new aspect. That was not allowed, as it was said that Harrington was dealing with it.

We tried two ways to get a survey of Harringtons. There was a serious flaw in the production of jettison tanks, and a brother wrote to the Ministry of Aircraft Production about it. He had no reply in over a month so we sent a long telegram to Sir Stafford Cripps concerning the firm’s attitude towards the production of jettison tanks.

During the war I fought several cases in front of the National Service Office and the Manpower Board. I won four cases before I was finally dismissed from Harringtons as a result of their recourse to the Manpower Board.

The Manpower Board was a wartime creation. So was the National Service Office, I think. That was supposed to be the great thing: before, you could get sacked and if your union was not strong enough in your particular shop to support and defend you, you got the sack and nothing could be done about it. These war time boards were supposed to stop that. That was said to be one bit of progress by the trade unions, the fact that they did get this agreement with the government, various things like that you couldn’t get sacked. Or, if you were sacked you could appeal against it. I got sacked three or four times by Harringtons! Had a week or a fortnight off, won the case against them, and went back for my money.

The following is Harrington’s statement, and my counter-statement, for a case in front of the NSO. It is a case I won. I include it because I still have the documents and because it is the best way of showing the details of the dispute.

Employer’s Statement re: L. Moss, 24 March 1944

“Throughout the whole of the time that Moss has been acting as a Shop Steward for the AEU members employed in the Aircraft Toolroom his attitude to the Management has been most unreasonable and abusive and, often disruptive. In support of this assertion we would instance the following, which have taken place over a long period.

1. On June 10th, 1943, Moss gave certain information to his workmates regarding the Whitsun holiday period, and invited them to ballot as to which day they would accept as a holiday. He led them to believe that they would be paid 1½ times the normal rates if they accepted a certain day, whereas, in actual fact, in accordance with official AEU and Federation agreements, no enhanced rates would be payable on that day. Having held the ballot it was Moss’s duty to inform the management of the result, but this he refused to do, thereby endeavouring to force the company to pay the enhanced rates on the grounds that no agreement with the workers had been reached, although such agreement had, in fact, been recorded by the ballot. In doing this, Moss misled his own workmates and deceived the company.

2. Shortly after this Moss accused one of our directors of having a microphone installed in his private office for the purpose of over-hearing conversations held between Moss and the factory inspector on firewatching matters in another room.

3. On other occasions Moss refused to accept the ruling of the appropriate authority on firewatching arrangements and did everything in his power to obstruct the smooth operation of these arrangements.

4. Moss then threatened and intimidated various employees in his section of the shop, who complained to the management and it became necessary on July 22 to address a warning to Moss regarding these activities which had caused unrest and apprehension amongst his workmates. We were also informed at this time that Moss had stated that the function of trade unions and shop stewards was not to cooperate but to work for the overthrow of managements.

5. On August 13, after the August holiday, Moss caused considerable trouble and embarrassment to his workmates and to the management by his deliberate misconstruction of an arrangement made between the local secretary of the AEU and the company respecting the payment of bonus.

6. On September 9, Moss in conjunction with three other shop stewards who, however, had only just been elected, sent a communication to the management threatening certain action. On taking up the matter with the union officials, through the Employers’ Federation, the company were advised that the union executive strongly disapproved of the steward’s action and stated that letters of reprimand had been sent to the men concerned. Moss was obviously the instigator of this particular incident, as the other stewards had not been elected more than a week or so.

7. On Thursday September 30 a major electrical breakdown occurred in the factory causing a great deal of disorganisation. On the Friday morning a partial service had been resumed but the supply to the Aircraft Toolroom where Moss was employed, was still affected. It was therefore necessary to advise certain employees that it would not immediately be possible to offer them alternative work, but they were promised full pay for the time they were idle and were requested to report back later in the day, when it was anticipated the electrical service would be resumed. All the employees accepted with the exception of Moss, who reported to his local secretary that the company had shut out various operators. Complaints on this were subsequently received from the National Service Officer and the District Manpower Board, who, however, after hearing the management’s explanation agreed that, in the circumstances everything possible was being done to provide alternative work to those affected in the shortest possible time.

The serious aspect of this particular incident was that Moss represented that he was acting on behalf of all those employees in his particular section of the shop, but the management were informed later that his own workmates strongly disapproved of his action. These employees, unlike Moss, accepted the Management’s explanation and promises in good faith and appreciated that everything possible was being done to offer them alternative work. We were also informed that as Moss had acted on his own initiative without any authority or mandate from his fellow workers, they themselves were considering having him removed from his position as shop steward. This action on the part of Moss was obviously an attempt to create friction at a time when the whole works were disorganised due to a breakdown over which the management had no control and despite the strenuous efforts which were being made to repair the damage and to provide alternative work to those affected in the shortest possible time.

8. On October 16th Moss’s foreman had occasion to speak to him for leaving his machine to converse with another employee whereupon Moss used extremely abusive and filthy language to his foreman, in the presence of female employees, who complained to the management.

9. On November 27th a letter was received from the union executive advising that Moss had resigned his position as shop steward and the divisional organiser for the union stated that he had advised the local committee to accept the resignation and that the names of the new stewards would be forwarded later. Moss’s resignation was due to some disagreement with the local committee.

10. During the time that Moss was not a shop steward we experienced no difficulties with union members in our shops and we have no records of any complaints during that time. On 22nd February 1944 we received notification that Moss had been reappointed shop steward and on the first occasion on which he requested an interview with the management he was extremely rude in his attitude and would not conform to accepted procedure, as laid down in the AEU/ Federation agreements. In view of this we felt compelled to report to the Engineering Employers’ Association, who have on previous occasions stated that they completely endorse our feeling that Moss is totally unsuited to be a shop steward and they have informed the union accordingly.

11. The incident which occurred on the 14th March when Moss adopted the threatening attitude to our Canteen Manager is supported by a signed statement which confirms that the words complained of were in fact used by Moss. This statement is verified in every particular by an independent witness and another employee is prepared to state that Moss adopted a threatening attitude towards the Canteen Manager. Obviously, therefore, the statement made by Moss to the National Service Officer is incorrect and his assertion that the Canteen Manager’s statements are pure fabrication is completely false.

There have been many other incidents which we have not recorded, when Moss has obstructed in every way the smooth working of the negotiations between the unions and the management and had endeavoured to upset the good relations existing between the workpeople and the directors. Furthermore, we have intimated to the union, on many occasions in the past through the Federation, that we would welcome the cooperation of shop stewards and we can instance many requests received from shop stewards for concessions and relaxations, which have been promptly acceded to.

So far as Moss’s accusation that his discharge is an attempt to victimise shop stewards, the foregoing will prove that if anyone has suffered victimisation it is certainly not Moss, and we can only repeat that his continued presence in our works is detrimental to the smooth running of our shops and his removal from our employee would go a long way to the restoration of good relationships which always existed between the management of this company and its employees.

24th March 1944 for Thos. Harrington Ltd.”

Statement by L. Moss

“The shop stewards have examined the firm’s report and have failed to find any connection between the implications contained in it and actual fact. The AEU shop stewards and the men in our organisation are all convinced that this is victimisation carried to a very extreme stage. All three AEU shop stewards have received warnings from this firm based on trivial matters which have been magnified to a tremendous degree. In our opinion, these were designed to obstruct the stewards in the performance of their duties and so cause dissatisfaction amongst our members, who look on the stewards as their elected representatives to solve their problems. Mr Reynolds received his first warning shortly after he was elected shop steward because he was seen talking to me on urgent matters about which the firm had asked for a quick reply. He has just received another on an equally trivial matter. I have received one couched in very strong terms of warning, every bit of which is incorrect, and which is the result of one-sided evidence. I was given no opportunity to state my case. I have recently pointed out to Mr Stevens that this method is unjustifiable and that this warning would be sent to our legal department. An attempt to show that this warning was justified may be one of the reasons for seeking my release now. Our new shop steward of only three weeks’ standing, Mr Brown, has already received his first warning because he said a few words to Mr Reynolds on urgent business after he had clocked out in the evening. The stewards feel quite sure that this treatment is not what is meant by many government spokesmen who have repeatedly called for unity and cooperation to serve the national effort. We have had one case in particular where our member has used his constitutional right to bring a very genuine complaint to the steward, who has tried to deal with it. As a result of this, the management have approached our member, bullied him, told him he is in the wrong trade union, and reminded him that he may be unemployed after the war.

Many of our past committees have been broken up just on the grounds that the management would not have them. One of our shop stewards was removed from his department almost immediately after his election, leaving that shop still without a steward. Many deputations from Harrington’s have been received by the NSO not only from our organisation but also from the NUVB, the ASE and the woodcutting machinists union, nearly all of which had to complain of the dictatorial methods of the management. A case was also recorded of a woman steward who was sworn at by the management because she consulted the NSO on an urgent matter concerning this firm. My AEU District Office is full of letters complaining of the treatment meted out to our stewards in the course of their duty.

This, then, is the background in which our stewards have had to carry out their duty. No wonder that the stewards who have attempted to solve these difficulties and have sometimes had to speak very plainly to the management, are selected for victimisation. All the stewards are certain that if the firm are able to obtain my discharge in this that they will be the next victims.

Concerning this firm’s report, I should like to mention that there is no Canteen Committee now. One was set up just over a year ago, but was broken up by Mr Tom Harrington, who told us that he would not have this committee. This is contrary to government policy which since the war has advocated Canteen Committees. Consequently, our members have no hopes of improvement except through the stewards. During the last three months, the stewards have had many complaints of bad management. Very often there was no food at all by the time the people at the end of the queue reached the counter. During the past month I have spoken to the Canteen Manager many times asking him to make better arrangements and to see that there is enough food for everybody, as so many complaints have been received. His attitude is always that he cannot talk to me on these matters and that nothing can be done. On two occasions when our members could not get anything to eat, or were restricted to a few biscuits, this has led to sharp talk. This must account for the firm’s remarks to “create discord” and “overbearing and obstructive attitude”. The firm’s reference to “dissatisfaction amongst the other employees” is a direct reversal of fact. The dissatisfaction is due to the management of the canteen, and under the greatest difficulties I am attempting to remedy this. The allegation that I have demanded unlimited quantities of food in the presence of other workers is a misrepresentation of what the firm know I mean, I was talking in relationship to the war situation, and to the conditions in other local canteens such as Allen West’s. This can be borne out by the other stewards. Abusing and obstructing the canteen staff is a direct lie: the shop stewards at Harrington’s are trying to create organisation, not destroy it. We realise that organisation of canteens is one of the vital factors on the Home Front which will play its part in helping to win the war quickly. So far from abusing and obstructing the canteen staff I have made many attempts to create a friendly spirit with them by trying to have a joke, but under the poisonous influence of the canteen manager this is impossible. A recent employee told me only last week that the manager had been using his influence on her to cause bad feeling between us.

The threat of violence was completely non-existent. I will deal with this later.

The next statement deals with unsatisfactory behaviour. This is merely propaganda to suit the wishes of the management. It should be viewed in the light that when the firm sent the warning referred to earlier, every man in my shop signed a petition claiming that this was unjust. I know absolutely nothing about the reprimand from my own organisation. It is a complete surprise to me, and I have no idea what it concerns and it should be ignored until I have taken the matter up with my organisation.

The statement of the canteen manager is wholly incorrect. This is my statement, which can be endorsed by Mr Brown, our other shop steward. I was almost at the end of the queue and I picked up three rolls. I was just going to pay for them when the canteen manager shouted out “You can’t have them” and attempted to take them from me. This was a great surprise to me. He had never done this before when I had the same quantity and when they were available. The aggressive attitude of the man annoyed me. I paid for the rolls, and these are the exact words I used. “Personally I will see you outside”. This would have meant that I would have been able to speak to him outside on a personal offence. I am prepared to take an oath that my statement is correct and that all the statements he has made are pure fabrication conjured up in his mind suitable to his interests. I ask the NSO to use his own discretion as to whether a shop steward of five years’ standing would lay himself open by making such statements.

A day before this incident I was warned by one of our members that the canteen manager had made statements outside the works saying that he was against me and that something would happen. A day after the incident he was boasting that he had been responsible for my discharge. All the stewards have been to the management asking for the removal of the canteen manager on this evidence. The firm have asked for witnesses but we cannot mention their names to the firm for fear that victimisation will follow. The only other allegation in the firm’s statement is that my presence “might impede production. In answer to this I want to remind the management that ever since I have been negotiating with the management, all my arguments have been based on increased production. Not only do we talk but we also act, and I have been responsible for increasing production in many cases. This must be borne out by my foreman. I now bore six jobs at once when it was originally planned to bore only one. I have fought for a Production Committee – from the first moment that I was elected shop steward. My trade union agreed some months ago to set up this Production Committee and although the stewards are still pressing for it, it has not yet been formed. Finally I should like to point out that in my own shop I have been instrumental in giving out ideas to serve the national effort and the need for increased production to win the war quickly.

(signed L. MOSS)”

When I went back to Harringtons after winning this case there was a solicitor who came to the works and asked to see me. He was so impressed by the way I put my case that he offered me work! I told him I was an engineer!

Another struggle at Harringtons was over holidays. Those that had been there a year would get a week’s holiday money, but those that hadn’t been there that long, could be out of work for a week. They wouldn’t get any money. So me and another bloke organised two things. We organised a march to the Labour Exchange, and got another set to go to the management and demand that these people either be paid or at least be given a loan for their holiday. And they both came off. I remember about 200 of us marched right down to the Labour Exchange. I remember getting there and I looked in and said “Look they’re all coming in, guv’nor. Where shall they sit, two hundred”. “Oh” he says “who are they then?” I said “They’re blokes from Harringtons and they’re not being paid. We want to get them paid. You’re going to pay them, aren’t you?” Anyhow, they all got paid, the whole lot got paid.

After Harringtons I went to Clifford Edwards. I was forced there. I had no choice about Clifford Edwards, they just told me I’d got to go and that’s how the law stood at that time. It was all war production, not necessarily arms, but all war production of some kind. At Harringtons it was supposed to be aircraft.

I was conscripted into Clifford Edwards. The law said that if the Manpower Board ordered me to go anywhere, I’d have to go. More than that, wages didn’t matter. If I was only going to get half the wages in the new place, nothing could be done about that. It shows you how weak the trade unions were then to allow that.

The fight at Clifford Edwards, oh dear, oh dear, we had some fighting there. They didn’t like me at all. Well, I told the bloke “Now look, how much are you going to pay me and what about your bonus” and he says “Yeah, you’ll get your rate” and I said “Look we’ve been used to at least 27½% bonus, but more than that if we produced more. Well what are you doing about that?” “Oh, that’s not part of our payment” so I said “Well, I don’t want the job, the only reason why I’m here is because the Manpower Board says I’ve got to go, and I can’t do anything against the law”. So that started it! When I got there, I went to the Labour Exchange, told them the bloody machinery was no good, which it wasn’t. It was all a lot of trash really. They put me on a lathe, with a main bearing. The front main bearing of this particular lathe, you could pull it to the extent of an eighth of an inch. I said “You don’t think I’m going to operate a machine like that, do you?” And there was all kinds of struggles about things like that. I went to the Labour Exchange and told them that they shouldn’t put me on machinery like this. I’d come from a decent shop where I was on a decent machine, and they’d expected me to do work on a thing like that! And they did come down and make them buy a new lathe. So you can tell how they liked me: this lathe was worth about £3000, a lot of money. They didn’t want to do that at all, but they had to. So one day they said I was redundant. I was happy to get away from there. I’d been there about nine months.

Then I went to Brighton Engineering Company. I stayed there until 1949. But it wasn’t the same there. I’d been warned over and over again that they’d probably prosecute me next time.

Towards the end of my time at Harringtons, I left the AEU and joined the Transport and General Workers’ Union. There were some differences between the AEU and the TGWU. In the AEU all officers were elected. But we got no support from the District Committee. In the above case that Harrington made against me, Harrington claimed that the District Committee had agreed with him that I was a bad steward. When we went to them they of course denied this. We couldn’t trust the District Committee. In another case we were asking a brother to set up a workers’ agreement with Harringtons to eliminate all those faults. The brother agreed but instead he set up a productivity agreement, which the government was asking for. It had nothing to do with workers’ interests at all.

Previously we had formed a new branch, No 7 branch, of the AEU, in the Lewes Road, in a pub, because all the branches were getting overcrowded at that time, with so many new people coming into engineering. I was shop steward then at Allen West’s and I went to all the branch meetings. But I left the AEU in the end because the District Committee always seemed against us.

Another example was when Walter Hannington was going to come to our No 7 branch to give a lecture. Although he came to tell us modern important issues, the District Committee had given him instructions to talk about the history of trade unions, something totally different from what he wanted to talk about.

In the TGWU all the officers were appointed, when Deakin was the national organiser. It wasn’t a democratic organisation at all. What I particularly remember was that when I joined it, a Labour Councillor told the District Officer that I was a CP member. Then the District Officer asked me to sign forms designed to limit my activities, which I refused to sign. When I joined a trade union I didn’t want to be restricted in any way. A lot of CP members were in the T&G. But when I was in the CP I was rather on my own. I don’t remember having any contact with the others about those forms. I think they attacked me because of my history.

I kept paying for a time, but I could see that this organisation was even worse. I don’t think there was much struggle put forward in the T&G. At meetings they mostly spoke about reports, conferences, etc, that I can remember.

Chapter Five – Political Involvement from 1945

One of my first struggles away from work after the war was in connection with Harry Cowley and his movement. A lecturer at the University of Sussex has recently published information about Harry Cowley which will be helpful background.*

Harry Cowley was responsible for forming a group of vigilantes who organised squatting in Brighton, first in the 1920s and later following the Second World War. They were not affiliated to any political party and denied any political motives for their actions. As Cowley put it, “We only did what Christ would have done if he had been on earth”. Squatting on a large scale died out by late 1946 when the squatters, with the encouragement of the Ministry of Information, were increasingly portrayed by the Press as queue jumpers in the search for housing, pushing aside those more patient and law-abiding citizens who were unwilling to resort to the “illegal” methods of the vigilantes.

Harry Cowley first appropriated houses in 1920 for returning servicemen, but also extended his assistance to civilians. Again in the 1920s, with a fake bomb in each hand he threatened to blow up an estate agent who tried to evict an elderly lady squatter. With a group of ex-servicemen searching for food and work he expropriated sheep off the Sussex Downs as well as houses. He broke up a Lord Mayor’s banquet and forced the mayor to release an unemployed man from jail and threatened to “Strangle the Board of Guardians with my own hands” if local rates of unemployment were not increased. Later in the 1930s he formed an anti-fascist group and had his home damaged and his leg broken by a gang of fascists who descended from London.

*Peter Dickens, “Squatting and the state”, New Society, 5 May 1977

My involvement with the vigilantes began in 1946. The vigilante movement lasted about ten years. I didn’t join it at its very start, I joined it while I was still in the Communist Party, and I left the Communist Party in 1947, so it was in 1946.

At that time the Communist Party wasn’t very active. I never got on well with certain members of the CP, so for that reason I was just looking for something else, not necessarily to leave the Party. I didn’t leave for reasons like that, but they were really inactive it seemed to me. We used to march: I can remember some of the old marches we had in London – Chamberlain Must Go – that’s the kind of thing they were doing in particular, not actually putting people in houses.

I was one of those people who wanted to push forward and Cowley made quite a sensation when he started this vigilante organisation. He was reported in all the Press, not only locally but nationally. When I kept reading about it, when we saw that they were housing people, I went and joined his organisation. I went down and saw him and said “I’d like to work with your organisation” and that was it. That’s what appealed to me at that particular time, they were doing something purposeful.

The method was to find empty houses and find the person who would take the risk, because don’t forget it was a risk to be a squatter. It wasn’t all that easy. You didn’t just go in and remain there, there was all kinds of police harassment. So they had to find the right people to squat. They had a list of these people and when they found the right spot they’d put them in. Of course it was a bit unsafe for families: imagine the cops coming and chucking out little kids. That wasn’t a very popular idea, so in many cases it was married people with no children. They had to pick them of course because the people they put in had to be just as brave as the vigilantes themselves. They didn’t know what was going to happen. They didn’t know whether the police would come and chuck them out tomorrow, bailiffs and all the rest of it. So they had to be prepared to barricade themselves in.

Many were evicted. For some reasons they seemed to chuck certain people out and in other cases they didn’t trouble so much. I expect it depended on whose property it was, and how much they complained. I would think that if the owners of the property really pressed it the police would do something. But if they were more liberal-minded and could see that these people needed homes, some of the squatters would be able to remain there for quite a time.

The vigilantes attempted to defend the people if they possibly could, but you know there weren’t enough of them to do much defending. So it mainly became a matter of putting them in and resting them for two or three months until they got chucked out again.

I would say there was a group of about thirty people. I don’t think most of them were members of an organisation at all. We didn’t really have a hall or anything like that, it was mostly meetings on the Level. Harry Cowley had all our names and addresses and I think I used to get notification that something was going to happen. Then we’d usually gather at the Level, or whatever it said on the note.

Whoever undertook jobs of this kind had to do it very secretly. You didn’t want thirty people going and busting a lock did you? You needed a couple of people with the right instruments to open the door and let them in.

The lack of housing now is as bad as it ever was, but it showed itself up after the war in particular, especially in this kind of place. There never was enough room in this town, there were always more people than could be properly housed, especially when the workers started to get a bit more money and could pay more rent.

Of course it was the Press that was blowing it up. As a rule you would expect they’d have been shouting against the vigilantes. I think the secret is that the people were so strong that the Press were afraid to report it from the opposite angle. It was pushed up quite a lot by the London papers, and there were people from London on holiday. They were witnessing the very thing they had been reading about in the papers. That made them much more enthusiastic about the movement. Harry Cowley would announce “We’re the vigilantes, we’re helping the people. We’re going to ask you to send some money down”. We all stood there and it came down in showers. Propaganda was on his side, the Press itself, otherwise I don’t think we’d have ever collected money like that.

We used to collect hundreds of pounds. The organisation was so well known that we used to bring whole sheets and hold them on the lower esplanade on Brighton front, and from the top they used to be chucking, never coppers, nothing under two bob as a rule. It was so popular at that particular time. I reckon in one sheet we must have collected fifty quid and that was only one sheet. I reckon we put up ten, fifteen, twenty sheets in one day.

Harry Cowley was a chimney sweep. He was known as the bowler-hatted chimney sweep. There was nothing logical about his talk. I remember listening to him on the Level and there was a lot of contradiction in what he said. I know the Communist Party didn’t like him. They used to call him an ignoramus and as a matter of fact he sorted me out on one occasion. I didn’t know that they used to have this opinion about him. When I was down there one day he said “Yes and you Communists call me ignoramus”. I knew nothing about it! He ran for a Council seat on the Liberal ticket on one occasion, but didn’t get in.

And there was the case of Cowley in the Courts. They pinched him one day. I think he was only fined, but I remember the judge telling him that he didn’t know what he was doing. He called him a nincompoop or some kind of words like that, like they always tell the working class when they do anything to help themselves.

He’d been active for quite a long time before they brought the court case against him. He was charged for actually housing people for this vigilante movement and for taking over houses, taking over property.

Eventually they found some method of satisfying his needs. There was a club just round the corner from Whitehawk: the only Council-sponsored Old Age Pensioners’ Club in Brighton. So when he made such a fuss and after he’d had so many disappointments with his Court case and people had told him he was an ignoramus, I suppose he started to settle down a bit and wondered what could be done. Then we found that the Corporation had made him the manager of that club. He went in for other things as well. He made himself the guv’nor of the boys up at the Gardner Street market. He somehow got in there and told them he could organise them. It was when the Council was going to shut that street and take their jobs away. And they tried it again in 1977. What they said that time was that its the people in the street that are complaining, but there’s hardly anyone lives in the street actually, its nearly all store places. I don’t know how they’ll get on because they’ve got no Harry Cowley to fight for them.

Although during these years the CP wasn’t very active I must say we did our best which the Labour Party never did. In the CP branch we used to have a series of lectures. One of the best lecturers in Marxism was Dudley Edwards. He was a good propagandist, he was extremely good on the materialist conception of history.

The CP had so many people in it who were professors and that sort of thing. They weren’t even known as communists. They were secret members. All the things we industrial workers did they weren’t involved in. Yet they were running the CP. You want some intellectual people to put forward Marxist theories but you also need industrial workers to do the donkey work. What I didn’t like was that these people were pulling the strings and we were just the victims of it. Yet they weren’t the active people. It wouldn’t have happened perhaps in another branch, but I’m talking about locally.

At that time we used to assist the Labour Party. Every election we’d offer ourselves to them as canvassers. This was just after the Second World War, about 1946. Dr Saxton, a communist living in Patcham, used to come to Whitehawk to give assistance to the Labour candidate. That’s as much as we did really. Election times were not that important to the CP. Except when the CP put up a candidate for the Council. That was in my district. My house was their headquarters.

I don’t say I like spending all my time knocking on doors and telling the tale, but it was necessary. It was done for a political reason. After all you don’t join a political party for amusement. I joined it for progress. That’s the way I’ve been educated. We thought we were educating the people to something better.

I got very good responses when I was canvassing. Whether I became a better propagandist than some others in the Party I don’t know. They used to ask a question and if the people said no, they would walk away. I was prepared to do a bit more explaining and to stop with these people if they offered any opposition. I usually convinced them that we had a point and that it was in their interest. That was the way I was trying to work.

I was well known on the Whitehawk estate because I did all the canvassing. In the early days you could count on at least 15 people who would always come on any project we were doing: canvassing or agitating for garden gates and fences. That was one of the first issues, when I went up there first before the War. But it never got anywhere. The leadership of the Labour Party never did anything. That was the trouble. They gave us a lot of work and we did it, on the understanding that something might happen. But we never even heard where the petition went.

The rent struggle was mainly what I was organising. Everytime the rents went up I went round with a petition. I tried to push for marches and that sort of thing. During several elections I had a separate list. I used to say to people “You’re signing for this but are you really prepared to do anything else?” Suppose we can organise a march, will you come?” Ninety percent of the people I went to said “Well if we can’t come we’ll send our boy or our girl.” I got a good strong case. It was presented to the Labour Party and they did nothing. We never really heard what happened to the petition itself.

When I moved into Wiston Road in 1932 (I moved to where I am now in Whitehawk Avenue in 1936) the rent was 10s a week. This included the use of an electric stove, the loan of an iron and a boiler and many other things. Also the corporation did up the interior of the houses every so often.

During the war the rent and rates went up a little, a shilling here and there. By the end of the war the rent had doubled. Wages weren’t all that special at the time. Then the council announced a rise of 6s a week which was unheard of at that time.

There were about 15 or 20 people, mainly in the Labour Party, who worked in Whitehawk. We thought the increase was very serious. We went round asking the people what they thought about the increase. They told us they couldn’t afford it. I mentioned the matter at a CP meeting. They took up the matter and set up a committee and we were invited onto it. We went round asking people if they agreed to having a rent strike. The tenants were up in arms about the rent increase and agreed to a strike. So we took the decision to hold a rent strike. We went round and asked people not to pay their rent. The strike lasted for about nine months. We never knew the true position.

In Whitehawk we used to make use of the pavement for propaganda purposes. We would send someone off with coloured chalk to write on the pavement. They would write slogans to keep people together and thinking in the right way about the strike.

We used to book the school hall to hold meetings and entertainments to keep people together. We held some in the open air. We had a number of talented people on the estate who would sing or do other things at the entertainments. I remember hundreds of people standing in the rain listening to one of our meetings. One day I was sent to the Town Hall to book the school hall for a meeting but the authorities refused to allow it.

With no school hall the entertainments faded away. One of the men who lived on the estate was asked by a Tory councillor to call on him. The man, who had no political understanding, went. We never found out what was said to him. Afterwards he came to a meeting and opposed the strike. We couldn’t get out of him what he’d been told. I can only presume that he was bribed.

People began to lose interest. We didn’t know quite what to do. The council didn’t give way. The CP began the strike through my initiative. Then the two people they sent up to the estate to organise the strike saw it fading away and they stopped operating. Then we locals got a lot of blame for not informing people enough. We advised people to put by the money every week so they paid up without too much difficulty. The CP acted very badly at the end I’m afraid, by stopping away.

About six years ago (1971) we again got all the people, about four hundred, marching down to the Town Hall. They were banging on the doors and on all the Tory councillors cars. That was about rents going up. We got no result from it. They keep going up and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.

I wouldn’t say that Whitehawk was open in the old days and closed now to that kind of political organising. It was only six years ago. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t happen again. We got all that response, four hundred people marching down there. All coming straight from work and going down there. Four hundred people from Whitehawk is quite a lot.

I left the Party on purely personal grounds because of the treatment I got as a result of being a member of the CP by certain individuals. If I’d been in a different district it may never have happened.

It wasn’t anything to do with Marxism, or fundamental policy. I left because of the little support I got when I was really in the fight with the bosses. There wasn’t much comradeship. There was amongst the industrial workers. But those people at the top didn’t even want to be known as communists. They wouldn’t even represent me at the Labour Exchange when I got the sack for the umpteenth time. But that was a personal affair. In another district there might have been more industrial members who understood more and would have supported me. It wasn’t fundamental Marxism that caused me to leave.

I left the CP and I haven’t been in any political party since. I think that it’s a shame that all the Marxist parties are so divided. In the early days there were really only two sections, there was the CP and there were the Trotskyites. Unfortunately there was a rift that came about. Trotsky had to run from Russia and the Russians killed him in Mexico. There were one or two reasons for it. One, in particular, being that Trotsky’s policy used to be to assist, from Russia, workers in any other country. That didn’t go down well with the Communist Party at that time. But I think it was a good idea, even though I was in the Communist Party which was supposed to oppose it.

Of course they said their policy was based on Marxism, that Marx said that the workers of any country have got to win their own freedom. These things could have been talked out, I would have thought. It’s a pity because nowadays there’s about 28 different parties claiming to be Marxists. They all claim to have the same scientific understanding that Marx imparted to them, but at the same time they are opposing each other. And in their propaganda sheets, whichever one it might be, you’ll read something against another party and if you pick up another one, they must retaliate against the first people, so it’s this vicious circle going on, always.

This means to say that there’ll never be any unity. And I can’t see any improvement coming until they are united. I would have thought that as they are Marxists and their analysis of society is scientific, they could have joined together and if they had slight differences they could have talked them out. But instead of that you’ve got them antagonised against one another and that’s stopping all progress at the moment. All the way through Marxism the main way forward is the unity of the working people, yet you’ve got a division within the working class parties opposing capitalism. This contradiction I shall never understand. The best way to struggle is to have the unity of the Marxist Party itself, and until you get that I don’t see that anything can change.

I think that another thing that can assist change is socialist education. Once people are Marxists, they understand the kind of society they live in and see the need for change, and know what they want for a more progressive society. Most capitalist minded people don’t. That’s why there’s so much mental trouble, because they run into conditions they can’t explain. Capitalism is full of these contradictions. I claim that the only way to understand our society is to study how Marx analysed capitalism. With this understanding, you can then see the reason for these contradictions, so they won’t send you mad. How many people are there in mental institutions now? I claim that it’s mainly because of the kind of society they live in.

People cannot explain things happening to themselves resulting particularly from religion. Marx shows that it’s pure superstition. I don’t want to offend anyone’s personal opinions. But if you’ve got nice ideas based on superstition, with Virgin Marys and miracles and things like that, which aren’t natural things, supported by a State that has set up institutions with clergymen to push these ideas, then you’re being treated like little children.

Just accept whatever they tell you – that’s how religion works. You’ve got these high morals based on these peculiarities – you mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that, but at the same time you live and work under capitalism with all its contradictions, its false values and inequalities – and people can’t understand it at all.

For example, the ruling classes mix everything with religion. They have made religion represent their interests. You get this Lady Barnett on television, she will tell you only what the ruling class want her to tell you. Everytime you ask a question, you know what’s coming. They’re going to use religion and all the ideas of the establishment which are their class interests. Marx shows that established morals and values are the interests of the ruling class. When you open a magazine and you see that Lady Barnett uses a certain kind of soap, and because Lady Barnett uses it you’re supposed to as well. Capitalists are spending thousands of pounds on telling us these sorts of things. You see, the contradictions of capitalism. Ridiculous isn’t it?

The strangest thing is that one of the worst forms of insanity is that of trying to understand religion, known as religious mania. The most devout people who are really trying to understand something that can never be understood, worry themselves so much and get a mental disease which is of the very worst type – what a reward for being so devout!

Socialist education happened to me partly through working conditions but a powerful socialist propagandist like Walter Hannington was luckily part of the environment for me.

My understanding of the word environment is my contact with life generally, anything we come into contact with registers in people’s minds and our minds are therefore formed by environment. I have tried to show that some kinds of contact with life register and affect the person concerned much more than other forms of environment. So what effect would a dirty and dangerous workshop have on an average unpolitically minded worker, for example? My answer is that experience shows that these workshops existed for many years and very little was done by the workers about it. The great change came when the workers got organised in trade unions and politically minded workers led the class struggles and educated the workers to fight these bad conditions. This shows that the environment of bad conditions in workshops did not affect the workers for action – organisation and working class politics did. To emphasise this, agitations in workshops are usually started by working class politically-minded workers, showing that one sort of environment (political education) is far more effective than those terrible conditions that used to exist in most workshops in the past.

Workers organised in a trade union who go on strike for better working conditions are usually under the influence of a politically-minded person who started the agitation with a view to better conditions and changing the minds of people for fundamental change, that is socialism. In these conditions, unpolitically minded workers see this as only improving immediate conditions instead of preparing for fundamental change. Until working class politics are introduced into the workshops and throughout the working class movement generally, I can see no great push for fundamental change.

The AEU was always the most progressive union and it held most of the militants, like Wally Farmington. He was one of them, but there were many others. And I think it’s that in particular, the propaganda coming from those people that’s made turners and other skilled people in engineering so militant. It’s the people, the propaganda, that’s done it, rather than the environment simply understood.

I think Marxism is the real world, society as it really is happening. It is the means to understand all the contradictions and the fact that the workers are the producers of everything and yet are the people who seldom get the things that they produce. They live in a society where they produce everything but they’ll never be the owners of the things that they produce – the economics of the capitalist system will always prevent that. A ruling class – the owners of industry – produce everything for profit and they are the owners of the means of production, they are only the money bags but they control the situation. No one can control the whole of capitalism since capitalists are divided and to some extent in competition with one another. Certain sections of industry can be controlled by monopolies but not the economy generally. Under this system, you can never get real progress for the reason that nothing can be properly controlled or planned.

We now live in a class form of society, where there are two main opposing classes. Those who own the means of production and those who just work and have only their labour power to sell. But there are also a number of other opposing groups, within the bourgeois or petty bourgeois classes, the landlord and the tenant, for example. A school teacher I know, changed his school and had to move up to the Midlands. He was looking for lodgings and someone told him an address and he went there. So he discussed it with the landlady over a cup of tea. She told him it would cost £15 per week, for one room. That’s a lot of money and a big percentage of what he was earning. They were just going up the stairs to have a look at the room and what do you think the woman said to him “You’ll have to share for that”! Now then, that’s what a landlord can do. So isn’t it right when I say that the tenant and the landlord are opposed people? Another example of an opposed or antagonistic relationship within class society is that of buyer and seller. When I try and buy something, I want it as cheap as I can get it, and the man who sells it wants to sell it in the dearest market to make a fortune if he can. Production costs mean nothing. All that matters is how much people can be persuaded to pay for commodities. That’s our kind of society. Even a man who produces bread, doesn’t necessarily think he’s producing bread to eat, he’s making money for himself and that is the issue right throughout capitalism. It’s money rather than service. Money is the most important thing and it doesn’t matter what branch of capitalism you look at, it’s all based on money. Under capitalism there’s no direction except that the ruling class are going to make as much money as they can, that being the only object of capitalism. There’s no planned method of change, just competition. Of course firms go bust and people lose their jobs and don’t even know why, unless they’ve studied the kind of system in which they live. Millionaires and paupers are the result.

Capitalism is in such decay at this moment and I can’t see any recovery, despite what the Prime Minister says on television. In essence, he’s going to help the capitalists to make things better and we’ve got to suffer. That’s what it amounts to, but he hopes that you won’t see it in that light. In other words, he’s a rotten propagandist. Most workers used to be able to buy meat and fish but now these are luxuries, mainly for the rich. Is this progress?

Occasionally you get better propaganda on television, like Willy Hamilton. I saw him discussing his book on royalty about 5 years ago. The treatment he received made me write this letter:

“Dear Comrade Hamilton,

Having watched the BBC broadcast which hand picked so many people to oppose your book, may I endorse all you said and hope your book will help to educate the working people who have nothing to gain from royalty. What really worries me is the fact that the Labour Party, a so-called socialist party, does not openly oppose royalty. In 1947 most of the top Labour Party members were so sympathetic to royalty that they said it was priority No 1 to vote big increases to these parasites. It is very strange how Tories and others who pay lip service to democracy can accept that a person with no special talents necessarily but who comes of a particular family, can have privileges and wealth bestowed on them, be known as grand and noble for no other reason than the one just stated. This class of people, supposed to be the elite have made the laws of the land to bring about this condition. In the last century and before they laid down the method of education making the history of royalty the history of England instead of the history of the people, to be taught in the schools. I think the most important part of your television talk was the way you have shown our society to be a class form of society in which a selected few, because of ownership, are in a position to exploit the rest of the community and lead very privileged lives, as against the working people who do all the work and get nothing for it. No wonder they, who also own all the means of propaganda and who use it to fill our heads with this nonsense, are so enthusiastic to keep this pretence going. It stops us from thinking of our own class interests.

This media which uses you in the way it did, could alternatively be used as a progressive educational influence, if only the Labour Party were as ruthless as the Tories and used it in the interests of the working class. The first step would be to clear out all those personalities who help the establishment and constantly pay lip service to royalty. How too can you get progress and justice as long as the press, who play up all this nonsense, is privately owned, with the right of the owner to print what he likes, known as the freedom of the press. The main force against the Labour Party making progress are those few people in key positions who have the right to tell huge audiences through the BBC television and radio, and the press, the things they should not and withhold all the things that the working people should be told.

While writing this, the Duke of Norfolk died. The local press gave the front page and two inside pages to this event, showing this figure in a gorgeous uniform with a whole row of medals. I wonder what for? The reading shows that his whole life was taken up with horse racing and selling land at huge prices, and without working he accumulated a fortune of between £3 and £5 million. It also stated that a painting in his castle of 130 rooms, insured for £10 turned out to have a value of £70,000. This the duke offered to the National Gallery, not for the £10, the paper states, but for something less than its real value. We also learn that he had moved from the castle to a £70,000 house, built in his own grounds, with only 40 rooms. How long would these people last if the working people, many of whom are unemployed, without decent homes, were informed by a press which had their interests at heart, instead of these parasites.”

Even that Tory rag ‘Encounter’ – do you know what it said on the front page? It said “Can capitalism last until 1999?” Now, even the ruling class are doubtful if they can keep capitalism going until the end of the century. So that’s what makes me hopeful for socialism. It’s what Marx says, that socialism will come into being when the capitalist system fails, and that’s right in front of us at the moment. In every capitalist country there’s trouble, because of the reactionary systems operating. First of all the balance of payments goes wrong. Because it’s all money. The ruling class gets most of the money and it can’t be balanced. They’re in such trouble now. It was easier for them in the 30s when they could keep 4 million people out of work, but now the workers are demanding much more money and the ruling class is getting into a position where the contradictions are so great that they can’t control the situation any longer.

Chapter Six – A Medical Scandal and a Ruined Retirement

My life and struggles since 1966 have been mostly about medical affairs and against doctors and civil servants.

This is a case of going into a Brighton hospital for hernia and coming out without a leg. I have tried in the following pages to show what can happen even in a National Health Service. Having been made a cripple, I have tried to show how difficult it is to get any justice or compensation as things stand at present. I think the Department of Health should make me a grant, as I am now forced to exist on the State pension as a result of a hospital’s treatment and the drug Lucofen. My primary reason for going into the whole story in detail is to get changes which will protect future patients. I feel sure that if no changes are made and when conditions are ripe this same tragedy will re-occur.

Doctors and Hospital

For many years before my retirement in 1966 I had had a small umbilical swelling, without any pain or discomfort. I had never had any harmful effects from it. It was something which originated about seventeen years before. I always put it down to one thing, a particular motor I bought which was hard on the clutch.

On my retirement, the BBC was staging lectures on ‘How best to retire’. Since I wanted to keep as fit as possible, and since there was a need to go on working to live instead of just exist, I was influenced by these television programmes. They suggested seeing your doctor about anything unusual.

I’m a bit of a planner, always have been. After all, a Marxist does plan. Planning is partly economic against capitalist private competition, but it is also personal. That being part of my make-up, I planned what I was going to do in my retirement. I was going to go on working as an engineer, partly by getting work and using the lathe in the shed at the back of my house.

So I took the programme’s advice. The doctor confirmed the swelling to be a hernia and suggested that I needed surgery. He then weighed me – 17 stone 4 lbs. He said I was much too heavy and would have to lose many stones to make the operation possible. So he prescribed a German dieting drug called Lucofen, which I later discovered was a blood-clotting agent. I took this for several months and found it useful for stopping eating. I lost 3 stone 6 lbs.

During this period I noticed that on a political march I had to fall out because, still without pain, I lost the use of my right leg. I did not report this to the doctor as it had caused no pain. I assumed it was of a temporary nature, which it was, and would right itself. I never thought of any connection with the drug I was taking.

Here I will emphasise that I had had the hernia for many years without the slightest pain or discomfort. I need never have gone to my doctor. I’m quite sure it would never have affected me. I also walked 16 miles the day before I was to go into hospital.

Until one week before entering hospital I was riding a solo motor cycle. This shows how delicate my lost leg was! It used to operate the gear and neutral positions, a very tricky operation. Also I had been in nearly all marches organised by the Peace Movement in London and Brighton ever since 1933. So I did not go to Hospital with any leg trouble.

After the dieting period my GP was going to discharge me. He said at that point that wearing a belt would be all that was needed. In my great surprise I reminded him that he had told me I needed an operation. I reminded him that I was dieting for this small operation which he had suggested would be a great improvement. I asked him why he had changed his mind about the operation. Instead of giving me an answer he told me he would write to the hospital. This is an important contradiction. At the time my GP and the hospital said the hernia operation was not necessary but was desirable. Later the Ministry defended them – the doctors – by saying that the instance of strangulation in hernia is so high as to make it hazardous to ignore the condition. This is not what the doctors told me at the time.

The next thing that happened was that I was called to see the consulting surgeon at the Brighton General Hospital. This was two weeks before I had the operation. He looked at my condition. He endorsed my GP’s statement that I did not need an operation. But he encouraged me to come in, saying that it would be an assurance that nothing would happen in the future. Looking back at my GP’s hesitations, I thought of possible danger. So I asked the consulting surgeon. By an unusual set of circumstances I saw him for the second time that day and put the same question which to me was so vital. He happened to come into the changing room while I was there. My main question to him was whether he could guarantee that there would be no bad results. He nodded and spent some time persuading me to come in, for my own good. He looked at me directly and got right over me and said, “If I was you I’d come in”. That’s what he said to me. So I was assured. I was told it would be a seven day job. Could I have been more prudent? Who would not have gone in after such advice?

I was called into the Brighton General on a Wednesday, September 6, 1967. I was informed by the sister that the operation was to be on the Friday, September 8th.

I signed, giving consent to an operation to remove a hernia. During this two day period I saw no doctor or had any questions asked, or had my stomach looked at again. None of us who entered hospital on that day had any examination except for temperature and blood pressure, or saw any doctor. I have support in this recollection from a neighbour in the next bed. In order to prove the point, which was later to be denied by the hospital, I went later to see this man. He occupied the bed next to me for the fortnight until his discharge. We ran through an almost minute-to-minute account of what happened during those first two days before the operation.

The consulting surgeon I had seen was not at the hospital at the time of my operation. He was on holiday. So when I was the first patient to be taken up to the theatre at approximately 10am on September 8th, a surgeon who had never seen my condition and whose identity I still don’t know, performed the operation. I was later told that this is not unusual and that it is quite acceptable for a surgeon who has not seen a patient except under sedation to perform an operation. I could understand this if a patient was picked up in the street or similar circumstances. But when a patient goes to hospital in the usual way, with two days to spare before the operation, it is surely unwise to proceed in this way. I should have been given the chance to see and question the new surgeon to get the assurance I had had from the other man. If the new surgeon had shown any doubt I would not have undergone the operation. As a result of this change, things were taken right out of my control.

Surely if I had had a blood test before the operation, the medical profession is advanced enough to be able to tell if an operation would be dangerous? I do not think that conditions like this would be meted out to privileged paying patients.

At the time of my admission to hospital I also had high blood pressure. I had had headaches for some time, which the hospital knew about. They later said my blood pressure on admission was 230/115.

The day of the operation was the most fateful day of my life. I well remember becoming conscious after it and feeling terrific pains in my right leg. I put up with the pain for a couple of hours. As I recovered from the anaesthetic I began to find my leg all stiff. The pains began to develop badly at about 9pm. I told the nurse, who brought the doctor. After three visits to me he said he thought I had clotted blood in the artery of my right leg. I would need another operation immediately. I had been drinking water. So this operation had to be performed, they said, with a local anaesthetic only. I was conscious all through the operation. I was watching the clock. It lasted from approximately llpm to 12.30am. I heard the doctor say that it had not been done for nothing. He thanked me for my cooperation and particularly gave credit to a young nurse who had just seen her first operation.

On the same night the police called at our address in Whitehawk, asking my sister to phone the hospital at 12.30 that night. This she did. The doctor on the phone told her about the second operation for blood clots, and that clotting had appeared in the first operation but that steps had been taken to remedy this at the time. He said it was a dangerous situation.

After the second operation I felt alright, although I was on the danger list for some time. My sister was told that if I had not had a heart much stronger than most people I would not have survived. And this was what I had been given to understand was a simple operation!

I felt fine and thought this must be the end of operations. Next day I noticed the ends of two instruments sticking out of the groin, not knowing what they were. About three days later one of the younger doctors came and said that sometimes in these cases we have to take a leg off. I said that if that was the case I would not want to live. This was mostly propaganda – I was hoping that everything would be done to avert this. The next day another doctor came and said I had a 50/50 chance of losing the leg. The next day I was informed I must lose the leg. This was undoubtedly the way of breaking the news gently. I thought this very strange because the leg was not looked at during the whole of this time. Later, after losing the leg, I knew it had been inevitable after a nurse came and drew out the instruments in the groin. These were two instruments blocking the artery which had cut off the blood supply to the leg and therefore the leg had to die. It seemed that plates had been passed through the artery cutting the blood supply.

To the best of my knowledge the leg was amputated on the 22nd of September 1967. But I can’t be absolutely sure. The doctor at the hospital out-patients department after my discharge said I was heavily drugged for some time. I woke up to find my leg had gone and was never sure of the date. I don’t remember signing for this amputation.

I had one more operation, because the first amputation was a failure. It would not heal and I was therefore kept in hospital for another three weeks after performing the third and last operation – to cut back the bone and shin and start all over again. This was done on October 4th. They called it a ‘revision of the stump’ or a ‘re-amputation’. In the end it did heal. I was finally discharged from hospital on November 11th 1967.

All this to me amounts to negligence, as a result of which I was to spend 9½ weeks in hospital rather than the proposed 7 days, and to come out without a leg rather than with a hernia cured.

As I have said, the consulting surgeon was away during my operation. When he came back I remember him coming round, because they come round every morning to have a look at you in practising hospitals. I remember wondering what he was going to say to me, because I thought he must remember that I said to him that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it if there was any danger. But he just came round and hardly looked at me. He just looked at my card and that sort of thing, and never spoke to me about it, neither did anyone speak to me about it in any way at all in all that time.

I remember some weeks after I’d had the leg off, the principal nurse there – the matron or something – she came to me and told me I was still very, very ill. But I knew I wasn’t. She seemed to know more about me than I knew myself. I felt quite normal. I could have walked out weeks before, that’s how I felt in myself. I did not let it upset me. I’ve learned that through, I think, being a Marxist, I don’t get upset. In other words I can control myself. I don’t allow myself to get in a position where I worry over things.

How could I fight? They had made all the procedure everywhere. You can follow the line of events and although you may be wild that it ever happened and say that it should never have happened, what could I do about it? There was another chap in hospital who lost his leg and worried about it and died a few weeks after. They set me trying to put him right. The matron came to me and she said “Look, if we find someone doing well we try to get them to see to anyone who’s not doing so well, to go and help them”. So I did, but this man, it worried him so much that he died as a result of losing his leg.

The only thing that gave me doubts while I was in, was the fact that about a fortnight before I was coming out, one of the ward men came to me and he told me I’d had a rough deal and ought to do something about it. I told him that I wanted to get out of hospital first and that as soon as I did get discharged I would take his advice. I didn’t discuss it much with him. He might have told me a lot more. I wish now that I had taken action there and then, since it has proved so difficult to get anyone to take effective action on my behalf ever since. Looking back, immediately after losing my leg, every new patient was interviewed by a doctor before any operation, as if trying to make up for past mistakes.

One more point on my hospital stay. Just before leaving hospital a doctor came to tell me I had lost my sex. I said that at my age it does not matter. But everyone I have mentioned it to can find no explanation why I lost my sex in an operation for hernia. What else did they do? It seems to me as though the medical profession were curious, and used me as a guinea pig just in order to satisfy their curiosity with these damaging results.

Lawyers

I attended the hospital as an out patient for a time. On one of my visits I mentioned to somebody that I would like to have my whole case examined. I am sure this was overheard by the nurse. On seeing the doctor a little later he spent quite a time advising me to go home and forget all about it. It is my opinion the nurse told him what had been said.

I was certainly not going to go home and forget about it. When I got out I first attempted to make a case for compensation through a solicitor. I wanted to establish negligence by the medical people. So I asked various people in the Labour Party if they knew someone who would assist me. That’s what I wanted because I’ve often heard of solicitors who don’t seem to be on your side. They just do the job for money. I was given the name of a helpful solicitor. I went to see him. What to do was not decided on at once. They asked me various questions. Then the solicitor wrote to the hospital asking for an account of the operation.

The consulting surgeon eventually replied. He made a number of points. One of them was that in the medical notes the loss of circulation in my right leg was attributed to an embolus, that is, a shifting clot of blood becoming jammed in one of the main arteries. “My personal feeling” he wrote “is that spontaneous clotting in the vessel is rather more likely to have been the true reason for the condition. In neither case can I attribute it to the operation for hernia which is a perfectly straight forward one and would in no way have involved the blood supply to the leg”. He then tried to answer my suggestion that the case had not been adequately explained to me. He wrote that he could not understand such a suggestion:

“There are two resident doctors employed in the surgical wards. Either of them could have explained to him, if asked, the circumstances and I myself go round the wards two or three times a week and again could have put the matter to him in fairly simple language. I find that these apparent failures of communication are extremely frequent in hospital practice – a patient who has had the matter elaborately and carefully explained to him in basic English will in a few days time deny any such explanation has been forthcoming. From the frequency with which this occurs I do not doubt that these patients are perfectly honest in their denials and I can only assume that this is what happened in your client’s case.”

He seemed in this paragraph to be suggesting some kind of obstacle to communication between doctors and patients in the hospital.

In his last paragraph concerning patients who are elaborately told in basic English reasons for medical action, I can understand some doddery old people being unable to absorb this information and later denying any knowledge of same. But in my case this becomes a lot of propaganda. As explained already, only two references were made to me concerning this medical condition. The first was that we believe you have clotted blood in the right artery and that an immediate operation is necessary. Three days after that I was told that sometimes we have to take a leg off. The next day, I had a 50/50 chance, and the following day the leg was to be amputated. The letter says that by asking, an explanation would have been forthcoming. My method was not to discuss the amputation of the leg so as not to let them think I was getting used to the idea. When first told this I said I would rather die than go without a leg. This I thought would spur them on to doing something to save it. But anyway why should I have to ask?

The consulting surgeon’s reply was, as he said himself, from my records, not from experience of having done the job himself. These are records, not necessarily facts. In his reply he only speculated on the reason for the blood clotting. He explained nothing. How the clotting could be said to be ‘spontaneous’ if it first occurred during and immediately following an operation, whether or not that operation involved the leg, I don’t know. My sister was told on the phone that the clotting had even been noticed during the first operation, but had been dealt with at that time. Still less could it be said to be spontaneous if it occurred after some months of taking Lucofen. But I don’t think the surgeons or anyone except my GP knew about it at that time, and no one had yet discovered its possible dangers as a blood clotting agent.

In the original letter (4th August 1967) from my GP to the hospital asking them to see me about my lump, my doctor just wrote “he has made great efforts by dieting and has reduced his weight to 14 stone”. How this had been done, using Lucofen, the appetite suppressant, is not mentioned so far as I know in any of the medical documents I have. Dangerous or not, I would have thought it would have been useful information for the surgeon to have. The surgeon’s only positive statement in the letter was that hernia is a straight forward operation and in no way can it affect the blood supply to the leg.

My solicitor was also informed that I had had an examination in the days before my operation. This was to be said throughout the rest of my attempts to get justice in this case. It is my word against theirs. When they have attempted to explain this examination, what may be being described is the time in the operating theatre just before the operation when the patient is under sedation and a last look is made. Various authorities have later insisted that a full report exists from the House Surgeon dated 6th September, the day I entered hospital. But they have said report, not examination. I strongly deny that I was examined during those days.

At this time, after analysing the documents from the hospital, my case rested on 4 main factors:

1. That I had had no examination before the operation which brought about this disaster.

2. That a strange surgeon who had never seen me before and who met me for the first time in the operating theatre and under sedation, performed the operation.

3. The hospital report admitted that at the time of the operation I had high blood pressure. I know nothing about medical affairs myself but am advised by people near to the profession that this was possibly some of the cause of the trouble.

4. Finally, I should not have been misinformed by the medical profession which took away the right to protect myself. The consulting surgeon stated in a letter to my doctor that there must always be some danger attaching to hernia operations, and that he could not have told me otherwise. But he did not convey this to me, and nor did the surgeon who did the job.

The next thing was that in November 1968 my solicitor recommended applying for Legal Aid. I obtained a certificate from the Law Society in January 1969. Its scope was “To take proceedings against the Brighton Hospital Management Committee for damages for medical negligence”. The money was to be limited in the first instance “to all steps up to and including obtaining Counsel’s Opinion, but excluding issue of writ”. I accepted the certificate.

But then the solicitor took a course of action of which I disapproved. He asked the Medical Defence Union to let him have the name of a suitable specialist who could advise him on the matter before going to Counsel. I told him that pursuing this line of action would certainly mean getting evidence against me instead of for me. No doctor will find against his own profession. They will not find against their own unless the case is obvious, such as cutting off the wrong leg or something like that. I said I did not want this line of action because I pretty well knew what was going to happen. They, the medical people, have a kind of trade union, and that’s more important to them than justice.

But against my advice the solicitor wrote to the recommended specialist. Of course he got the reply I expected – no case.

This Harley Street specialist went out of the way to whitewash the hospital authorities. This of course was the end of Legal Aid. I think this is an important point to be noted, as to whether solicitors should have the right to work against their clients’ wishes and so lose the case before it had started. I thought he would be dealing with the Ministry of Health.

The Harley Street man’s reply stated definitely that I did have an examination, merely because the consulting surgeon’s documents said so. He said he found no grounds for a claim for negligence. There was, he wrote, no pre-existing evidence of disease in the vessels in my legs and therefore no indication for any special investigations prior to the operation. He did write that “As it was agreed that this operation was not essential any evidence that suggested that Mr. Moss was not in fact a good surgical risk might be of value in preparing a statement of claim”. What we now know to be important evidence – the taking of Lucofen – was not available to the hospital, still less its dangers. He did also say that my blood pressure was “somewhat raised” but “in the absence of any other cardiac or vascular disease this is not a contra-indication to operation”. He found no undue delay in attempting to remove the clot. He wrote that it was “unfortunate” that the amputation had to be repeated, but “this, in my opinion, does not justify a claim for negligence”.

Soon after this I came across what I thought was a vital discovery. It was from a man who entered the Sussex County Hospital about the same time as me with the same complaint. He gave me an account of the treatment he received before undergoing his operation. He stated that on the first day in hospital he just wandered around the ward without any medical supervision. That started the next day. He told me that on this second day he had a blood test then a blood pressure test. Next he was taken for x-ray and later a water test. Also other tests which he did not explain.

As a result of these tests it was explained to him that as he had a high blood pressure they could not administer an ordinary anaesthetic in the usual way. He said that a local anaesthetic was injected into the spine and a very mild sedative used just to put him to sleep.

This comparison, it seemed to me, proved negligence by the Brighton General where I was operated on. I told the man who gave me the information that I was in touch with my MP and asked if he would allow me to use this information officially. He gave his consent. I hoped to get a signed statement from him but never did.

When the Law Society wrote to me on November 19th, 1969, asking me whether I saw any reason why my Legal Aid Certificate should not be ended, following the Harley Street report to my fist solicitor, I wrote back. I said that they would have to decide that. I re-stated some of the facts of the case, particularly about my unwillingness to follow the procedure used by my solicitor of appealing through the medical profession. The solicitor simply stated in his last letter to me what the Harley Street man’s decision was and that she would inform the Law Society about it to see how my Legal Aid Certificate would then stand. I was not allowed to see the report submitted to the Harley Street specialist, so could not correct vital errors in it. I ended my letter to the Law Society “The Committee must decide, I am using other methods”.

I was very dissatisfied. I didn’t know what to do about it after that. I think it was two or three years after, in 1971 or 1972, when a certain crippled lady got out of one of those invalid vehicles and started talking to me. I was parked near her. When a disabled person meets another one with these motors they nearly always speak to one another. I suppose we talked for about a half hour.

She was telling me about different things. I told her I’d tried a solicitor. “Oh” she says, “you want to go to my solicitor. He’s a good man”. She said he’d be helpful. Anyway, she gave me the address. I went up there and saw him and brought all my papers. He asked me to leave them with him, and come back a couple of days later.

When I went back, what do you think he said to me? This will show you what justice there is in England through solicitors. He told me that he had looked at the case and seen that I had had one solicitor already. I told him that I had been dissatisfied and that in my opinion the earlier solicitor had not done what I wanted. He told me that if he was to do the job for me and win it I would be able to sue the first solicitor and that therefore he would not take the case! So, taken to its logical conclusion, no other solicitor would take my case on the grounds that it may injure someone in the profession. You can’t win! Justice never came into it at all, only the defence of another solicitor, just like another trade union! Where is justice in this? This is how things work in capitalist society. I had no idea of suing the first solicitor, knowing him as a Labour Party man for one thing, I certainly wouldn’t have done so.

A Politician Helps

Meanwhile, during 1969 and 1970, I had been working through Dennis Hobden, Labour MP for Kemptown, as well as through these solicitors. Before contacting him I had already applied – in July 1968 – to the Ministry of Health, as a means of opening up my case, for an invalid three wheeler. I had been motoring until one week before entering hospital. Now my licence was withdrawn for a conventional vehicle and I could neither walk nor ride. I was turned down. I again applied setting out some of the medical history and was again turned down. Later I applied for the third time and set out the medical history in full. This fared no better and was again turned down.

At this point I went to see Mr Dennis Hobden. He took up my case. Strange to say, as soon as he moved, I was granted this vehicle.

The details are as follows. I first applied to the Ministry of Health Artificial Limb and Appliance Centre (Elm Grove, Brighton) in July 1968. On September 30th I was turned down, in a letter from the Ministry in Blackpool. They sent me a document listing the categories of person who could get a three-wheeler. They were:

1. those with both legs-amputated, one or both above the knee
2. those suffering from paraplegia or other defect of the locomotor system equivalent to the total or almost total loss of the use of both legs so that they are to all intents and purposes unable to walk
3. those slightly less severely disabled with very limited walking ability who, because of their disability, need a vehicle to get to work.

They wrote that a medical examination of me had shown that “you are able to walk moderate distances and that you do not qualify in any of these categories”. They said they would “be ready to reconsider your application if you feel that any fact has not been brought to our notice or if your ability to walk should at any time deteriorate”.

I wrote back to them, and pointed out my main reason for needing a form of transport was that I was on National Assistance, which I disliked but was forced to accept. I had been going to continue to work in my trade as a turner. But this was almost impossible, physically and economically, without a means of transport. This seemed to me to relate to category No 3 of eligibility above. I wrote that I did not know how they viewed that clause. “I have admitted”, I wrote, “to being able to walk one mile. But I also told the doctor this is with difficulty and discomfort. At the end of such a journey I have to take a bus home, so my life is restricted to short walks and only on a bus route. If these are the standards set by the National Health Service in this modern scientific society where we have the transport, we have a long way to go”.

Another reason I gave was that I had always lived an outdoor life and was a member of many organisations whose meetings were barred to me as a result of having no transport. This was the biggest blow to me. Also, the doctor who examined me for the artificial limb people and on whose evidence they were refusing me a vehicle gave me every encouragement when I said I wanted to work and keep up other social activities. What a contradiction!

In my letter I also wrote: “Present experience has shown me that my leg was worth many of your vehicles. But just one would relieve the situation, and help to make up for what I consider a big mistake not of my own making… This is a killing situation for an active person”.

They replied to my letter on 18th October 1968 saying that they had carefully reconsidered… but that “even on the most sympathetic interpretation of our standards you are not eligible and we are therefore unable to reverse our former decision. I should perhaps stress”, went the letter, “that the main criterion is the extent to which a person’s disability restricts his ability to walk and that even in the employment category it is a basic requirement that the applicant’s ability to walk at all must be seriously impaired.”

I again wrote back – an eleven page letter which in the end Dennis Hobden had, so that he could take it up to the Ministry of Health. I set out my medical history in full as I understood it. “There is no need”, I wrote, “to mention how I am affected, except to say I was always an outdoor person, and was planning to extend that mode of life. Now as a direct result of this, I am sitting in an arm chair all day, have put on over 2 stone in weight even though on a partial diet, and can see no future. When they cut off my leg they cut off my driving licence which I had held for fifty years and which was a very big part of my life… I had also planned to get a motor combination on leaving hospital. Having been in the motor trade for many years I used to be able to buy cheap motors, strip and rebuild them with new spare parts and that way get a good motor for a few pounds. Now of course, even if I could get a licence ‘without a leg’ it is physically impossible to do that. I mention this because I don’t want to create any idea that I am rich enough to buy a specially adapted vehicle costing two or three hundred pounds.”

My sister and myself had paid our National Health Insurance contributions regularly. We had hardly ever used the medical services, we even had to pay for our own teeth and glasses. Now when I had a real need, the Health Service ignored my claim.

“I was informed by your clerk”, my letter went on, “that the reason for turning down my application was that I walked too far. I did indeed tell the doctor that I walked one mile, for want of a better word. I also said this was with many rests and much discomfort. In fact the pattern of my going out is simply to take a ride on a bus to a pre-arranged place and walk with much discomfort a short distance where I can sit down. Then back to the bus and home. But now, as a result of sitting about and putting on weight I would think the last three times in the past fortnight that I went out I have sprained a bone in the centre of my foot which has compelled me to stop sometimes for ten minutes before the pain goes. Also for the past two months, every time I go out I return with a swollen ankle.”

I got another refusal in June 1969. “The report of your recent medical examination indicates that your ability to walk is not sufficiently limited to qualify you in the second category, and as you are not in employment you cannot at present be considered eligible in the third.”

Meanwhile, however, Dennis Hobden had begun working for me. He wrote to the Department of Health and Social Security in July 1969. Julian Snow MP, responsible Minister at that time, dealt with the case. In their first reply they wrote that they were making enquiries to see whether I qualified for a vehicle. “We would however like to know when and at what hospital your constituent had the operation which led to the loss of his leg”. More details were supplied. I had another medical examination. Then Dennis Hobden got a letter on 15th September 1969 saying that “Mr Moss has been found eligible for an invalid three wheeler”. They also said they would be making further enquiries about the whole story of the operation.

This they evidently did. Dennis Hobden got a letter from the Department of Health on 11th November 1969 reporting on their enquiries. This merely repeated things which I knew not to be true. The central paragraph read:

“From the enquiries made I understand that there were no reported difficulties at the hernia operation but that on the following evening Mr Moss lost the circulation in his right leg. This was attributed to an embolus, a condition which might arise at any time in a man of Mr Moss’s age, and an attempt was made to remove the clot. This was unsuccessful in restoring circulation and the leg had to be amputated. It is, I am advised, improbable that there was any direct relation between the operation for umbilical hernia and the condition of popliteal artery block which appeared subsequently. This has, I understand, been explained to Mr Moss’s solicitor in correspondence at the end of last year.

“With regard to the suggestion that the consultant said the operation was not dangerous, (he) has pointed out that danger cannot be excluded from any surgical procedure and that he could not have said otherwise.”

This was not quite the end of this part of the story. On September 25th, 1969 I got a letter from the Artificial Limb Centre at Brighton telling me of the favourable decision, but also saying that I couldn’t have the vehicle until such time as adequate garage accommodation was made available. There then followed another tangle. It was not until June 1970 that I finally got a letter saying that my vehicle had been ordered. This was because of the difficulty of getting a garage. Mr Hobden wrote to the Housing Manager of Brighton, and to the Borough Surveyor before it was finally resolved that I would not have to walk half a mile and pay 6/6d a week for a garage they were offering me, and that I could get planning permission and financial help for a shed in my front garden in which to house the vehicle.

Mr Hobden’s main help was to get me an invalid vehicle, which he achieved. I kept on also giving him letters from me to the Ministry of Health (Department, as it became). In the end nothing effective happened.

The Ministry did make enquiries at the hospital. The Hospital Management Committee and, I think, the Regional Hospital Board, were involved in this. When the judgement did finally arrive from the Ministry it showed that all my correspondence had been sent to the Management Committee of the Brighton General. This was the very hospital which had brought on all the trouble. I was not allowed to see any of the Hospital Authorities’ statements. But all were people associated with and loyal to this hospital, and not necessarily to the interests of the patient. Although I live in the area I was not asked to attend and therefore could not put my case.

The Ministry’s letter insisted that I had had an examination before the operation. In reply to the fact that the surgeon who performed my operation had not previously examined me, the answer came that the Ministry had sanctioned such practices. They did not say whether they were safe or not. The one thing the Ministry would not comment on was that I had had high blood pressure. I had emphasised this as possibly the most important thing.

After all this from the Ministry Mr Hobden wrote to me, “As I expected, responsibility is denied. The difficulty is that it is almost always impossible to contradict these people who rely on their medical knowledge”. He agreed that my case was unresolved, but his powers were limited. So it all came to nothing. I’m all these miles away from them, so I can’t actually get at them. I can only do it through someone like an MP. But the point is they’ve made up their minds not to answer. They go all round the moon to evade you, even if you put the logical question, which you think they’ll answer logically. I think it’s deliberate. After getting the letter from the Ministry, Mr Hobden told me he could do no more. I told him he had certainly done a lot. I wrote another letter, replying to the letter from the Ministry, asking him to read it if he could and either deliver it to the Ministry or return it to me. At that moment he was busy with the elections, and unfortunately lost his seat and could do no more.

Further Attempts to Get Justice

After that I was getting into a position where I didn’t quite know what to do next. The next opportunity – the next sort of breakthrough – where I was able to present the case was when, from Swansea (that is where they issue your driving licence) they sent me a questionnaire, and in it asked how I was getting on. So, I wrote the whole case to them. They only wanted to know odds and ends, how I walked and so on. But I showed them the whole case. A year went by and I got no reply from anyone at all. I thought they might have put it through the different Ministries or something like that. Or given it to the Minister of Health, which perhaps they did. But he didn’t want to talk about that and never has wanted to since.

During 1970 I made contact with the Patients’ Association (335 Grays Inn Road, London WC1). They made efforts to help my case. I wrote to them the whole story as I understood it, including my work through Dennis Hobden. In a letter to them I paid tribute to their organisation for all the good work being done. I was also glad to hear on the radio that they were attacking the then new Administration for its cuts in the social services which, I said, would put the clock back many years. I pressed them, unsuccessfully, to tell me whether the three specialists they evidently contacted on my behalf were members of the Socialist Medical Association. I also asked to be able to see the reply of the one specialist who evidently did reply to their enquiries at some length.

I did see his findings. He assumed much that was wrong, as in the case of the earlier Harley Street man. He assumed that I was obese, whereas he had the information about my dieting and loss of weight. And anyway, if I was obese and if there was no urgent need for the operation in the first place – why did they do it? He also assumed that my blood pressure was only a minor matter.

What was completely wrong was that he stated that I was just the kind of patient who might well get a small coronary thrombosis which could lead to an arterial embolus sometime post-operatively. But the more that is said, the more I should have been warned of dangers. The clotting in my case started to happen during the first operation.

I wrote back to the Patients’ Association making these points. I also explained how I thought that in this class divided society we live in, each group has its own particular interests. When something goes wrong, it attempts to justify its class or group interests only – with no attempt at justice or progress. I wrote that I was trying to make a breakthrough in the patients’ interests. The greatest danger to progress, I wrote, are these organisations like the medical profession and other bodies like it which not only bring about the cause but are the judges as well. When the PA offered to take my case I thought they might have found another way of dealing with these cases other than going through the medical profession. At lease I hope they found how futile that method was through my case, as I had already done. I finished my letter to them saying “I must now attempt the press”.

At the end of my dealings with them they wrote to me (on 14th December 1970) saying that “Our only possible comment on your last letter is that no case could better confirm us in our resolution to press for the appointment of a Health Commissioner or Ombudsman. Although in cases such as yours we always try to get a clear cut medical opinion, it is never with much hope of success. Without such an opinion there is nothing further we can do”.

There was one other individual who offered to help me.

I was still in most of the peace movements. I was in the CND, the British Peace Council, Committee of 100, and so on.

I met an osteopath at one of the peace meetings. It was at the Friends Meeting House. He seemed to suggest to me that he knew what to do about my sort of case. He said he would help me. I gave him quite a lot of the correspondence, the important stuff. He lost it and did nothing about it.

He came to my place and collected the documents. He said he would come back when he had got some sense out of it. He never turned up. I did not see him for about 18 months. Then I met him by accident and asked him what had happened. He said he was still trying. I asked for my correspondence back and he never sent it. I had to keep going down there. Finally he said he had put it through the post. But it never arrived. I never received it. So that I just lost it. Instead of doing me any good, he did me harm by losing my correspondence. I tried asking down at the Sorting Office. But that never came to anything. I think I have my mail opened sometimes anyway.

Lucofen, Social Services, QueenSpark and the Making of this Book

It was in about 1971 or 1972 that I began to find out about Lucofen. Up until then the fact that I had been taking it during the months before the operation had not seemed important, to me or to anyone else.

I found out because at times I had to see my doctor since losing the leg. The visits were mainly about small matters concerning the bad effects of artificial legs. My doctor kept on telling me that I was getting too heavy and that I would have to diet. I therefore asked him to prescribe the same drug as I had been taking before the operation, since it had reduced my weight. He refused, on the grounds that if I was to take it and lose weight I would only get fat again as soon as I stopped. He told me this on three occasions. It did not seem a very scientific answer, but I had to accept it.

But then the cat was let right out of the bag, by the medical profession. I went to the doctor’s on a minor matter and was told that he was not present, and would I like to see another doctor. This one also told me I should lose weight. I asked for Lucofen again. This doctor told me I could not have this drug. On my enquiry why, I was told that Lucofen was a blood clotting agent. So at last the truth had come out. The drug given me for months, right up to the operation was a blood clotting agent! This shows that at least some of the drugs used by the NHS are not being adequately tested before being dispensed.

Having been told this, I set out to get more information. Friends of mine who have relatives in Germany who are chemists found out for me about its withdrawal before I learned more details from the Committee on Safety of Medicines. In order to get a line on it, I also visited two chemists who have done my dispensing in the past. The first I approached with the question: “Has Lucofen been withdrawn from the NHS?” To this the chemist replied, “Yes, it was a slimming drug”. The second said “It is still available on prescription but doctors won’t prescribe it, it is never used now”.

Eventually I got onto the Committee on Safety of Medicines, and corresponded with them, with the help of someone in QueenSpark.

The Committee on Safety of Medicines was appointed in 1963, following the thalidomide affair. Their work led to the Medicines Act of 1968. This Act introduced controls, testing, and licensing procedures for new drugs. It came into force on 1st September 1971. Before that there had been, since 1963, an adverse reaction monitoring system, whereby doctors were supposed to report voluntarily possible relations they detected between drugs and harmful effects. Although the 1968 Act (coming into force in 1971) led to sterner controls over the free trade in medicines, it did not act about drugs already on the market. Lucofen had been on the market for many years (its chemical name is chlorphentermine) before the licensing provisions of the 1968 Act came. Consequently it was granted a Product License of Right. Product Licenses of Right were issued as a simple registration without scrutiny as to safety, quality or efficiency.

In the end the company making Lucofen discontinued the product as “it had become commercially uneconomic” and the Product License of Right was cancelled at their request. But there is a background to this. Lucofen was one of the drugs withdrawn from the market in West Germany and Sweden in 1969 as a precautionary measure following reports of pulmonary hypertension in a few cases treated with chlorphentermine, “pending scientific evidence of the relationship between the application of the drugs concerned and this possible side effect”. The Committee on Safety of Drugs (as it then was) drew the attention of doctors to these reports from West Germany and asked them to report any cases of adverse reactions following treatment with anti-obesity drugs or appetite suppressants. Drug information sheets from the World Health Organisation dated 12th March 1969 and 16th April 1969 were received by the Committee “who decided it would be appropriate to pass this information to the professions”. The Committee did also get reports from doctors including some suspected reactions following treatment with appetite suppressants but the CSM was unable to say whether my doctor reported my clotting as a suspected reaction to the drug I was taking.

This information about Lucofen has made me even more determined to get compensation. The National Health Service is much better than private medicine, but there is no doubt in my mind that it has ruined my life by allowing doctors to prescribe inadequately tested drugs. I have read many times of doctors whose surgeries are flooded with untested drugs from private firms whose only object is profit. We are the guinea pigs. We are bound by law to belong to the NHS. In my case, for the last 18 years of my working life I, as a self-employed worker, paid twice what an industrial worker paid in contributions. I was only entitled to this medical service, no unemployment benefit, as was sometimes needed. And this was the result.

If an ordinary pedestrian is compensated for injury on the road, then surely a person crippled by the NHS is entitled to the same treatment. I claim that people crippled in this way are a special case which cannot be dealt with properly by local branches of the Social Services. It is in cases like mine the responsibility of the State. The injured party should be compensated, not left as I am.

In 1945 and later, when the railways and coal industry were nationalised, the owners demanded enormous compensation from the State, the payment of which is still being carried out. I am entitled to nothing unless I try to go through the courts. Previous pages have shown how difficult a course that would be.

I’ve got no illusions either about what trade unions are doing. I have been trying to get compensation because I lost a leg, and the authorities will not even talk about it. But powerful trade unions, as in the case of the dockers, have been able to make agreements whereby if any docker leaves work over a certain age he can get large sums in compensation. They’ve been well paid, and if they’re not working they’re still paid. I’m not saying anything against it – but take that in relation to the average lay-off by the Health Service, let alone a man crippled, left on the lowest pension, with no compensation.

When I consider that for many years I have done donkey work, not only at election times, but all the years round, for the Labour Party and trade unions, and was victimised for so doing, I feel the injustice more strongly. Even after two or three Labour Governments with adequate majorities the law leaves a worker in this position, while a rich man in a libel or slander case can receive thousands of pounds merely because someone has said something about him which is probably true. This shows that Tory and Liberal thought still prevails in the Labour Party instead of socialist progress.

So, over the last years I have continued to try to get justice. I have tried writing more letters direct to the Minister at the Department of Health and Social Security. I have written to Social Security nationally, as well as to local Social Services people. I have written to Jack Jones, when he was in charge of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Most recently I have tried the Ombudsman, particularly after I heard on the BBC that his area of work was to extend to health cases. So you see I’ve never stopped trying to get justice, but without much success.

This explains this book coming out, through the work of QueenSpark. At first I didn’t think there was a lot of interest in it. I did not just want to reminisce. But it does seem to me now to be the only way open to me for making propaganda for my case and for others in similar situations. I hope it will draw attention to the whole case and to what I have tried to do about it.

I first came into contact with QueenSpark indirectly, through some socialists who came to Whitehawk to organise an Action Committee on Rents and other matters a few years ago. I think they were from the University, and one of them knew a QueenSpark person who also works at the University.

This so-called revolutionary group was a small Trotskyite group, nothing to do with QueenSpark. There was a man and his wife and two girls in particular. I thought I’d get unity with them, would mix with them and would assist them in all they were doing. But they isolated me. They wouldn’t have anything to do with me organisationally. They would come and talk in my place and let me have a few words. But when it came to doing things they wouldn’t let me in at all. I kept appealing to them to let me participate a bit more. But no, they wouldn’t do it.

It was highly unlikely they could do anything. They were on their own, they weren’t known. That’s why I kept asking for involvement. I was known in Whitehawk. I’d been working in the district for 20 years or so. They finally found they were unsuccessful in what they tried. I don’t think they did it in the right way at all. They just gave out leaflets and expected people to turn up. They did not talk to people: they thought leafleting was enough to bring people out on winter’s nights with television and all that. No, you have to talk to people. When we used to canvass, that is what we were doing. People knew us: that was the great thing, they knew we were on their side. With one or two leaflets you won’t get a great following.

Then I gradually started having more contact with this street newspaper and community organisation (not connected with the Trotskyites at all) QueenSpark. Although there are obviously certain things against QueenSpark, there are more things for it, and for these kinds of books and publications. Therefore it does seem to me to be progressive. It should carry on in such a way. It is also very important for someone like me to be working through an organisation, otherwise nobody listens if you’re on your own. From a position of self-interest alone it is very important to me. If you try and do a thing on your own of this kind, when you’re dealing with governments, you stand absolutely no chance at all. To write the book about my affairs may help me more than anything else. And that’s not the only outlook. It also gives me something to do. After reading some of the QueenSpark books, especially Albert Paul’s, although I think he looked on things in the wrong way, I’ve come to the conclusion that the organisation is quite progressive.

Otherwise retired life has been made very dull. All I can do is to drive myself to a pre-destined seat somewhere, sit for a time, try to walk a short distance for exercise and return home. All my planning for a much more exciting retirement has disappeared. With better medical care it need never have happened this way.

Now, this organisation, QueenSpark, is putting ordinary working peoples’ views forward. These are undoubtedly going to be the future ideas. Working people are going to come out on top before very long. So reading this sort of thing is seeing the future, as I see it. There’s the difference. These other people – the Lady Barnetts – are making money out of it, spreading their ideas. QueenSpark is not. No one here is making money out of it. It’s all coming from working people, showing the conditions of forty years ago and so on, when working people were starving, many of them.

Perhaps QueenSpark could go a bit further. Perhaps I’ve gone a bit further than others with what I’ve recorded in this book. Those like me who are a bit more politically-minded than others, I suppose, would put what I would call a better case. There’s a cure for capitalism’s conditions, which most of us have never even thought of, because we have been born under the system. We’re supposed to accept these conditions without comment – that’s the state of our mind generally speaking, under capitalism. The point is that if these books are just very simple and only respond to the ideas that the capitalists want, we’ll never get any progress. The same status quo will remain. Whatever you write will just be the old ideas that capitalism wants you to write, to protect the ruling class. We live in a class form of society, and if you want to be progressive you’ve got to write according to working class needs.

Once I began to have regular contact with QueenSpark I began, with the help of people in that grouping, to press my case again. This book is the latest attempt.

But during 1976 to 1979 there were other efforts besides this book, but also with QueenSpark’s help. I have tried to get adequate Home Helps. The most I have been told is that if I was to find a private help for myself at a reasonable wage, Social Services “may be able to help towards the cost of the services”. I have also tried to get help with my clothes. My artificial leg means that I go through several pairs of trousers each year. I was told in hospital that I would be entitled to a Special Clothes Allowance. A visitor from Social Security told me at my house in March 1976 that this should amount to about £2 per week. As a result of many letters, I have been told that my Supplementary Benefit is already supposed to include an amount to cover clothing, that they have added 25p a week more, but that they will send special sums occasionally to help. So in mid-1976 I got a cheque for £38.30. All through this period of my struggle it has been interesting to see that I get nothing without asking, in long letters, and that I had difficulty in finding out precisely how my pension is made up, what proportion of my rent is paid through Social Security and so on. I get little bits of information as a result of my continual letter-writing and agitation. The decisions they make about rent allowances, when to send me a lump sum for clothes, how much it is, seem quite arbitrary. And it also seems that such decisions would not be made unless I was writing letters to all levels, from the Minister downwards. If I did nothing, I would get nothing, money, help or information.

Our rents in Whitehawk have been artifically increased from 10/- a week to £10 or more. In spite of this hundreds of our homes in Whitehawk are being demolished. My own home may go in two years. Pensioners are compelled to pay 40% of their pension as rent even in these conditions. For economic reasons I have been forced to stop smoking. I have also lost many of my friends since I can no longer afford to go drinking with them.

I have also had to attend the Artificial Limb Centre over a period of 9 years. I must have had about 14 or 15 artificial legs. Most of them were so badly fitting that they could not be used. This must have cost a small fortune. I also have to attend the Sussex County Hospital roughly once every 8 weeks for chiropody. Foot troubles have only occurred since amputation. This too must have cost money which more care could have avoided.

In one correspondence, with the Department of Health and Social Security in London and with the Regional Controller for the Department, during 1977, I had mentioned that someone from Social Security in hospital had told me just after my amputation that I would be entitled to a Special Clothes Allowance. Their letters kept denying this. So I tried to check up with people whose addresses I had who had been in hospital with me 10 years before. I even went to Seaford to try to trace one of them. I made enquiries with the local police but could not find him. The other two lived in Brighton. So I was able to contact them. They remembered the lady visitor in question but did not know what organisation she represented.

So, expecting no results, because it happened there, I then visited the Social Services Department in the Brighton General Hospital to make enquiries. I was right to expect no results: After explaining my position, the lady there, who acted more like a sergeant-major than a friendly person to guide people and give advice, knew nothing, could trace nothing for me, and seemed very anxious to get rid of me. She went to the door to see me off before I had even put all my questions. I made her promise to reply by letter before a certain date – but no answer came. Only one thing was established at this interview – the original person who told me I was entitled to this clothing allowance was not from Social Security but was from Social Services. But what really is the difference? I see none – they are both departments of the State, presumably concerned to administer the law of the land.

In 1977 I wrote a long article for QueenSpark street newspaper (No 17) called “It Could Happen to You”. They did not have space for all of it. But it told of some of the things that have happened to me over recent years. It went back to the period following my discharge from hospital and the death of my sister. It put as clearly as I could the essential parts of the story. I will use my original version here.

After the death of my sister in 1970 I was left entirely on my own and with one leg. About a year after my sister’s death, and at the age of seventy, a Miss Smith called on me to ask if I needed a home-help and also meals-on-wheels. I told her I needed both, but please not to bring meals on Tuesdays or Thursdays. This was repeated many times, as a lady I know was providing me with a dinner on those two days.

So a meal was delivered to me the next Tuesday and then Thursday, which I had expressly told them not to do. I told the lady who delivered that there was a mistake and please not to bring them on Tuesdays or Thursdays. But this was repeated the following week, and again I told her to change the days. The same thing was repeated the following week. I showed her that she brought a meal on the wrong days. I would be having a dinner provided by the lady before mentioned on those days. She said she had been told it could only be provided on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I had to tell her it was quite useless, and not to bring any more.

I told this to the home help, who had just been provided, and who stated that she worked just round the corner on a Wednesday and meals-on-wheels were provided there on that day. Yet I was informed that they could not be provided on that day. Why? This finished the service I had just been asked by Social Services if I needed.

A home help had also been provided who was with me for about five months. She cleaned the floor and wiped the cooker and few other things. But nothing was dusted or curtains cleaned. One day a lady I know called on me and looking round could not believe that I was provided with a home help. She helped me sweep down the cobwebs and cleaned up generally, and advised me to ask the home help if, with my help, she would do one room properly this week and another room properly next week, and the third room the following week, so that it would be reasonably clean for Christmas.

This I did. The lady made no response and left me to try to do everything myself. She never came again. Not only did she cease to come but was not replaced by the home help service. I therefore after some time visited the home help office to try to find out if any complaint had been made against me or why the home help was not replaced. I got a very cold reception. There was no answer to my question and no further home help was provided for a year or two until I, with some help, forced the situation. This is what happened.

A different woman was sent every week for approximately ten weeks. I asked all of them if they were coming regularly and they all told me that they had only had orders to come once. Finally a woman living in this district was sent regularly. I recognised that something very detrimental to my interests was happening, which for legal reasons I cannot write here, but which should be known to those high up in the Social Services. When the home help organiser came to look over my place I told her that for legal reasons I could not give reasons, but asked if she would change my home help. To me it was very important. She noted my complaint but nothing was done, which cost me dearly. After a time I was forced to go to the Social Services office and make them understand how important it was to me to withdraw this home help. This was done and no replacement has ever been made since, although I have never ceased trying.

So at the age of seventy I was asked by Social Services if I needed a home help. What I have written shows that I only had this service for about one year in eight, and now at seventy-seven I’ve had no help for years, although I am made a cripple by a State organisation and up to now received no compensation.

Resulting from the loss of my leg the following are some of my experiences. In the early days after providing me with an artificial leg practically all the first ones provided broke down. They first split down the front and later split down the back. The legs then had to be returned to the manufacturer. This left me sitting at home waiting for another leg, and on one occasion the two artificial legs had failed one week before Christmas. I had to sit at home all that week and only received the leg late on Christmas Eve, too late to buy my Christmas dinner. I had to make do.

Four times the legs failed whilst in the street. I had to rely on passers-by to get me a taxi and help me to it and me, a pensioner, had to pay the taxi fare. Many a time as a result of artificial legs I have had to remove the leg and sit at home waiting for the leg to heal and can make no contact with anybody to help.

But on one occasion I, by a stroke of luck, was able to contact my doctor who sent to my address a male nurse who treated me on several occasions until I was better, the only time I have had proper treatment. On the next occasion when this happened again, by luck, I was able to contact my doctor and the male nurse was sent again. He dressed the leg once, promised to return on a certain day, and although I was relying on him he never returned. This is the state of the Medical Service. The Disablement Office were supposed to provide telephones for people like me, but where are they? I could write much more about trouble resulting from the loss of my leg but will cite only the last and very recent occasion.

I had fallen at home on the stump of my amputated leg and, in terrible agony, somehow managed to call at my doctor’s surgery to find it closed, and then gone on to the Sussex County Casualty Department.

The medical staff at the hospital were extremely helpful with sympathy and great kindness. The doctor, understanding my very painful condition aid finding that I was entirely on my own with no help whatsoever, ordered that Social Services should give me help at least while I was in this condition. The doctor then put me in touch with the representative of the Social Services at the hospital. The lady I saw seemed helpful and apologised for not being able to send anyone to my home for two days, but that I was to expect help on Monday. (To show how bad I was, I had to be carried by two hefty men from my motor to my front door.)

So, without much food in the house, I waited for Monday and nobody arrived and all day Tuesday nobody came. By this time I was starving and could contain my temper no longer. I staggered back to the hospital to complain. I told the people at the desk in no uncertain manner that I wanted to see the Social Services woman. They kept me there for three hours trying to see her, and kept sending different people to me making excuses for the delay, hoping I would give up and walk out. Finally a woman arrived, not the one who was supposed to have arranged help, but one I have dealt with before, who attempts to see you off before the interview is ended and talks like a sergeant-major. She wanted to talk in front of all the patients sitting around so I asked for a private interview. On the way she ran well in front of me, and on catching her up I found her talking to what looked like a doctor. As we entered the first interview room a typist was already in position, and as we moved to the second interview room the door was left open, and every time I spoke the typewriter was operated. I told this woman what I thought about the Social Services and asked why they had done this to me. I pointed out that the medical staff had been so helpful, had seen my plight and had ordered me help, while the Social Services people had stopped help even against the doctor’s orders, assuming that civil servants have the right to say who shall be helped and who not. I reminded them that it is their only job to help, they are only employed to help the patient. This woman at first said she would not answer my questions, but later, after much pressure, admitted that although Social Services had promised help on the Monday, which really was much too late, she had left it until the Tuesday before even notifying the Head Office. I asked why she had done this and got no answer. After more pressure I found the real cause. She said that when she finally got in touch with Head Office they had told her I had been a nuisance and had complained (which was completely untrue) and they had therefore refused to help. Again, I repeat, civil servants are saying that they have the power, even against doctors’ orders, to say which patient shall be helped and who not. This point needs to be cleared up right now at the very top.

I next called at the Social Services Head Office and told them what I had been told at the hospital by their own representatives, that civil servants had stopped my receiving help because I was a nuisance and had complained. At this point the girl left me, and on her return confirmed that the woman at the hospital had not notified Head Office until the Tuesday instead of Monday, and that the matter was talked out between them. They decided to give no help and would not comment on my being a nuisance and complaining. This being a nuisance and complaining is pure imagination, and I asked the woman at the hospital if any witness could be brought forward to prove this in my presence, but there were no offers and as just stated Head Office would not discuss this matter.

This article in QueenSpark won much sympathy for me and disgust for the people who caused the situation. One letter to QueenSpark wondered how an organisation calling itself Christian could do such a thing. The only letter which had no sympathy for my case totally ignored my plight and continued to support the Health Service workers and hinted that we should all do so. Even after all I have written, and I am sure if she applies to QueenSpark for the report of my meeting with the head of hospital social services, which lists a great number of things as bad as this one which have happened to me ever since I have had to deal with Social Services, and before the expenditure cuts, she will see there is no excuse. She mentions the casualty staff, presumably meaning the medical staff at the Casualty Department, and it is my opinion that there is no praise good enough for them – not only do they do a marvellous medical job but attempt to get their patients properly looked after, and then the social workers smash doctors’ orders, refuse help to badly suffering people and by their actions claim they have the right to say who may be helped and who not.

Another reader sympathised with my and the other case written about in QueenSpark No 17. This lady showed the great advantage to working people of the NHS as compared to private medicine (it cost her family hundreds of pounds for their daughter to be born abroad). I entirely endorse that the NHS is vastly superior to any private medicine, my complaint is not with the NHS but with some of the people who run it. This reader says she agrees that the NHS faces problems in some areas, and surely Brighton is one of them.

My presence at the hospital caused some uproar, and in order to justify their action, it seems, the Social Services people here appealed to the authorities to take action against drunks and troublemakers. This was mentioned on the news on television the next day. The following day on the radio a questioner asked Social Services what should be done about this, and what Social Services wanted was a room, without furniture, where troublemakers could be locked up. The medical staff made it clear that they disassociated themselves from this request.

The striking thing here is that the medical staff, who need to do no more than their medical duties, are the progressive people who understand their patients and are trying in every way to make things more bearable for their patients while social workers are throwing a spanner in the works to prevent this from happening. They must have brutal minds when they disobey doctors’ orders and stop help coming to a patient who they know is one-legged, in terrible pain and starving – but fancy this being possible.

Next, our organisation was told who was head of Social Services, and I made an appointment to see her and took a lady from our organisation to make a written report of the interview. In her presence I listed a number of complaints against the Social Services, including the withdrawal of home helps for no apparent reason, after they had asked me if I needed a home help and well before the new economic position. Another complaint concerned a neighbour who had admitted, in front of two policemen I took to her house, that she had persuaded my home helps not to call on me. The police advised me to go to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, and the only advice I got from them was that I pay a solicitor to send a warning letter to this neighbour, and although Social Services were informed of this they took no action against the woman for interfering with State arrangements.

On another occasion my artificial leg had crippled me. I could not put the leg on and was sitting about helpless. At that time I was having meals-on-wheels, and when the lady called I was able to speak to her through the window, showing her my position, and asking her to please contact Social Services as I had no other food in the house and I needed other things. Nobody arrived, and the next time the meals lady came she assured me that she had gone out of her way to contact Social Services concerning my plight. This condition lasted for several days and nobody from the Service arrived. When the leg did heal I went to the Social Services Head Office and asked why nothing had been done about my serious position. At first they denied having any knowledge of the matter, and I pointed out that the meals-on-wheels lady had assured me that she had done everything to bring this matter to their attention, since it had worried this lady to see me in such a helpless condition. For a long time they kept up this pretence and I kept pressing them. Just as I was thinking of leaving, the interviewer said “wait a minute” and left me. On her return she stated that they had had this message from the meals lady and believe it or not, she said it was noted. (Again, this was before the cut-backs, so no excuse there.)

The Social Services lady listened patiently and sympathetically to all my complaints and then told us that she was not the person responsible for these hospital social workers and yet we were informed, as QueenSpark No 18 confirms, that she was the Social Services manager, which means she was the head of the hospital social workers. The report of this meeting was compiled. One copy was taken to this head lady and another was sent with a copy of QueenSpark 17 to Minister Ennals, and we have had no adequate answer from either.

So, it was the social workers who asked for the padded cell, and the medical staff who disassociated themselves from this idea. What a difference in mentality and what a funny thing that the social workers should ask for the padded cell only the day after I had called there to voice my well-justified displeasure at their disgraceful action! Was it not a cover-up for having acted in this way? I am sure if it was a regular practice for hooligans to beat up nurses and destroy public property, as was stated, we should hear far more about it in the press. I can’t remember one case. There are enough males at the hospital to defend any threatened nurses without asking for padded cells in hospitals. Since “This Could Happen to You” was published in QueenSpark 17 a letter was sent to our paper’s representative, by D.B.R. Bowden, who says that it is only to him that complaints should be addressed. The letter is contradictory as it says Mr Bowden is responsible for investigating all such matters for the Area Health Authority, yet he then says he is not allowed to investigate complaints concerning general medical and dental practitioners or social workers. He then asks for more information so he can follow it up, which I take it means to investigate this matter, which he has just stated he is not allowed to do. He can easily get any details he wants from me.

During all this time I have heard nothing from any official. I still have no home help, although crippled by the Health Service which administered to me a dangerous drug which clotted my blood, necessitated the amputation of my leg, and turned a fit man into a cripple, bringing about social, economic and other troubles in addition to the troubles stated here for which I have tried to get compensation by legal and other means, only to come up against enormous barriers from the law as it stands. Nicola Ruck, our representative, arranged another interview with the Social Services Manager, in which she stated she was not pleased with QueenSpark for having given me help on this matter. A letter to me from Nicola Ruck stated they intended doing nothing about my case, and my return letter to Nicola said Mr Bowden offered to look into my case after telling us he had no power to. Perhaps he will after the publication of this book. The Social Services Manager, and therefore head of hospital social workers, has no power to correct these abuses of the hospital social workers and blames QueenSpark for giving me assistance. My letter ended by saying “What is worse than all these complaints of mine is the mentality of the people at the top of the NHS”. No wonder the news stated a short while ago that there are fifty things wrong with the civil service!

The next thing was that I called at the Limb Centre in September 1978 to repad my artificial leg, which had been wrongly done in the first place. Past experience should have told the fitter that that form of padding would lead to trouble, as it had done before. When this has happened in the past I have brought the leg to the Limb Centre, and pointed out the fault. The leg has been left in the morning and collected, repadded, in the afternoon or the next day. Another leg had also been issued to me, wrongly padded, straight from the manufacturing firm, which shows that they do not know exactly what is needed, although the local people do.

I made the mistake of not examining the padding of the new leg, and on reaching home discovered the fault. Since I had taken the leg only to test it, I was told I would be called back to the Centre to report on it. It was put aside until I was called in, which did not happen. Had I used the leg with its present padding another suit would have been ruined, experience shows, in thirteen or fourteen days. When I took into the office seven suits which had been purchased in one year because of the lack of correct padding, and the Social Security was informed that this state of affairs had cost me, a pensioner, all his life’s savings, the only grant I was made was £38. With this history behind me you can guess my thoughts concerning the National Health Service.

Then I brought the badly padded leg and ruined suit to show the fitter. I asked him to pad it correctly, as had happened before. And I was met with a blank refusal and told it must go back to the factory which had padded it before incorrectly – and who might do the same again since they are not here to understand the exact need and which experience shows would take at least three weeks. When the fitter finally showed me he had no intention of doing this small job, I forcefully pointed out the position I am in. If I use either of the two legs wrongly padded, I shall ruin a £30 suit in fourteen days. Also, I am now using a leg which is not designed to walk on, but was specially made for me to obtain a kneeling position – although it has served me well in the past when proper legs have been in for repair, or when the old form of leg has so bruised me that I have had to sit about for days waiting for the leg to heal. This leg has got me out of trouble at times since although it digs in and hurts, it does not bruise. But for some reason it’s worse now. I used to be able to use it for long periods but now, after two days it so hurts that it is very difficult to walk with. So, having explained this position to the fitter, I thought logic would prevail and he would agree to do this small job. But instead he walks away with no solution.

Then a man in the office comes to me who tries to be helpful after I explain. He asks me if I have brought the second leg, which has never been used, and I explained that I could not carry the two legs in my small three-wheel car, but agreed to go home and get it, which I did. This man then takes the new leg to the fitter and comes back to say that the fitter will not do the job. I had already told this man that the leg I am walking on was not designed to walk with and was hurting a lot. He suggested that perhaps we can do something with it to ease the situation. And he again goes to the fitter and returns to say nothing can be done.

When I was in an impossible position like this once before, and had taken up several suits to the Limb Centre office which I’d bought in one year, they said they’d speak to the fitters about it and see if something could be done. When I next saw the fitters they informed me that nothing could be done, as the government only paid the firm for providing the leg, so though I’d paid hundreds of pounds for clothes, there was to be no solution. In desperation, I attended the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, who took immediate action, and the next time I attended the Centre help was forthcoming and the fitters soon found a padding method which cured this dreadful situation. What inefficiency by the civil service. Had it been another person, not so ready to act as myself, the situation would have gone on forever. This I told the man at the Limb Centre and informed him I was now going again to the CAB to show them this new impossible position which has arisen.

While they are looking into the matter, their instruction to me is to write to the Centre immediately, making the firm responsible for any damage already done (one suit) or will be done by wearing the legs badly padded, that is, a suit every 14 days. And that they have refused to correct this even after experience has shown that the right padding is so necessary to correct this situation.

Finally, one of the doctors made me promise that if I got into this position in the future I would consult him on the matter. So I asked the man at the Centre if I could see him, and after consulting with the lady in the office I was told I could not see a doctor for a week. By this time I would have worn out another suit.

My most recent struggles have been over trying to get the Ombudsman to take up my case, and in getting my council house in Whitehawk, which is in a shocking state of repair and decoration, re-decorated. The house question may be about to be successful. Some volunteers from a student voluntary grouping called Link-Up, who had been contacted through QueenSpark, came 18 months ago to clean out my kitchen and front room/bedroom. I am unable to clean properly for myself because of the leg. Then this summer they came to do some decorating. They found the task too big for the three days they had set aside for it, and had to give it up when they had only scraped one room and painted the woodwork. In some ways it looked worse than when they had started: But they did write a complaining letter to the Area Office of Brighton Housing Department, pointing out that either Housing or Social Services should take responsibility for putting my house into a reasonable shape. A month later a letter came back to the students saying that the matter was to be put in hand. I shall wait and see.

(STOP PRESS: Two rooms decorated, January 1979)

With the Ombudsman, I have met an obstacle which I have met before. I first saw a notice in Brighton Public Library last year saying “If you have a complaint about the hospital services administered by Area Health Authorities or about Family Practitioner Committees, you should first send to the body concerned. If you are not satisfied with their reply you can write direct to the Ombudsman (Health Service Commissioner) who may be able to help you. There are however restrictions on what he can do, and further particulars can be obtained from…”

So I wrote off. Before I wrote I had heard on the BBC news that the Ombudsman was to be allowed to take up cases involving the clinical judgement of doctors. But in their answer to me they say they are “unable to consider any matter which has occurred as a result of an action taken by a doctor where he believes that the action was taken solely in consequence of the exercise of that doctor’s clinical judgement. This includes the prescription of drugs and the consequences arising therefrom”. They told me that a Parliamentary Select Committee has recommended that the Ombudsman should in future be allowed to look at clinical decisions, but that Parliament has not yet decided.

So I am blocked again. I had been told the same thing by the Department of Health and Social Security in September 1976 – that it is a “long established principle” that the Department cannot interfere in matters which involve “the clinical judgement of the doctors concerned”. This is saying that this sort of thing can go on forever and that although they’re wrong, they’re right.

After making and reading this book, what are we going to do? Les Moss has always seen changing the world as more important than just understanding it. He has also always seen his own case as only a part of a much wider struggle for justice.

It is obvious from making and reading this book that nothing will come or has come from nothing: every advance recorded in the text (for example, Les’s three-wheeler) has been won through struggle, not by sitting back.
There are two demands which we want to put immediately:

– that a home help service should be restored to Les

– that he should be given adequate COMPENSATION for the loss of his leg. This means sufficient money to buy all he needs, having become a cripple as a result of going into hospital for a hernia operation.

Nothing can compensate fully for his discomfort and the ruin of his retirement, through Lucofen and doctors’ clinical decisions. But financial compensation would help.

QueenSpark would welcome anyone willing to coordinate a campaign on behalf of fellow-sufferers from doctors’ clinical decisions who cannot at the present time get redress. If you are willing to be part of such a campaign or have experiences similar to Les Moss, let us know. If you write post to 71 RICHMOND STREET, BRIGHTON, enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope. Or come and see us at that address if you live locally. We cannot do anything – even make books like this – by ourselves. Any campaigns further to this book, or further books and QueenSpark newspapers can only happen through more of us getting together!