There She Goes
Liverpool, a City on its Own
The Long Decade: 1979-1993
There She Goes
Liverpool, a City on its Own
The Long Decade: 1979-1993
First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2019.
First Edition
deCoubertin Books, 46B Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool, L1 0AF.
www.decoubertin.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-909245-91-4
Copyright © Simon Hughes, 2019
The right of Simon Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Thomas Regan
Typeset by Leslie Priestley
Printed and bound by Jellyfish
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for photographs used in this book. If we have overlooked you in any way, please get in touch so that we can rectify this in future editions.
In memory of Etta and Jo, whose wartime stories introduced me to this city’s history.
Contents
Introduction: Another Cholera-Smitten City In India
1 Looking After Number One
2 Burn After Midnight
3 It’s Just Smack
4 Red Rising
5 Possessed With A Particularly Violent Nature
6 Truth And Lies
7 Let’s Get A Kid Lost
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Another Cholera-Smitten City In India
THE CASA IS AN OLD SEA MERCHANT’S HOUSE ON LIVERPOOL’S HOPE Street, where there are vast Catholic and Protestant cathedrals at each end. The city’s wealth is illustrated here, its entire existence succinctly explained in the Georgian Quarter – up on its rise and looking down into the centre and the docks beyond, where the real money was made and labourers, not knowing whether they’d be working from one day to the next, lived in squalor.
‘Looking down,’ Tony Nelson, thought, ‘was a deliberate emotional decision by the powers that controlled the whole of Liverpool.’ Nelson saw Liverpool’s emergence as the most significant maritime port in the British empire differently to the majority of historians, whose focus had reliably been taken by the enormous provision towards the capitalist economic cycle rather than the consequences of a fairer redistribution.
Nelson had been a docker, though he was now the landlord of the Casa, more of a social club than a bar; a place born out of one of the longest and most heroic industrial struggles in the twentieth century, the 850-day dockers’ dispute. It had raised a million pounds a year, providing a lifeline for people in need of help, the latest of whom had been Stephen Smith, a 64-year-old whose weight had dropped to six stone because of a range of health problems but was still denied benefits and told to find a job. When his story became public, it was Nelson and the Casa who came first to Smith’s aid.
At the Merseyside Maritime Museum, there are walls filled with recollections which reflect what Liverpool used to be like. ‘Ships filled the river, waiting their turn to gain access to fully packed berths,’ one quote reads. ‘The dock road was once again a daily confusion of traffic, while quays and warehouses were full to bursting with haphazard piles of crated, bundled, bagged and baled cargo.’
‘The regions of the world were still sea-laned to Liverpool,’ was another explanation. ‘Within hailing distance of the Liver Building were small ships to Paris via Rouen, and a mere ten-minute walk took in ships of varying sizes loading for Limerick, Barcelona, New Orleans, Demerara, Lagos and Manaus… It was impossible to exaggerate how much the city of Liverpool was a sea port.’
History was illustrated on the walls of the Casa too. There was a framed plaque with all of the names of the Merseyside volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There was a photograph of Robbie Fowler whose support of the dockers strike, which ran between 1995 and 1997, coincided with his advent as a legendary goalscorer for Liverpool FC. There was also a glass case of pins donated by seafarers, demonstrating the multitude of shipping companies that once operated out of Liverpool.
In the corner of the lounge area beneath ‘Let It Be’ sounding from the jukebox was a group of smartly-dressed bearded men, warmed by their duffle coats and leaning into one another in a sort of conspiratorial manner. They look like sailors and their presence confirmed that while in Liverpool there is religion, politics, football and music, the heart and lungs of the city was in the docks: the space where workers spent the most time, talked about the most and where the experience and personality of both its men and women was ultimately defined.
Liverpool had been one of the richest cities in the British Empire, producing more wealthy families in the nineteenth century than any other urban area outside London. Its golden era was between 1880 and 1899, when it was estimated that Liverpool produced as many millionaires as Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Tyneside and East Anglia combined. Over a longer period, 1804 to 1914, Merseyside produced almost twice as many millionaires as Manchester, and this showed just how lucrative shipping was compared to manufacturing. In the writing of this book, I would meet Michael Heseltine, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government who tried for Liverpool when it was at its lowest economically and nobody else within his party bothered. Heseltine spoke endearingly about the grandeur of Liverpool’s buildings and other civic monuments, erected because of the endowment of its business people. The painting by Atkinson Grimshaw from 1887 showed Liverpool as it was widely viewed in its peak: a centre of trade, with tall men walking the streets dressed in elegant Victorian tailcoats; horses and carriages tapping and rolling across the oily cobbled dock streets, washed by seawater; bright lights in the shop fronts attracting customers and wine merchants inducing high-spiritedness.
Contrary to Heseltine’s impression, Hugh Shimmin, the Tory radical, questioned intent, describing philanthropy in 1861 as ‘a fashionable amusement’. If an old wealthy family of Liverpool donated funds for a new hospital or school it wasn’t because they cared about the shocking levels of poverty that existed. ‘It was because,’ he wrote, ‘it brought them into passing contact with this Bishop or that Earl.’
Liverpool’s elites were more autocratic than philanthropic. Sir William Brown, who donated a free library as well as a museum to the city, was a millionaire cotton broker who sacked a footman for taking sympathy on a beggar by giving him a plate of food. Meanwhile, the ‘public’ parks were not really public at all; owned exclusively used by the carriage-owning classes who lived in grand residences close-by.
Hugh Farrie was a journalist at the Liverpool Daily Post. In 1899, the city had made more money than ever yet the gulf between the rich and the poor was stark. Farrie’s reporting described a district around Scotland Road, which led north from the city centre towards Anfield and Walton. The area was, he wrote, ‘dirty, tumble-down, and as unhealthy as any part of squalid Europe’, despite its location less than a mile away from Liverpool’s banks, cafes and commerce. On Dale Street, there was ‘wealth and ambition … of busy, happy men, all bent on winning some prize in the world.’ He depicted a glorious place ‘of ship windows, of gossiping politicians lounging on the steps, of carriages rattling past the Conservative Club’. Yet walk a few paces ‘from this bright and cheering scene,’ he concluded, ‘and you will find gathered upon the very edge of it a deep fringe of suffering, helpless, hopeless poverty.’
The culture of casual labour allowed Liverpool’s economy to boom for a born-into-privilege minority as well as a few entrepreneurs. According to Nelson, it could not be overestimated how profound an effect the culture of casualisation had on Liverpool’s collective psyche. Every morning and afternoon, men would assemble at the gates of the shipyards not knowing whether they were going to work and whether they were going to get paid. Tides played a role on starting times and there was a lot of uncertainty. ‘Unlike in manufacturing towns elsewhere in the north west where shift work was tough but reliable, there were no consistent patterns in Liverpool and this led to an undisciplined way of life,’ Nelson said. ‘It was uncommon for dockers in Liverpool to wear watches because they didn’t live by the clock. Geography by its sheer nature meant that while being freer, we also had more to be concerned about because we didn’t know for certain when the next pay was going to arrive and therefore had to be more creative in the way we worked.’
Nelson reasoned that because Liverpool’s workers did not have a regular authority looking over them and because they were not constricted by contracts or shift-patterns, they were able to develop a single-mindedness, and a suspicion of anyone in authority telling them what to do developed from there.
The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne had not been in Liverpool for six months when, in 1854, he recalled observing on a Mersey ferry a labourer eating oysters using a jack knife from his pocket before throwing the shell overboard and wolfing down another. He then took out his clay pipe, filled it with rush and smoked the whole thing. Hawthorne considered the labourer as the embodiment of a Liverpool person because of his ‘perfect coolness and independence’ which was mirrored by other passengers. ‘Here,’ he wrote, ‘a man does not seem to consider what other people will think of his conduct but whether it suits his convenience to do so.’
The extent of casual labour in Liverpool or anywhere else in Britain has never been established at any particular time. In 1921, a census revealed the number of workers who reported having no fixed workplace, though the figures did not include seafarers on voyage. This had also been the life for many men in Liverpool: a life at sea of casual relationships and few commitments on land. The census showed that there was twelve times as many men in Bootle, right next to Liverpool’s dockland, without an address or a workplace than in St Helens’, the glass-making manufacturing town twelve miles inland.
While the city was the first in Britain to appoint a Medical Officer of Health and amongst the first to build council housing at St Martin’s Cottages in 1869, these developments did not represent progressive politics but rather, the desperation of Liverpool’s situation. The deprivation in the docklands was astonishing. In 1880, more than 70,000 people lived in buildings already condemned as unfit for habitation and two years later, a new medical officer reported that ‘whole districts were plagued as the cholera-smitten cities of India’.
By 1896, around the time Liverpool had more millionaires than anywhere outside London, new findings were stark: ‘There is,’ another report claimed emphatically, ‘not a city in this country or in Europe, which could produce anything like the squalor that officials found in some of Liverpool’s backstreets.’
*
TONY NELSON IS A TALL, THIN MAN WITH A PENETRATIVE STARE who took great care with the language he used, never swearing – an unusual trait amongst old school dockworkers in Liverpool. He described the docks as the ‘destiny’ he reached in 1973 when he was fifteen years-old. Nearly all of his family had worked there. His dad and his brothers were dockers and each of the girls on his mother’s side had met dockers in the dockside pubs around Brasenose Road in Bootle. He was too young to lift and carry cargo and this meant he initially worked in the offices of Harrison Line, the Victorian shipping company which had started out 120 years before, as an importer of French brandy from Charente. Harrison Line’s workforce had largely been the same group of men for decades, ‘Fellas in their 70s,’ Nelson said with affection. ‘The whole place stunk of history from way before my time.’
Nelson was brought up on tales of industrial disputes. ‘Dockers are storytellers,’ he continued. ‘There were great debates about the Russian Revolution so I learnt how to argue my case. I received a political history, how the communist party had developed in Great Britain. There were Stalinists and Trotskyists: a dense mix of socialist politics. It changed the way I thought about everything.’
The discussions in the canteen were usually led by former conscripted soldiers who had fought in the World War Two, a conflict which had dire consequences for Liverpool and its docks. Nelson was entering employment when Liverpool’s port was just about keeping afloat in turbulent waters. Strategically, the city had been critical during the war effort and the Battle of the Atlantic was coordinated from a nerve centre deep below the Western Approaches on Rumford Street, close to the Royal Liver Building. Liverpool faced America and would act as the premier port for the convoys that kept the Allied war machine supplied. Hitler recognised Liverpool’s importance and began to bomb the hell out of it from July 1940 onwards. Attacks eleven months later accounted for 1,300 deaths across just six weeks, almost half of all the casualties in the city during the course of the entire war.
In total, wartime raids destroyed 6,585 homes. A further 125,310 properties were seriously damaged. Liverpool was left with a housing crisis which reached into the 1970s and beyond when more than fifteen per-cent of properties were still derelict or vacant. In the docks, shipping companies such as the one Nelson worked for lost significant tonnage and it would take time to replace fleet and for lost markets to be re-established. In this crucial period, the world changed again.
Dramatic shifts in international transport and trading links impacted on Liverpool’s significance. The earliest casualty was the lucrative transatlantic passenger lines which suffered as commercial air travel increased. The break-up of the Commonwealth and a reduction of trading partners made Britain look towards Europe following the creation of the EEC in the 1950s and this left Liverpool marooned on the wrong side of Britain. In 1966, Liverpool clung on to being the second biggest port in England but twenty years later it was sixth. While the share of ship arrivals in Liverpool halved, Dover’s, for example, increased by four and a half times. When it came to new contracts, Southampton took many of those involving Asian countries from Liverpool. When United States Lines moved their ships, taking advantage of the faster turnaround times at the east coast ports despite being further away from the US, the signs for Liverpool were really ominous.
The east coast had been quicker to implement containerised docklands and this transformed the way goods were handled and transported. Previously, Liverpool’s docks needed thousands of men to load ships and move whatever was arriving. By the late 1960s, large dockside cranes were hulking much bigger containers onto ships at a much faster speed and this heralded a new round the clock operation which heightened difficulties in relations with an already reducing labour force.
In 1970, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board was already on the brink of bankruptcy. The south docks of Liverpool were redundant, the Mersey being too narrow and too shallow in parts to deal with the increase in ship sizes. As the area became off limits to the public, scavengers took timber for repairs and pig iron for ballast. At nights especially, as the last working lights flickered, a ghost town quietness became even eerier. Cats interbred at a frightening rate and supposedly, hundreds lived on an old fishing boat. ‘You could smell them a fair distance downwind,’ said a fisherman.
Seaforth in the north of Liverpool where the Mersey spills out into the Irish Sea was designed to deal with the shift brought by containerisation but while that site was being developed, other towns in the south with more space were able to seize their opportunity, like Felixstowe, which was able to employ a new, more agreeable workforce which had not experienced the historic disputes like those in Liverpool and therefore made them easier to manage.
While Felixstowe became the largest container port in the country, employment in Liverpool’s docks was slashed by more than half in the twelve years up to 1979, though it wasn’t just the dockers who suffered. The impact on other industries which relied on the docks was also disastrous.
Before World War Two, manufacturing had overtaken shipping as the basis of Liverpool’s wealth for the first time. Yet by the mid-1970s, only 35 per-cent of employment in Liverpool was involved in manufacturing compared with more than 50 per-cent nationally. The manufacturing trades, however, still relied on a functioning port, with sites located on or adjacent to the dock estates and food processing plants such as Crawford’s Biscuits, Jacobs Crackers or Hartley’s jam factory, further inland in newer areas like Aintree or further afield in Kirkby.
As the docks retreated, so did the manufacturing base. Opportunities in the merchant navy decreased because there was less space on newly mechanised ships that needed smaller crews. The repair firms that had operated out of the docks for centuries were suddenly rendered redundant because of the turnaround times and this impacted on the surrounding areas, with pubs and cafes initially shutting followed by the smaller dock firms who operated in rope and sacks. Between 1973 and 1983, male employment fell by 53 per-cent in Merseyside compared with 32 per-cent nationally. The women in Merseyside bore the brunt even more than the men as their workforce was slashed by 62 per-cent, compared with 33 per-cent elsewhere. In Kirkby alone, there were 13,000 job losses, which represented a 57 per-cent decline in overall employment.
The culture of ownership also partly explained the decline. Regional policies in the 1960s enabled a 20 per-cent rise in non-locally controlled firms by 1976 and this meant few bosses held any allegiance with Liverpool. Between 1966 and 1977, 350 factories in Liverpool closed down or moved elsewhere and forty-thousand jobs were lost over a ten-year period starting in 1971. By 1980, only one of the twenty largest manufacturing companies on Merseyside was controlled locally. The rest did not have any natural commitment to Liverpool or its workers. The city, therefore, had lost control of its economic future and became known as the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism. Tony Lane, in his evocative book, City of the Sea, would describe Liverpool as an ‘Imperial mausoleum: an embarrassment to the post-colonial establishment.’
‘Liverpool,’ predicted one council survey, ‘looks set to become the Jarrow of the 1980s,’ after 17,000 jobs were lost in 1978 alone and it was discovered that unemployment was twice that of the national average having risen by 33 per-cent in less than a decade.
According to some politicians, Liverpool’s dockworkers were partly to blame for the demise. In 1966, Harold Wilson condemned seamen from Liverpool as a ‘band of communist agitators holding the country to ransom’. Two years later, Wilson spoke again about, ‘strike after strike frustrating the efforts of the government; signalling a question mark to those industrialists who are attracted by the inducements and are considering establishing themselves here’. In 1967, Liverpool’s dockers had maintained their strike for much longer than other ports over arguments during process of decasualisation and lost days amounted to twice the national average.
There had been prior warnings about Liverpool having to come to terms with a reduced workforce and when that workforce railed against the possibility, other politicians blamed them for not embracing progress, even though the evidence around them indicated the world was changing and Liverpool – by its geography – was never going to be able to keep up. Tony Nelson thought of Liverpool’s resistance to change as an understandable reaction – that history sided with the workers because of the way the modern docks became, where fewer staff are still able to generate vast amounts of wealth for global companies.
‘The fortune of each dockland community was bound in the number of ships that were in the docks and the trades that those ships stimulated,’ Nelson said. ‘Nobody was quite sure about the impact of global trends at the time but dock workers were feeling it. What are they supposed to do? Accept that the next 30 years will be bad for them or fight for everything they can claw back? When we were told that the resistance was putting off investment, where we supposed to be grateful for capitalists taking advantage of our weaker position?’
Capitalism would be a feature of the discussion with Nelson, as it would be with other dock workers when researching this book. Many felt let down by a system which they felt casts aside without feeling or sense of responsibility when the wind shifts, though not all felt as strongly as Nelson about the alternatives: ‘It let Liverpool down – it has let lots of cities down,’ he said. ‘From there, it boils down to whether you want to do something about it.’
The sharpest focus of Nelson’s disappointment was with the trade unions. He believed it was their failure to understand the difference in cultures that existed in the manufacturing industries and the docks which culminated in dockworkers feeling misrepresented and undervalued by the authorities supposed to be supporting them.
‘Were we responsible for that being a bit insular?’ Nelson would ask himself. ‘Maybe so. We were behind a wall. We looked after each other. It was a bit of a cult to be honest with you. Maybe we could have let more people in and trusted a bit more but maybe we were right not to trust because by the 1980s, the government was encouraging everyone to look out for number one.’
Liverpool’s docks would become important again, engendering more profit in the decade after 2010 than it ever has before, but it would never be the same. The Mersey came to terms with containerisation and the site at Seaforth flourished, with the annual tonnage initially increasing between 1991 and 1998 by 20 million tonnes. For that to be possible, though, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had quashed the National Dock Labour Board Scheme in 1989, an agreement which, after the end of decasualisation, had given registered dock workers jobs for life. When dockers went on strike nationally, the government offered each affected worker around a redundancy package of nearly £35,000. Though Liverpool’s strike lasted longer than the rest, the tactic placed the future of all dockworkers in the hands of private firms and this preceded to the Torside walk-out in 1995 which began when five men were sacked and led to 500 more losing their jobs in one of the longest running strikes in history.
Nelson thought this dispute would blow over quickly but when Torside handed the strikers their notices for breach of contract, it went on, on and on. Nelson spoke of a ‘sacred rule’ in never crossing the picket line – ‘Dockers before us had fought for better conditions and some had given their lives. We couldn’t just go and throw away those rights and sell out on future generations.’
Twenty-two dock workers did, however, ‘betray’ the cause. ‘Without going into much detail, but whenever anyone asks me about how this made me feel, I always say that they got the money but we got the city. What sort of life is that? Surely money is there to buy you freedom.’
For two and a half years, Nelson and hundreds of other dock workers stood in the wind, the rain and the cold knowing they were not taking home a wage. ‘The duty when you’re in dispute is to try and end it as soon as possible,’ Nelson admitted. ‘But then you get into a monotony and the longer it goes on the more gets said and the more difficult it becomes to end it. The first six months, there is a sense of independence: you’ve got no money but you’re free. Then the economic reality sets in. Eighteen months in, stress levels became an issue. Five people died during the strike and another 50 have died since – all under 70.’
Nelson believed the strike succeeded in breaking down some social barriers. Dockers had previously been old-fashioned, rarely discussing their work or their problems at home. ‘The strike changed everything,’ he insisted. ‘If we didn’t explain the reasons behind the strike fully to our wives, we’d have been under pressure to go back. So, we had to get them involved in order to understand. They were absolutely brilliant.’
Suddenly, Nelson became emotional. He thought about his own wife, who drove him to the picket line every single day. Not long after the strike finished, she had died of cancer. He began to wonder: ‘I’ll never know whether stress had a role in what happened to her…’ With that, Nelson looked away and fixed his gaze elsewhere, into the middle-distance. He would stop himself from speculating any more.
*
MY DAD WAS NOT A DOCKER BUT HE DID WORK FOR 33 YEARS IN THE same power station. Margaret Thatcher had been in charge of Britain for four of those years when I was born. I can remember my dad’s reaction whenever she appeared on television. ‘Not her again,’ he’d say, reaching for the remote and pressing one of two buttons: mute or off. Hushed conversations would happen in the kitchen about redundancies and what might happen if Fiddlers Ferry closed down or fell into the hands of another company that wanted to make further cutbacks. Like every other major industry, Thatcher had denationalised the energy sector. Though big investors fired her economy, it came at the expense of workers and my dad was always hanging on. Though he just about did, it felt as though our existence was threatened.
We lived in a semi-detached house in Crosby. It was a middle-class looking home. My mum and dad were working class and had worked very hard. The issue of class never came up, though from the outside they’d probably have been viewed as lower middle-class by other families in Crosby, an affluent area seven miles north of Liverpool’s city centre.
Between 1983 and 1997, Crosby had been controlled by a Conservative council led by Malcolm Thornton – one of the few in Merseyside. Above any other allegiance – even football – it was made clear to me that the only political party to follow was Labour. Yet Labour in Crosby from 1981 had fallen into third place, as residents turned away from a Michael Foot led leadership of the party and initially supported the Social Democrats. Shirley Williams had been one of the ‘Gang of Four’ Labour rebels who’d rejected Foot and in forming the Social Democratic Party (SDP), would take her constituency in Crosby from Labour. It was reflective of Tory dominance that before 1997, the best Labour could do in Crosby led to defeat five years earlier when Thornton maintained his control by taking nearly half of the vote.
In school, it had been an insult to describe ‘yer ma’ or ‘yer da’ as a docker. I have no idea why or where this started and I’m not sure it was used anywhere else in Merseyside but it did reflect, amongst other things, that by the start of the 1990s, dock working had become a trade of the past, certainly for families in Crosby, a town that must have felt a comfortable distance from the problem of unemployment. Waterloo separated Crosby from Seaforth and the enormous blue cranes of the new dock area pointed towards a different future, thus distancing those further down the coastline left wondering what to do next.
The politics of Crosby would change, however. No Conservative has come close to regaining Thornton’s seat since 1997. The news in 2011 that all 90 members of the Crosby Conservative Club (essentially a snooker hall) had voted to de-affiliate themselves from the political party and rename the venue felt like the death notice for the Conservatives in Liverpool, a city which now feels like a no-go zone for the right.
It had not always been like this. In the 1959 local elections, when there were nine wards across Liverpool, six were led by the Conservatives and at least three were resolutely working class: Toxteth was Tory. Walton – though only briefly – was Tory. Wavertree was Tory. Sectarianism would largely explain this. Change came in the 1970s when Liverpool became Liberal and from there, the city swung between the parties.
The Liberals commitment to pavement politics during this period led to Labour losing voters and, in 1973, four Liberal seats became 48. When Militant then took control of Labour in 1983, indeed, the city council succeeded a Tory/Liberal alliance. Thatcher had polarised the country by then and politicised so many people that many in Liverpool figured: ‘I’m with Militant.’
Liverpool had been conspiratorial but never that radical a city, certainly not as much as Manchester, where Marx and Engels came and wrote about the living conditions of the working class. There was a transport strike in 1911 and a policeman’s strike in 1919. Individuals like Jack Jones emerged as a leading politician and the unions slowly became more prevalent in working lives. Yet until the 1960s, Liverpool’s dockers remained unorganised labour.
There had been a very individualistic trait in the people of Liverpool. Virtually everyone who came out of the city in the 1960s was a Tory – or not really bothered about Labour. The Beatles never spoke about politics, Ken Dodd was a Tory, Jimmy Tarbuck was a Tory. Leonard Rossiter was a rampant Tory. Though Cilla Black’s brother was a communist councillor, when she married Bobby Willis, she became a Tory. Kenny Everett, who was educated in Crosby at St Bede’s – the same school as my father – later claimed that he was not really a Tory and rather a satirist but he did speak at a Tory rally in 1983, saying ‘Let’s bomb Russia,’ before condemning Michael Foot. This was an era where class standing defined that if you had money in Liverpool, you were with the Tories.
For a common belief to emerge, there needed to be a fusion between an organised leadership with clear messages and a groundswell of resentment against the current authority. It was only by branding Liverpool entirely as a ‘city possessed with a particularly violent nature’ as Thatcher did the day after the Heysel disaster that the individual in Liverpool became the collective.
The history of modern politics in Liverpool is underpinned by the council being run by the opposite of whoever is in power. Even throughout most of New Labour, Liverpool was Liberal and it only became Labour again when the Conservatives took over nationally. For Liverpool, this meant it rarely had a champion of its cause in government. This reinforced the idea of it being an outside sort of place.
Part of me did wonder whether the death of Bill Shankly shifted Liverpool’s political consciousness. It was only a few months after the riots in Toxteth. He had transformed Liverpool FC through his wisdom and deep socialist belief, though he never spouted Marx in a press conference and it never translated into a common thought of: ‘I like this fella, let’s vote Labour.’ While others received honours for their achievements, Shankly did not and Liverpool only really came to think about that after his passing, thus heightening an anti-establishment sentiment.
In the same year, Norman Tebbit had told workers to ‘get on their bikes’. Because of Liverpool’s reputation for labour discord, a perception had already developed by then of its workers being idle – a perception that was perpetuated throughout the rest of the decade as the disharmony intensified. Yet the 1980s would see Liverpool’s population decrease with many workers moving to other cities to find jobs. Liverpudlians, in reality, had passed Tebbit’s test but in other places they were met with the sort of resentment that Poles or Romanians feel now.
Liverpool was always on the television. Impressions were beamed to a wider audience through dramas like Boys’ from the Blackstuff and Bread. Shirley Valentine presented the Liverpudlian romantic, as did Educating Rita, though the latter was filmed in Dublin rather than Liverpool. Brookside would arrive with a harder more day-to-day edge: a constant reminder of how things supposedly were, only with an increased level of dramatic intensity to catch the viewers. At the start of the decade, the reading of Scousers had still been quite positive and Liverpudlians would play up to the reputation. John Lennon’s death in 1980 seemed like both the end of a purer time and the start of something murkier. By the 1990s, the view of Liverpool had completely changed. What happened and the resulting media coverage of Militant, Heysel and Hillsborough presented the city in a darker light. Shifts in alternative comedy had a major role as well. In the 1970s there had been Irish jokes, Pakistani jokes and sexist jokes. The emergence of left-wing humour through satirists like Ben Elton began to challenge the acceptance of such supposed humour. This left a big gap in the market. Scousers in the main were not black or Asian – not the standard Jim Davidson target. Instead, they were robbing and lazy. If this was ever contested, Scousers also became sensitive and whingy – ‘where is the famous Scouse sense of humour?’ they’d ask – and this suppressant enabled the stereotype to endure.
The 1980s proved to be a defining decade in Liverpool’s history, a city with a lifeblood in its docks. In writing this book, it became clear that Liverpool’s problems were mounting before 1979 – the year Thatcher was elected. Liverpool, it is fair to say, needed help but her ascendancy brought a new set of opposing values. Thatcher possessed a fundamental distrust in the power of government and at the expense of state intervention believed in the primacy of competition and a free market.
This compounded Liverpool’s position. How were an already deeply suspicious workforce supposed to react? What happens to a city when its existence breeds from one industry and that industry is told to lay down and change? Thatcher’s government, it turned out, did discuss plans for Liverpool and in 2011, it was revealed that the city was targeted for ‘managed decline’. Those still in a physical condition to speak about the memo, which was sent from the office of Geoffrey Howe – who was Thatcher’s longest-serving cabinet minister – denied his suggestion evolved into a coherent plan. That Liverpool would fall the furthest of any urban area under Thatcher suggests otherwise. On her death in 2013, crowds would gather at the Casa, spilling outside onto Hope Street. They toasted the moment by drinking milk and setting off fireworks. The celebrations would carry until the next morning.
1
Looking After Number One
‘I’LL TRY NOT TO FART,’ LORD TEBBIT PROMISED, WHEEZING WICKEDLY as I placed a recording device between one of his frail limbs and the quilted arm of his comfy chair as he sat in the study of his home in Suffolk. The cellar in Tebbit’s townhouse dated back to 1080 when a fire ripped through Bury St Edmunds and though his mansion was re-built in a mock-Georgian style, the area was ecstatically bucolic. Nearby was a white hotel covered in ivy with a plaque on the wall announcing proudly that Charles Dickens once stayed there and the surrounding cobbled roads and lanes were restored with names like Angel, Athenaeum, Chequer and Hatter. There was a stillness, an impressive collection of red post boxes and old signs in the main square pointing towards Ipswich, Stowmarket and Sudbury in one direction, then Yarmouth, Mildenhall and Thetford in the other, as if they were the ends of the earth. In the ruins of the abbey in the shadow of the cathedral, a medley of conkers and berries lay scattered across the gravely footpaths and rare species of bird cackle in the aviaries. Not far away someone was roasting chestnuts and its bouquet filled the autumn air. Thankfully, poisonous gasses from Tebbit’s study did not.
Bury St Edmunds is a long way from Liverpool and it was quite a distance from this Conservative politician’s roots in north London – where he was known simply as Norm. He was keen to explain his family’s heritage was, in fact, in East Anglia where the Tebbits worked as farmers and bell ringers or, the ‘original rock stars’, as he put it in a reedy quasi-Cockney twang. Nearly 88 years old, he walked unaided but was shrunken with a hunch and his skin was pallid. He was dressed smartly but with colours and shades that clash. There was an unavoidable turquoise V-necked jumper, the checked shirt, the green tie, the cream trousers, the mustard socks and the heavy brown shoes. In front of his eyes were enormous glasses which filled half of his face. His interest in art seemed to be limited to impressions of fighter planes, of which there were a dozen or so in the magnificent hallway. He introduced himself by pointing upwards at a Spitfire. ‘A government’s first duty is to defend its country’s shores,’ he warned, appearing to relish the challenge.
Tebbit’s wife was upstairs in bed. She had sustained debilitating injuries from an IRA bomb blast in Brighton, meant for the other Margaret in Tebbit’s life – Thatcher – at the Conservative Party conference in 1984. She was now suffering from dementia. All of this made Tebbit seem vulnerable. Yet he remained a Thatcherite bogeyman – a nationalist who voted for Brexit – someone who was keen to remind me that he still possessed, ‘a very, very, very right-wing view,’ which made me wonder how many verys you needed to reach extremism.
In his post front-line political career, Tebbit had condemned gay marriage and celibacy, saying, ‘There’s Ted Heath. He was celibate. But Ted wasn’t a raving queer.’ He denounced western aid to Africa, believing it went ‘down in the same sink of iniquity, corruption and violence’. In November 2016, when Home Secretary Amber Rudd decided not to instigate an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, Tebbit praised her, describing a potential inquiry as something that ‘could have been used as a stick with which to beat the Thatcher government’, a government of which he was a major part at the very beginning.
It was right at the end of Thatcher’s final term as Prime Minister, indeed, when he proposed a cricket test to determine whether immigrants were supportive of England or their native countries, a test he believed would then show whether they were significantly integrated into the United Kingdom. By then, he had become a hate figure of the British left. He was the Chingford skinhead, a union smasher and the scourge of state dependence. A Spitting Image character reflected his thuggish notoriety.
‘It helped me enormously, particularly with young people undecided by the left,’ Tebbit beamed. ‘I owe a great deal to my creators at that show. They didn’t intend it to be complimentary. I was the bovver boy – leather jacket; looking after Thatcher. I remember one programme where she was there with the French president of the day, Mitterrand. They were in the cab of a truck, struggling for the wheel. I was there and resolved it by bringing out a knuckle duster and sorting Mitterrand. I was always presented as being on the winning side…’
‘I’d been up north of Merseyside one Saturday night when [John] Major was prime minister, poor little Major,’ he suddenly remembered – Major being Thatcher’s successor and pro-EU. ‘I was coming back on the train and discovered there was no first class dining car. I needed something to eat so I wandered up to the buffet car and it was full of Millwall supporters… not only that but they’d lost that afternoon. They were a fairly sort of bolshie lot and I was waiting in the queue for my British Rail sarnie and half a bottle of red when one of them recognised me. It started with, “Hey Norm, where’s you’re jacket?” Interestingly, they started on at me at Major’s proposal to privatise British Rail. I informed them it was right to privatise it but it would be a balls up because he’d been told by boys in Brussels that he’d have to split the ownership of the track. It would not work unless you had the ownership of the two under the same management because the responsibility would be in one place. I can’t say I was winning the argument but we were having a sensible discussion. All of a sudden, there was a shout: “Norm, you’re right mate.” I said, “Of course I’m right, what’s convinced you?” This bloke shouted back, “They’ve just ran out of fucking beer… only a nationalised fucking pub could run out of fucking beer on a fucking Saturday night.”’
Tebbit used a wolfish smile whenever he wanted to emphasise something, but particularly whenever he swore.
‘… after retiring to my compartment and then getting off the train at St Pancras, I was again surrounded my Millwall supporters on the concourse. I was a relatively elderly gentleman with a long blue coat, glasses and briefcase. Their leader said, “We’re going to escort you to your car, Norm.” I told them I didn’t have a car waiting for me. “Then we shall escort you to your cab then…” You see, Norm the leather jacket wearing Spitting Image character had carried me through. I was one of them. I think that was one of the reasons we managed politics rather well when I was in a position to influence it.’
Tebbit talked about himself as a sort of everyman but Millwall were not everybody’s sort of club. Like Tebbit, its Bushwhacker hooligan firm was white, aggressive and British. He had been born into a poor working-class family. I wondered what made him Conservative. He will always be associated with the 1980s but it became clear that the defining decades in Tebbit’s consciousness were the 40s and 50s.
He cleared his throat, as if this were a rehearsed speech. ‘My grandfather came to London to make his fortune because he was not the eldest son and he did not inherit the family farm in East Anglia,’ he explained. ‘He died as a result of a traffic accident where he was tipped out of his pony and injured. I construe that he broke his ribs, caught pneumonia and that was that. The family was left in very difficult circumstances but that was made no easier when my father and his younger brother volunteered to join the Middlesex Regiment in the First World War. They were at Ypres and the Somme. It enormously damaged both of them and my mother had to take the decisions that needed to be taken thereafter because my father was not capable of doing so. I won a scholarship to go to grammar school in Edmonton. This was during the Second World War and fortunately, I received exceptionally good teaching. I gradually realised by the time I was 13 or 14 that I was instinctively anti-collectivist. I felt that I wasn’t particularly tribal. I wanted to do things my way and was not prepared to go along with a consensus for which I was not part. I went in my direction. Some of it was enforced. The consensus was, to get on in the world you had to go to university. Well, that path was closed to me so I had to find another one. I went down the anti-collectivist path even to the extent of being a single-seat fighter pilot.’
During the 1945 general election, Tebbit stood as the Conservative candidate in his school form and lost. A year later, the Young Conservatives were formed and he entered the political arena in Enfield. Iain Macleod was standing in Enfield North, a man who according to Tebbit was ‘from the right of the Tory right,’ and someone who ‘would have later got rid of Heath and seen things in a much more sensible light’, had he not died in 1970.
Aged 16, Tebbit became a journalist at the Financial Times and two years later, he was called up by for military service. There was one occasion in 1954 when he had to break open the cockpit canopy of a Meteor 8 to escape it, fracturing two vertebrae. But he did not see combat. It was his later experience with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) that left him convinced that socialism did not work for him.
‘I had an enormous sympathy for the management, in that they were not in a position to manage the assets for which they were responsible because of union power,’ he explained. ‘It leads to bad decisions, socialism. It leads to decisions taken on a political basis.’ It became apparent that despite Tebbit’s reputation for possessing forthright views, he still had a parliamentary knack for talking in smartly constructed sentences while not necessarily answering the question. He would lead on to a story about James Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister who Thatcher knocked out of the way.
‘I had a very strange friendship with him,’ Tebbit admitted. ‘He sometimes used to invite me to go back to his room in Westminster when we sat late as we did in those days, when the House of Commons was a full time place rather than part time as it is now with family friendly hours. He would sometimes ask me questions over a bottle of whisky. One evening he asked my advice about the prospects for an aircraft which was going to be produced by British Aerospace, which was state-owned. Jim said, “What do you think about the commercial prospects for it?” I said that it was a lovely looking aeroplane and I’d like to fly it but it would never make profit because it wouldn’t sell enough. It was behind the times. The American DC-9 and the Boeing 727 had been in production. The market was already being filled and he said, “Yes, you’re probably right – but it’s difficult for me…” Helene Hayman sat for Hatfield, which was a marginal Labour seat, and this decision would impact on a lot of people within her community. A few weeks later, a decision was announced and Labour went ahead with it. Jim came up to me in the corridor by the library that day and said, “Seen the decision, Norman?” I said, “Wrong one I’m afraid.” He said, “Yes, I think you’re right but what else could I do?” That’s the corruption – not in a financial sense of course because Jim Callaghan was a very considerable guy in my judgement. But it eats into making decisions on political grounds for political advantage as opposed to taking them on primarily economic grounds.’
Tebbit explained what he saw as ‘the ridiculousness of socialism’: ‘Public ownership undermines respect for property,’ he fired off. ‘People in public housing may well neglect their property… somebody else’s job to make sure they’re looked after. When they become owners of property themselves, they look after that property.’
With the exception of Nigel Lawson, Tebbit was the only member of Thatcher’s first cabinet still engaged in public life, still carrying the torch of Thatcherism, for which he defined by the roots of those leading the government.
‘I think you have to look at where Thatcher came from to understand what Thatcherism was. Daughter of a lower middle-class shop keeper from middle England, devout non-conformist Christian and a scientist who’d actually worked as a scientist. She was on the team that created soft ice cream: her great gift to the nation. If you take those three things together you could usually see which way she was going to react to any issue. They were the three pillars that guided her. The scientist in her particularly was strong. I remember her saying in a cabinet meeting one day that the conversation was going off the rails. She was the only woman in the cabinet. “Gentlemen,” she said, “shall we have the facts first and the discussions afterwards? It leads to better decisions.” That was her way of doing things. She could be difficult to manage at times because she didn’t have a particularly robust sense of humour. She was naïve. She didn’t see double-meanings. We’d brief her ahead of PMs questions when she was the leader of the opposition and she’d be determined to make a point regardless of the consequences. It was left to me to say, “No Margaret, you can’t say that.” ‘‘Why can’t I say that?” ‘‘Because they’d all laugh…”’
Tebbit says he did not really get to know Thatcher until he and a number of other Tories decided it was time to remove Heath as the party leader, ‘because he was bloody useless’.