The Scots workers who grounded the planes of Chile’s military murderers
WHEN Rolls-Royce engineer Bob Fulton came across a Chilean jet engine on the factory line after it came in for servicing, he stopped in his tracks.
It was March 1974, and he knew it was from a Hawker Hunter – one of the planes just used by General Pinochet to launch a coup.
“I thought, ‘I can’t work on that,” Bob says. “It might have killed innocent people.”
Bob went to find his colleague Stuart Barrie, a fellow shop steward in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, now Unite. “Let’s find all the Chilean engines and black them,” Stuart said.
‘Blacking’, normally used for health and safety reasons, meant no one on the production line would touch the engines. For four years 4,000 brave workers at the Rolls-Royce factory in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, refused to return or repair them – risking their own careers.
Now, four decades on, Chile has awarded three of the heroic RollsRoyce engineers the highest honour given to foreigners, the Medal of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, named after Chile’s liberator.
“We received those awards but they don’t really belong to us,” Bob, now 95, says, holding the medal’s bright ribbon in his hand. “They belong to the whole workforce. If it wasn’t one of us, someone else would have done it. Another worker had already refused to work on the engines without us knowing it.”
For years, the story of solidarity between Scotland and the bombed city of Santiago was known in Chile but largely forgotten in Britain. It came to light when filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra, the son of a Chilean dissident, came to look for the heroes of East Kilbride.
Felipe had grown up in Belgium, where his dad had been forced to flee to after exposing the start of the coup as a student journalist.
“The Rolls-Royce boycott was like a legend to us,” Felipe says. “At the end of Chilean Solidarity meetings, people would read out a list of solidarity actions, and they always listed the workers of East Kilbride.”
Felipe grew up to become a filmmaker – and the result is the brilliantly named Nae Pasaran (they shall not pass), a film in the running at the Scottish BAFTAs this weekend, that finally gives the heroes of East Kilbride some recognition.
It also led to the men realising how much their actions meant to prisoners in Chile. “They had heard about what we were doing on the radio,” fellow former shop steward Robert Somerville, 82, tells me. “Prisoners who were being tortured. It gave them the strength to carry on. We didn’t know that.”
When I meet four of the shop stewards involved in the action at the British Legion in East Kilbride – Bob, Stuart, Robert and John Keenan, 78 – they tell me the youthful Stuart was known as “the boy” and Bob was feared by the bosses, a firebrand who had fought Mussolini in the Second World War.
“We called him the Tank Commander,” Stuart, now 75, says, “because he was hard to stop and he’d served in the tank regiment.”
A committed Christian, Bob was among many workers at Rolls-Royce horrified to see Hawker Hunters used by General Pinochet’s military. The bombings were the start of a CIA-backed coup that cost the life of President Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, left-wing leader of Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship went on to become notorious for torture and human rights abuses. More than 30,000 people ‘disappeared’.
On the production line, Stuart didn’t hesitate. “We thought there may be six Chilean engines down the line,” he remembers. “Bob had some blank labels in his pocket, and I wrote ‘black’ on them.” Bob starts shaking with laughter. “You went along tying the labels on!” He shakes his head. “We went to the convenor’s office and said, ‘we refuse to work on arms for Chile’. Everyone in the factory agreed.” He laughs. “The gaffers were down right away.” During lengthy trade union negotiations, Rolls-Royce asked the men to reconsider, but no one lost their job.
“We were a well-organised, united trade union organisation,” Robert says. “We didn’t down tools, we carried on working on everyone else’s engines. In the end, they didn’t want to pick that fight.”
He shakes his head. “It’s easy to get trapped in your own wee square of life,” he says. “We need to show solidarity with people all over the world. Speak truth to power. It just takes one person to stand up. You’ll not always be successful but it can be surprising.”
For four years the engines languished in a yard. Then, on the weekend of August 26, 1978, they mysteriously disappeared. “It was a bank holiday weekend so no one was around,” Bob says.
“Someone came and told us they were missing. I asked the security guards for the number-plates of the vehicles. They were registered to a scooter in Kent, a private car in Glasgow and the other one never existed. We asked the Transport and General Workers Union to try every harbour and transport hub for them, but they never turned up.”
The men’s lives moved on but their actions were remembered by Felipe and many other Chileans. Yet Felipe’s dad, Hernan, now 71, has never been able to watch his film. While on the run from Pinochet’s militia, Hernan hid in cinemas and cannot bear to sit in them now. One day, his son dreams of showing Nae Pasaran outside. For screenings see the movie’s website naepasaran.com
They told us that hearing about our boycott gave them strength
Bob had some blank labels in his pocket and I wrote ‘black’ on them