OUR DAILY PUB QUIZ
1
Which painting by Edvard Munch was stolen from the National Art Museum Oslo in February 1994? 2
What is Europe’s most southerly capital city?
3
Which leader of the Soviet Union brought about perestroika, or reform? 4
Queen Victoria had how many children? 5
Corvine describes what kind of bird?
They were condemned from the pulpit, denounced in Parliament and vilified in the media for not going to work. Their job was to dig graves and operate the crematorium for the people of Liverpool. But for 10 anxious days, they were on strike in the Winter of Discontent that paralysed the nation and cost Labour political power in 1979.
The gravediggers’ walkout was demonised in headlines like “Now They Won’t Let Us Bury Our Dead!”.
Families were split and violence flared on Merseyside in the dispute – merely a microcosm of a national confrontation between Labour premier “Sunny Jim” Callaghan and the labour movement.
Such was the furore that 40 years later, survivors of the industrial action cannot bring themselves to talk about it openly.
One man who can is Ian Lowes, 68, the gravediggers’ GMB convenor at the time and still a union activist.
He defends the strike, saying: “It was ‘enough is enough’ by low-paid workers who were treated like dogs.” But he promises: “Never again.”
The diggers’ down-shovels was a long time coming. Denis Healey, Labour’s Iron Chancellor, decreed a 5% pay rise limit for all workers in summer 1978.
At a secret meeting that autumn in his Sussex farmhouse, TUC leaders – among them David Basnett, leader of the cemetery workers’ union – warned him that, after years of wage restraint, they could not hold their members back.
This was about low-paid people fighting for a better deal
Pay curbs were rejected at Labour’s annual conference, and the floodgates opened when striking Ford workers won a 17% pay rise. A tanker drivers’ walkout triggered a national fuel emergency before 20% increases were conceded.
Public service unions swiftly took up the cudgels and, on January 22, 1979, staged a National Day of Action in support of a £60-a-week minimum wage, practically double the gravediggers’ money.
In numbers, this was the biggest stoppage since the General Strike of 1926. Eventually, the year lost 29,474,000 working days to stoppages.
Strife came to Merseyside when GMB shop stewards representing 9,000 workers employed by Liverpool City Council met to plan a follow-up.
“The national leaders had lost control,” says Ian. “So we decided to go for selective action, bringing out key workers and putting a financial levy on everybody else. Binmen carried on working but we closed tips, so the rubbish piled up.”
In the Parks and Gardens department, eight crematorium workers and about 50 gravediggers were called out on a show of hands.
This was the 1970s, before Tory labour laws demanded pre-strike secret ballots.
The walkout was solid. Pickets were not needed at the city’s big sites such as Allerton Cemetery, where we are speaking today, and adjoining Springwood Crematorium. The levy meant the strikers enjoyed virtual take-home pay.
It could have gone on indefinitely, like some of the walkouts by council workers that left a mountain of uncollected refuse in Leicester Square, Central
London, and half the country’s hospitals on emergency admissions only as NHS manual workers joined the dispute.
Leaders of the Liberalrun city council begged the men to go back, the chief executive anticipating media malice with the plea: “Even in war they stop to bury the dead.”
An irate GMB official came to Liverpool and ordered the men to resume work, prompting a predictable Scouse raspberry. Hostility went off the scale.
Inevitably, Tory leader Margaret Thatcher condemned the walkout, sensing electoral opportunity.
In the Commons, Anthony Steen, Tory MP for Liverpool Wavertree, called it IAN LOWES THEN-GMB CONVENOR FOR DIGGERS
Ian Lowes in Allerton Cemetery