Gravediggers’ strike that helped put the final nail in the coffin of union power
“repugnant, an outrage to human decency” causing great personal distress to the bereaved. Some 106 bodies were awaiting burial or cremation, embalmed and stored in a disused factory in Speke, he told MPs.
“This strike offends against the dignity of man and is a horrifying example of man’s indifference and inhumanity to the dead,” he declared.
This was the MP later to find fame for claiming £87,250 expenses for his country home in Devon, where he moved after losing his Scouse seat.
And a vicar shared this apocalyptic vision: “When gravediggers will allow corpses to mount up rather than carry out their duty, I detect the undermining of the whole structure of society.”
Duty? For the men it was a job of work, carried out for 30-odd quid a week in all weathers, without protective clothing. They were not even allowed into the canteen for their break. A dumper truck came round with the tea and they ate their snap round an open hole.
Ian says: “This was all about a group of low-paid people fighting for a better deal. They had a right to withdraw their labour. But when they did, the consequences were terrible.”
As working-class men in communities, it was obvious strikers’ identities would be known.
One was attacked in a pub and taken to A&E, where it is said he was left for hours by NHS staff, even though they were in dispute, too. One whose mother died is still not speaking to the family. There were threatening letters and verbal abuse.
In fact, I understand some cremations were secretly taking place at Springwood of bodies that could not be embalmed. They were held in the evening, by unpaid volunteers.
In the second week of the walkout they gathered to take stock. Enough really was enough – of the strike. The action was hurting ordinary people, not the government. They voted to go back after 10 tumultuous days in the eye of a media storm. Propaganda damage had done its worst in this corner of militancy, but the wider dispute did not end. Council workers struck, and unofficial strikes by ambulance staff and other public service workers continued until late February, when 11% pay rises were granted and Healey signed a peace treaty with the TUC.
ALiverpool’s Allerton Cemetery today
s a show of political unity it was too little, too late. Jim Callaghan had ducked a general election in September 1978 when Labour was five points in the lead in opinion polls, but by the end of the Winter of Discontent the Tories were 20 ahead.
They were helped by complacent Callaghan, who returned from a conference in the sunny Caribbean and didn’t quite say to reporters at Heathrow, “Crisis, what crisis?”
But the headlines did, and that’s what mattered in a nation on the cusp of radical political change. “Britain Isn’t Working” ads and TV broadcasts for the May election showed footage
of rubbish piled in the streets, picketed hospitals and locked cemeteries.
Swept into power on an anti-union ticket, Thatcher enacted laws that would have made the gravediggers’ dispute unlawful. Some say the unions dug their own grave.
Does Ian, a one-time member of the hard-left Militant Tendency, think it could happen again? “In the last 40 years, this is the only time there has been a dispute in the cemeteries of Liverpool. There have been issues, but they have been resolved without strike action. My answer is no.”
That might come as a relief to the 18 workers who still tend the city’s six cemeteries. And at least they can now sup tea in the canteen.
One of the Class of ’79 declined to talk to the Mirror, so these words may have to be the epitaph for the revolt of the Liverpool gravediggers.