Ricky Tomlinson

Ricky

By Ricky Tomlinson

Time Warner, 2004

448 pages, $24.95 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/32810

"A window got broke, a door frame got knocked over and a couple of walls were toppled. Some guy slipped off scaffolding and sprained an ankle. Another claimed a brick hit him. That was it! Nobody got carted off to hospital. There were no ambulances ... no injuries ... no arrests". Yet this summary by picket organiser (and later-to-be British television actor) Ricky Tomlinson of what happened in September, 1972, in Shrewsbury during a national building workers' strike, was a galaxy away from what the right-wing press, the Tory government, construction industry bosses and the trial judge concocted.

According to these anti-union zealots, a "Strike Terror Gang", shouting "Kill! Kill! Kill!", had gone on a violent rampage to intimidate honest building workers from working during the strike. Tomlinson and five other strike activists were the targets of a multi-million-pound political show trial that, as Tomlinson recounts in his autobiography, sent him to jail for two years as an example to the rest of the union movement.

Best known as a television actor (Brookside, The Royle Family, Nice Guy Eddie), Tomlinson was Liverpool born and bred. Treading the lower rungs above poverty, his family had the outside lav, the once-a-week bath and a life of scrimping to make do. Tomlinson, apprenticed as a plasterer, gigged around the pubs and clubs of Liverpool as a banjo-player and joke-teller (from a love of entertaining as well as to supplement his paltry income).

By his late 20s, Tomlinson, despite being a shop steward, was still politically naive, seduced by the simplistic appeal of the extreme right National Front. He joined the anti-immigrant party from concern about jobs, not from racist motives ("Colour wasn't the issue. I didn't want Australians or Canadians coming in either"), and stood as a National Front candidate for local council elections. It took Tomlinson four years to see that immigration was a scapegoat for class ills.

These ills were on full display when Tomlinson moved to Wales and found himself in the middle of the building workers' strike. The unions had struck for a minimum wage, enforcement of safety (building workers were dying at the rate of one a day) and outlawing the "lump" (self-employed contractors who were undermining conditions). Tomlinson became a leading member of the Wrexham Strike Action Committee, which organised flying pickets to bring out the smaller sites where the "lumpers" were strike-breaking.

After 13 weeks, the building workers won their demands, thanks largely to the effectiveness of the flying pickets. This made the Tory government and employers angry and vengeful, and they chose to make a criminal example of the flying pickets. After failing to schmooze Tomlinson to rat on his comrades, police arrested the Wrexham strike leaders on charges of affray, unlawful assembly and, dusting off an antique 1875 law that had not been used for 98 years and which was to carry the heaviest sentencing sting, conspiracy.

As Tomlinson writes, "the government wanted to make an example of the building workers' pickets" and the trial that followed was a classic example of British class "justice". A report to the Director of Public Prosecutions, which concluded that any violence had been instigated by men whom the police had been unable to identify, was suppressed. Original statements of witnesses had been "lost" and they were asked to make new ones five months later whilst being shown photographs of the accused before they entered the witness box so the witnesses could dramatically point them out in the courtroom.

Police witnesses who escorted the picketers to all the sites "suffered from a rare form of memory loss" in the witness-box, forgetting that they had made no arrests and that the Chief Inspector had thanked the picketers for a peaceful picket. In fact, Tomlinson and the picket leaders had been at pains to restrain the more hot-headed picketers, who had been provoked by scabs waving shotguns at them. Cross-examination showed the prosecution witnesses to be lying or exaggerating, coached by the prosecution in the art of perjury.

The judge did not leave it up to the jury to decide if there had been a conspiracy (the crux of the case), but strongly implied that there had been one. The judge had also permitted inadmissible hearsay as evidence and put the most adverse interpretation on ambiguous statements and actions. One of the accused summed up the real conspiracy that was going on here, a conspiracy "between the Home Secretary, the employers and the police ... conceived after pressure from Tory MPs who demanded changes in picketing laws".

In prison, "harassment and humiliation, the transfers to different jails, the appalling food, slave wages and demeaning jobs", plus small armies of cockroaches and assorted vermin, were met by Tomlinson's unbowed sense of humour and principle. He stood his ground against victimisation with a hunger strike, a work-to-rule campaign, and, claiming political-prisoner status, a naked protest against wearing prison clothes.

Abandoned by the trade union leadership ("we were an embarrassment ... proof of their weakness and gutlessness"), and shunned by a newly elected Labour government, it was left to the union rank and file, and the revolutionary left, to campaign for their release. Widespread outrage, industrial action and demonstrations had made the remaining "Shrewsbury Two" (Tomlinson and Dezzie Warren) a "PR nightmare" for the Labour government, which was suffering damaging splits.

Labour's Home Secretary wanted Tomlinson out of jail on parole but the price, Tomlinson's contrition for his "criminal" actions, was too high. Typically for Tomlinson, it was concern for a mate, Dezzie Warren, whose health had been badly mucked up by the daily "liquid cosh" (sedatives), that saw him take the offer of parole in 1975 to campaign for Dezzie's release.

Free but blacklisted, Tomlinson was forced to pluck the other strings to his bow, getting work as a film extra, running a casting agency, and working the clubs as an MC and comic. He soon shot to national prominence playing a fiery, flawed but caring shop steward and union official in Brookside, a gritty television drama series hugely popular with its large working-class audience.

Tomlinson's working-class blood-line, and his fighting stance against injustice, made him a first-choice actor with movie directors like Ken Loach. Tomlinson readily took to Loach's funny, sad, heartbreaking and tender films, and his talent for improvised dialogue added extra authenticity to Loach's films. Tomlinson never forgot his class roots, and he stood on picket lines with the miners in 1984-85 and the Liverpool dockers in 1995. He bemoaned New Labour "masquerading as a party for the workers".

Money trouble lurked, however, and running from bailiffs and debt-collectors stressed Tomlinson into a nervous breakdown. A bar-stool across the back of his head, an affair with a 17-year-old (Tomlinson was 48) and a marriage breakdown marked his dramatic fall from grace — "once a TV celebrity and now I was hiding out from creditors and claiming social security".

Tomlinson slowly climbed out of debt thanks to more Loach films and television roles including the most popular TV character in England, couch potato Jim Royle, in The Royle Family. Nice Guy Eddie, with Tomlinson as a "fat, affable gumshoe, doing dog-eared work like serving writs, chasing unpaid bills and checking up on straying partners", continued Tomlinson's mortgage on the role of unglamorous battler. Assisted by the "physique of a bag of builder's gravel and a nose like the last satsuma in the bowl", Tomlinson was the actor of choice for "ordinary", working-class people.

Banging up union activists in jail, particularly those committed to the rank and file and therefore likely to be disowned by labour bureaucrats and politicians, is a well-worn record. In the face of this and other injustices, Ricky Tomlinson's biography offers a simple but compelling account of a man with an irrepressible laugh and a big heart. A big, working-class heart.