By Elliott West
“People don’t realise now but building sites at that time were the killing fields. Someone died every working day. They were injured in their tens of thousands and the injuries were so bad”.
Ricky Tomlinson
Introduction
Imagine being locked up in a prison cell for 23 hours a day with nothing in your cell apart from a metal bed and a bucket as a toilet in the corner of the room. Well, that’s exactly how 23 building workers spent their time after taking part in peaceful pickets in strike action on building sites in 1972. These hard-working brickies and plasterers just wanted a few more quid for an honest day’s work. Yet they were branded as militant and political with a conspiracy to intimidate. Two of the 27, labelled ‘The Shrewsbury Two, Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren were jailed in 1974 after a 55-day trial for conspiracy to intimidate, unlawful assembly and affray following altercations at a building site two years before. Warren was sentenced to three years and Tomlinson to two years at the Shrewsbury trials, overseen by the judge Sir Desmond Fennell.
A Political Stitch Up
Edward Heath’s Conservative government was paranoid about the industrial unrest at this time. The shop stewards brought workers to a standstill in car plants, factories and coal mines, stopping the wheels of the British economy until there came a time when their trade unions’ demands were met. Yet this wasn’t militancy, it was just a cry of despair. A rallying call to end social injustice and to help those who were struggling to keep up with the cost of living. A society where inflation was rampant and a government that bolted the door on those who strived to make ends meet. The builders just wanted better pay, legal employment and improved safety regimes.
As the sands of time always prove, recently released government documents show Heath’s cabinet and the security services influenced an ITV documentary called Red Under the Bed. A documentary that featured the defendants at the trial and was broadcast on the day that the jury retired to deliver their verdict. Fennell dismissed the defence’s claim that the film was in contempt of court. A handwritten note from Heath read “We want more of this” and further evidence from the trial remains locked away at the National Archives in Kew, refused to be released on grounds of national security.
In the summer of 1972, UK building sites imposed what is called today, bogus self-employment on their workers. As a result, a 12-week builders’ strike took place and the union rank and file used a tactic of flying pickets. They would arrive at building sites and drag what they deemed as scab workers off the site. Sometimes this action would get violent but was a drop in the ocean compared to the mob violence seen at football matches at the time. Using the housebuilding boss Peter Starbuck as their stooge, the Conservative government asked him and others to collate a dossier of evidence on these so-called troublemakers. The businessman claimed that the picket buses were laden with crates of beer to incite violence but Ricky Tomlinson disputes Starbucks’ article written in 1972, saying “There was no beer on my bus”. These were peaceful protests and at no time wanted to incite violence. Actions that were praised for how they carried them out.
The employers handed their dossier of intimidation to Home Secretary Robert Carr in October 1972. Construction boss, Robert McAlpine wrote to the Police Commissioner demanding enforcement of the law by the police and Carr ordered a team of detectives to build a conspiracy case against the union militants. This resulted in trials in Mold in two hearings. The result was that most accused were released and only several minor convictions were imposed. This was largely because the defendants had the right to challenge the membership of the juries. Subsequently, Lord Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, abolished the right of defence lawyers to vet juries. So the stage was set for Shrewsbury.
This means of acquiring conspiracy charges under common law was deemed archaic and unjust and outlawed in 1977. It was replaced with a criminal conspiracy law the same year. Yet this didn’t help those convicted at Shrewsbury. Tomlinson recalled that precisely because of left-wing politics, he was persecuted. Ferried around 14 prisons before his release from Leicester prison on 25 July 1975, Ricky refused to comply with prison rules. Protesting his innocence, only allowed a brief stroll around the prison yard before being thrown back into his cell again.
It was an incarceration period that deeply affected all those involved. Ricky battled the prison demons by reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, written by the Irish house painter and sign writer, Robert Noonan with the pen name of Robert Tressell. A book that was published by his daughter in 1914 after her father had died from tuberculosis in 1911 and buried with a score of others in a pauper’s grave. A book that inspired Ricky during these desperate times and that he still hands out personally to prison libraries. George Orwell described it as “a book that everyone should read”
A Fight for Justice
This stain on the British justice system, a miscarriage of justice that lingered for over 50 years. A stain that put innocent men in prison, charged under arcane legislation, the Conspiracy Act 1875. Ricky spent 16 months in prison and his friend Des (Dezzie) Warren, two years and eight months. Tomlinson’s pal died in 2004 from Parkinson’s Disease. An early death that Ricky blames on the cocktail of tranquillisers that Dezzie was fed by the prison guards. A political trial from start to finish and one Tomlinson refuted with every bone in his body. A victim of blacklisting whose acting career came by chance and saved him. A victim of a vetting list until the 1990s. He was a lucky one, if you can that but for others, the ordeal led to marriage breakups, family breakdowns and lives of poverty. A fight for justice that is far from over. Political prisoners in what should have had an ordinary trial but were thronged by 1,000 police outside the court.
