An insecure Labour Prime Minister, down in the opinion polls, taking the side of rogue shipowners against trade unionists in an ultimately futile attempt to appease the interests of investors? Keir Starmer, who sacked Transport Secretary Louise Haigh last year over her description of P&O Ferries as a ‘rogue operator’, would do well to look at the history of the 1966 National Union of Seamen (NUS) strike. The walkout, which drewaround twenty thousand merchant sailors out for seven weeks in the spring and summer of 1966, has largely receded from popular memory, but it deserves to be better known; its outstanding journalistic chronicler, Paul Foot, rightly called it ‘one of the longest and most bitter disputes in post-war British history’.
Amidst a post-war period that is sometimes defined by its relative affluence, the sailors stood out. While observers like Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell heralded a working class defined by ‘the new way of living based on ‘the telly, the fridge, the car and the glossy magazines’, merchant sailors experienced immense physical dangers and harsh discipline. Complaints of illegal beatings were not infrequent, and men were expected to address their officers with complete deference. Indeed, the Victorian-era Merchant Shipping Act even opened union members up to imprisonment for ‘disobeying a lawful command’. The sailors were proud and saw themselves as distinct, as frequent references to ‘on shore workers’ in NUS archives attest. Working hours were especially long because the men could be summoned to duty at any time. As they themselves made clear, ‘any vessel that leaves the UK is, from the moment she sails, not only our place of employment, but our substitute for… HOME’. Throughout the period, the industry attracted young and uncommitted men looking to earn significant wages through overtime whilst spending months away at sea.
For many NUS members, the oppressive conditions were compounded by the state of their union, which was a byword for both corruption and reactionary politics through to the mid-1960s. In the Cold War Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, the organisation’s leadership was certainly not unusual in its anti-communism. When reading management’s letters to one another, however, the sense of paranoia and spleen is unusually pronounced. As early as the Second World War, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union had given the Communists a place within unions, the NUS’s General Secretary Charles Jarman expected district officials to monitor the presence of communists in ports like Cardiff and Liverpool and report back to central office. Hostility only intensified as the Iron Curtain descended, with communists being banned from holding office in the NUS’s sister union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), which represented dockers.
But of course, not everyone accused of being a communist is in fact such. For the full-time officials of the NUS, accusations of communism proved to be a useful weapon against internal critics throughout the 1950s, and the leadership would need every weapon it could get its hands on. NUS officials tended to be much older than the men they represented, and many hadn’t been at sea for decades. The officialdom of the union was tight-nit and incestuous; sons often replaced fathers or uncles as officials. Added to this was the officials’ very close relationship with the shipping owners and managers. On a charitable reading, the officials’ dealings with managers on a weekly basis allowed them to empathise more with the plight of British shipping companies, newly mired in international competition, than with their own members, frequently uncontactable thousands of nautical miles away. On a less charitable one, many of the officials were simply corrupt.
By the 1960s, the anger of younger sailors had peaked. These men had grown up with the confidence engendered by twenty years of full employment and the Welfare State, and they were more militant than those who remembered the privations of the thirties. Following an unofficial strike in 1960, the National Seamen’s Reform Movement (NSRM) was formed. The NSRM was radical in its analysis — it argued that the union’s rulebook was undemocratic and designed to stifle industrial action and that, to confront the employers, the rules had to be changed. The union’s officials often responded with petulance by excluding NSRM members from meetings by claiming they were not ‘financial members’ (that is, they had not paid their membership dues in time). This tactic backfired when the NSRM was able to win sympathy within the wider membership by pointing out that paying dues was difficult when you were away for months at sea. The NRSM was increasingly successful in winning representation on the union’s national executive, though its candidate for General Secretary was defeated in 1962 by ‘moderate’ leader Bill Hogarth. One NSM activist, A. Farrand, proudly declared that ‘we shall continue to join in battle until the British merchant seamen are given wages and conditions that compare favourably with those obtaining ashore’.
After thirteen years of Conservative government, the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 brought hopes for national renewal, hopes fanned by Wilson’s often fiery rhetoric. The previous year, Wilson had stood up at the Scottish Labour Party conference and declared that ‘the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. We shall not suffer this Party, on which the hopes of millions depend, to become either a soulless bureaucracy or a vote-dealing Tammany Hall.’ From the middle of the Wilson governments, Paul Foot was more clear-eyed, noting that ‘economic growth was the first principle in Wilson’s politics’. The seamen were to suffer most from this delusion that growth could be divorced from questions of who would benefit – the working class or capital.
In 1965, the NUS and the shipowners’ association signed an agreement that gave sailors a 56-hour working week in return for less than £60 a month. As one NUS analysis pointed out, this was ‘less than the hourly rate of charwomen ashore’. Whilst contemporary readers might bristle at the gendered term language, they are likely to be more sympathetic to the sailors who earned far less than the average working-class wage of the time while being forced at sea into ‘accommodation that almost defies descriptions’. Even still, this agreement might have held had the employers not tried to violate it at every opportunity.
By April 1966, when the NUS submitted a new claim for a 40-hour week and a pay rise, the breaking point had been reached. When the employers refused the offer, the NUS instructed its members not to sign new contracts from 16 May, starting the first national seamen’s strike for more than fifty years. From the off, the position of the strikers was doubly difficult: they had to defeat both the employers and the Wilson Government, which, as part of its pay and incomes policy, was committed to pay restraint (that is, holding working-class wages down). The government intervened forcefully, with Minister of Labour Ray Gunter instructing the shipowners to reduce their offer to the union. Harold Wilson appeared on television the night the strike began to insist that it was ‘a strike against the state — against the community’.
The most lucid and substantial expression of the world-view of the younger NUS members on strike remains the long pamphlet they produced during the strike in June 1966, Not Wanted On Voyage, as a retort to the findings of Lord Pearson’s Court of Inquiry. Written primarily by Charlie Hodgins and John Prescott of the NUS strike committee, with assistance from academics at Hull University, it proved to be a polemical success, selling 23,000 copies in June and July 1966. It laments a world where the young seaman is cut off ‘from normal leisure occupations and pursuits’, and suggests that ‘the discipline so frequently used against ordinary seamen should be used against the officers’.
Having called members of the NUS executive into Downing Street, Harold Wilson was incensed by their refusal to accede to what he defined as the national interest. It was perhaps this that motivated him to stand up in the House of Commons and claim a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ were pressuring the NUS. This was followed up with a statement to the Commons more than a week later that named specific union activists as communists or communist-influenced, as well as specific locations they had met.
The impacts of this statement were explosive. As the historians Keith Jeffery and Peter Henessy note, not for decades had there been ‘such a clear example of raw intelligence data being flaunted in Parliament’. The Security Services had plainly been spying on law-abiding trade unionists, and Wilson had seized on their paranoid ravings to undermine the strike. Striking too is critical scrutiny by the press, which is almost unimaginable today. Michael Randall, the editor of the Daily Mail, then as now owned by the Rothermeres, was presented with ‘evidence’ of the Communist conspiracy by a Labour Cabinet minister. Having found this ‘evidence’ unconvincing, he refused to publish. According to Foot, only the Observer and the Guardian went along with the smear campaign.
As Bert Ramelson, the Communist Party’s Industrial Organiser, correctly noted, as the 1960s and 70s went on, the British state would be increasingly drawn into regulating the relationship between employers and trade unions, in a doomed attempt to maintain profitability in the face of changes in the structure of the world economy. Anti-Communism would be a useful weapon for the state in attacking a militant union movement, running as a consistent thread from the NUS to Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson in the Birmingham car factories and on to Arthur Scargill during the Miners’ Strike.
And thus it proved for the NUS. Caught between the demands of their rank and file members and an unparalleled onslaught from a Labour government, the union’s executive voted to return to work a week after Wilson’s speech. While the main demands of the strikers, including the forty-hour week, had not been won, the strike galvanised the upcoming generation of industrial militants. The strike’s final coda came with the election of Jim Slater as NUS General Secretary in 1974, in a final victory for the union’s modernising militants.
One Tribune journalist claimed that Wilson’s actions were ‘surely the most sordid episode since Labour came to power’. It is only recently that we have confirmation of just how sordid Wilson’s actions were. Recently released papers have revealed MI5 tapped the phones of NUS activists and recruited informants, with Wilson being briefed by the spooks nearly daily. Having obtained a taste for red-baiting, Wilson’s government would deploy the same tactics against Jack Dash, the militant docker leader, the following year. Happily, Dash’s members gave the smears short shrift and elected him dock shop steward after a nine-week strike on the London and Liverpool docks.
Capitalism is a mucky business. In the 1960s, as in the 2020s, the gleaming technological visions of its promoters consciously hide the dirty, backbreaking, and dangerous labour that sustains it. In their imagination, determination, and refusal to bow to the so-called ‘national interest’, the 1966 NUS strikers deserve to be remembered as witnesses to the truth. This was expressed more recently by the current General Secretary of the NUS’s successor union, the RMT, Eddie Dempsey, who said, ‘there isn’t a train that moves in this country, not a bin gets emptied or a shelf stacked without the kind permission of the working class.’