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Actor RickyTomlinson (left) and Des Warren (centre) on the Shrewsbury picket line in 1972 in a strike for a minimum wage of £30 a week, along with a campaign to abolish the Lump labour scheme which involved unregulated casual cash-paid, daily labour and undermined union demands for safer conditions at work |
My farce! Royle Family star fights his flying picket conviction, 36 years on
Ricky Tomlinson is to speak alongside Arthur Scargill next week as he campaigns to clear his name, writes Simon Wroe
INDIGNATION is Ricky Tomlinson’s stock in trade. His grumpy TV patriach Jim Royle, in BBC’s The Royle Family, is famous for comparing a wide range of cultural phenomena to his substantial backside.
And it’s not always easy to tell where Royle’s buttocks end and Tomlinson’s begin. The Merseyside actor has added the “My Arse!” qualifier to his books on football, Christmas, celebrities – even one on reading.
But beneath the catchphrases Tomlinson has good reason to be irate. He is one of half of the “Shrewsbury Two”, imprisoned under Edward Heath’s Conservative government after a building workers’ strike in 1972. He served nearly two years in jail for conspiracy and faced allegations of violence and intimidation for his role as a “flying picket”. Thirty-six years on, he is still trying to understand why.
Next week Tomlinson brings the fight to Camden for a public meeting at the London Welsh Centre in Gray’s Inn Road. Backed by local trade unionists, the actor will call for a public inquiry into the affair to coincide with new evidence unearthed by his lawyers. He wants his conviction and those of 23 other pickets to be quashed and full access to the files on his case.
“I’m 69 now and I’ve never been involved with the police before or since, but obviously I’m still classed as some sort of subversive,” he tells me from his Liverpool home. “I was a political prisoner. Before I die I want my name cleared and I want a public inquiry.”
The son of a Liverpool baker, Tomlinson was working as a plasterer and playing banjo in the city’s nightclubs when Britain’s first building strike was called in the summer of 1972. He joined peaceful pickets around Shrewsbury and Telford in protest at the “absolutely disgusting” conditions for labourers but was arrested for “unlawful assembly” outside a McAlpine construction site with five colleagues.
“I don’t think people really understood what went on when we were jailed,” he says. “They probably thought, ‘Oh it’s a gang of building workers knocking people about – they probably got what they deserved’.
“There were 300 pickets on that site, 300 building workers ‘rampaging’, according to the prosecution, with sticks and stones and shards of glass and six-inch nails. But they forget to tell you that the police were with us all day. No one got arrested. No one got killed. Where’s all the mayhem? I was charged with being a thug, and with conspiracy. Once they put the conspiracy charge on, the sentence is interminable. Of course, there was a conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy between the building employers, MPs and the Conservative government.”
He and fellow unionist Des Warren were sentenced to nine years each. They ended up serving two and three years respectively. Both men went on hunger strikes for weeks.
One prison governor gave Tomlinson a copy of Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and it became a bible for him. According to Tomlinson though, Warren was marked less fortunately by his imprisonment: he died of Parkinson’s disease some years after his release, insistent the drugs he had been administered to keep him quiet – “the liquid cosh” – while inside were to blame.
Tomlinson turned to acting after prison because he was still blacklisted from the building trade and rose to fame in Brookside and films with Ken Loach and Samuel L Jackson. But he has never forgotten what happened, or the “duty” he owes to “Dezzie”.
“The Tory government was absolutely terrified that the rank and file had taken control of the strike,” he says. “Workers, through the unions, were winning important victories. So we were an example to others, the scapegoats. But if you commit a wrong then you’ve got to right it.”
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