Letters
Lessons learned
A few days ago I realised that I had forgotten to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the great Post Office strike of 1971.
I joined the Post Office in January 1970 and I usually had three shifts: mornings starting at around 5am for a delivery round, afternoons in the bag-cleaning room, and a night shift on parcels. In those days the Post Office comprised of letters, parcels and counter services, as well as telecommunications - though my own area of work was letters and parcels.
When I started I had a week with an experienced postman and then I was on my own. We were due back at the office at 10am for breakfast in the canteen and then out at half-past for the second delivery; it was a little while before I got a second delivery out at all! Every little gap in a hedge or a low fence helped, along with a good letter-box technique - it takes time. (And then there were the dogs!)
FEBRUARY 15 1971 was United Kingdom Decimalisation Day: no longer were there 12 pennies to a shilling, half-crowns or 240 pennies to the pound.
That day, 50 years ago, was also just over halfway through the greatest strike this country had seen since the General Strike of 1926: the 44-day national strike of 200,000 Post Office workers.
Telegraphists, telephonists, Post Office counter clerks, cleaners, postmen (170,000 of them!) and PHGs (postmen higher grade), members of the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW), struck for their claim of 15 per cent, or £3 a week for lower-paid grades such as cleaners.
They picketed, they lobbied, they marched, but after six-and-a-half weeks they went back to work defeated: why was that?
OUR newspaper’s front pages of January, 50 years ago, were dominated by one story – the postal workers’ strike. It was Britain’s first national postal strike, prompted by a dispute over pay rises, and it lasted for seven weeks, overlapping with the introduction of decimalisation in the UK. (That’s a subject that is still sore for many Times Past readers – get in touch and share your memories of going decimal!) It was January 1971 when the postal workers walked out. The Evening Times of January 19th lamented more than 150,000 letters were piling up in the Glasgow sorting offices. In London, postboxes were sealed up to stop theft and vandalism but our newspaper announced: “Glasgow is not following the London example – pillar boxes are to remain ‘ungagged’.”