I was born in this house 97 years ago. My parents were Ipswich people, my dad worked at the local plastics factory in Brantham. He was really one of the pioneers of the trade union movement, in a time when you had to be quite a brave man to be a trade unionist. It wasn’t an accepted thing, especially when you live in a rural area such as this – it was more or less unheard of. 

He organised his works, and the management of the works called a meeting in the local village hall. The manager said to the workforce – you can have your union, but I can close my gates tomorrow and that’ll be the end of you. With that, about 90% of the members he’d got just packed it in and he was left more or less at the manager’s mercy. They put so much pressure on him that he had to leave, but he then went to Vickers, who had a factory in Ipswich, and he organised that factory. Because of his beliefs, life was very hard for him, and the family suffered, because you were in an area which is predominantly Tory-controlled. It was bred in me I suppose.

It’s ironical that I should’ve more or less followed in his footsteps. I went to work at the same plastics factory and it was there that the TGWU held a meeting in that same village in hall in the early part of 1940 and we started the union up.

Yes, right in the early part of the war. We had a very strong union. I served on the committee for a number of years before I went into the army. 

I was a teenager in the thirties, and it was grim. My father tried to do what was best for us, and he got me a job as an apprentice mechanic, and I was getting five bob a week. Times were very hard, that was a struggle. 

We never really experienced it, but you don’t out in the country. We used to see fascist markings on the road – I can remember seeing fascist markings at the top of the village. We read about the Spanish Republicans in the newspapers, and that’s as much as you got concerned with those sorts of things. I didn’t get involved in any of that, and it wasn’t until after the war that I got really involved with the union.

It was round about after Dunkirk. I registered on November 15^th, I had my medical on December 15^th, and got called up on January 15^th 1941. We were put up near the docks at King’s Lynn, and we had no real uniforms, just denims. We had about half a dozen rifles between us – there was 90 of us, we had been making up regiments that had been decimated at Dunkirk. 

I was in the First British Infantry Division – there was 90 of us who made this regiment up to strength. Half of us came from this part of the world, and the other came from up north – Durham and places like that. In King’s Lynn, there was an area which was a real slum. We lived in a condemned school. There was no heating, the windows were broken, there was no hot water, three hot basins shared between 90 of us. We were living in little classrooms, and the floor by me was rotted away, and had this big hole in it. One night, I had too much to drink in this pub, came back, and was feeling worse for wear, so I threw up all down this hole. 

We did six weeks at King’s Lynn, and then we went to Thetford, then Cromer, then Scotland. I was only in about ten months when the war in North Africa started, so we joined that in 1942. I served in Tunisia, we went right through there. 

That’s when the Americans joined the war, they were completely green and we’d been fighting there several months before they’d come in. From there, we had a rest period of two or three months, and we moved to Italy. I landed at Taranto, and we went up to the Adriatic side to Foggia. The American Fifth Army were having a rough time in Salerno, and we switched and fought all the war from Salerno to Naples. 

It was bloody hard-going. If you advanced a couple of miles in a fortnight or a few weeks you were doing well. Monte Cassino was in full swing – we moved into that, and we were only in there about a week before we were pulled out again. We moved to Caserta, not far from the ruins of Pompeii, and I went there to see the ruins. The sergeant said I had to go and see the colonel at 2pm. I said what does he want? He said I don’t know. When I got there, there was another bloke, a despatch rider, and another bloke who had been a sergeant but had been busted down because he’d got VD at Naples. 

Yeah. It was rough, really bad. They were starving – the Germans took everything, they never left them a bloody crumb, and they would do anything for a packet of biscuits. This is how this bloke got VD. Anyway, I had to go and see this bloke. He was a horrible old bastard too, he lived up north – his family were coal mining owners. He looked down at us like dirt, he did. This is what would make you a socialist, really. He thought we were shit. I can’t remember what his real name was, but we called him ‘Gazala Joe’, because he was in the defence of Gazala during the desert campaign. And when he was giving us a took, he would always tell us about “When I was at Gazala…”

Anyway, he said “we’re going on an exercise. I don’t know where. I want you to take the jeep, get it water-proofed, and it’s got to be ready at the end of two weeks”. Rumours were about the south of France. I thought, well this is going to be good – we’d be near home! That was the first few months of 1944, they said we had to be ready to move off. We sailed past the Isle of Capri, and on the Sunday, they gave us a midnight briefing that we were making a landing south of Rome, at a place called Anzio. We thought, ‘Christ.’ 

At about half past one, we were all there, starting up our engines, and geared up. At two o’clock, down went the ramps, the doors all opened, the infantry went ashore, and they nailed us. I went off about twenty past two, in the dark. There were just narrow white tapes firing in the sky, they shot off to the right, to the left around me. There was a lot of barbed wire criss-crossed all over the place, and when we got up there, we got a pathway through, there was two blokes dying dead to my left on the barbed wire. The world was spinning. 

Just above them was someone standing under some trees shouting “come on, come on, come on! Don’t stop!” Which you couldn’t do, because there was a narrow bit everyone had to come through. We came through, and we got on to the track, and we stopped there until it got to nearly daylight. I didn’t know until years later on, but the man standing underneath the tree was Denis Healey. I met him in Ipswich one year when there was an election on – he came down to make a speech, and I was with him. 

I had two Christmases in Italy, and I remember on Christmas Day 1944, it was bitterly cold, in the mountains before you got to Bologna. We didn’t hear gunfire, a mortar, a thing. I was on the wireless truck from 2 to 4, and the truck was about 60 or 70 yards from where I was in my canvass divvies, where we were sleeping in the slow. I was walking towards this truck, and I could hear a plane at a hell of a height. When I was getting near the wireless truck, this plane – BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. It dropped about seven bombs in the snow about a hundred yards away from us. It just left a row of black in the snow. We always reckoned they were pissed up in the mess, and someone told them ‘go on, get in the plane and give them a shake-up’. 

Yes. I can remember that in the early days. The army is Tory-controlled, there’s no question about that, and we used to have to go to an hour’s talk every week – I can’t think what they called it now – and myself and this lad from Sheffield called Goldstein, we were always the ones what was questioning. We would question whatever they were trying to pump into us. When they would say ‘any questions?’ it was us two that would ask the questions against the authorities. We got looked down with those sorts of things. 

Absolutely. The Labour government was elected when I was still in the army. I sent off my postal vote, and there a landslide election. You can imagine how I felt, and I think everyone felt the same. We were expecting great things, and that was a great time in the labour movement with Clement Atlee at the helm. 

I remember coming back, and this was a time in the early days of the National Health Service, when that was being discussed through parliament, and the Tories voted against it at every stage. Every time, they were saying ‘the time weren’t right’. Nye Bevan’s case was ‘when will the time be right? The time is right now.’ You see, if you’re Labour, you’re working against the system. Labour always has to work doubly hard because we’re working against the system, the capitalist system – they’ve got the money, they’ve got the means.

When I came back, I went back to the factory again. The department that I worked in moved to Liverpool, then I went over to a sister factory next door, making film base. I went over to there, and took a more active role in the union then, because they weren’t all that organised – or as how I thought it. 

My shop steward was the sort of chap where, if you went to him with a problem. he’d give it to management, and the management would say to him “do you want a shift of overtime this weekend?” and he’d say “Go on then!” and that the problem didn’t go anywhere. He was a bit of a yes man. I put pressure on this particular shop steward, and it came to the point where he came to me one day and said “Wal, I’m going to resign. Will you take over from me?” I said, no, I don’t work like that. I’ll be the shop steward, but I’ve got to be elected properly by the workforce. So he resigned, the wheels were put in motion, and I was elected unopposed.

I think people then may have thought that here was a chap with fresh ideas from the other place, we’ll give him a time. I was duly elected. However, the branch secretary caught me and said “the company said won’t accept you as a shop steward”. I said, “What did you say to them?” he said, “well, what could I say?” I said, “you should have said I’ve been elected and I’m going to be shop steward. Look here, if you don’t accept the fact that I’m the shop steward, I’ll put you in this bloody mixer.” And away he went back to management, and he told them that I was adamant about being a shop steward, and that was that.

Following on from that, my friend said “there was one, you should’ve come”. I went to the convenor at the time, a bloke named Eric. I asked why I wasn’t invited to the shop stewards committee meeting. I’ve been elected for my department. I told him to make bloody sure I come to the next one. 

So the next one, I went to it, and sitting with the shop steward was a member of staff, a personnel manager. I sat there as a new boy, quiet, and taking everything in. This convenor was basically saying “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir”. This don’t sound right, I thought. At the meeting after that, the same thing happened again. After it, I said “Eric, when was [the personnel manager] knighted?” he said, “He isn’t.” I said, “well why do you keep on saying ‘sir’ to him then?” He said “Well, you know how you’ve got to be with these people.” I said “No, I bloody don’t.” 

The other people pricked their ears up then, and thought I could stir things up. They passed a vote of no confidence in the old convenor and elected me as the new one. As soon as I was elected, I saw the personnel manager and told him I was the new convenor. He congratulated me and said, “Oh, have you? Good luck!” and this sort of old crap. So I just said, “yes, and from now on, you will only come to meetings at my invitation.” He says “oh, it’s going to be like that is it?” I said that yes, it’s going to be like that. I wanted to put things more on a business footing, if you like – no more palling around with management.

I’d say, without a shadow of a doubt, that our policies are much better than the Tories, and I would urge everyone – anyone – to vote Labour because of that. If you want your National Health Service to be the National Health Service as it was intended to be – as Nye Bevan intended it to be – then they should vote Labour. 

The NHS is sacrosanct to the labour movement. It annoys me sometimes that we don’t make enough about the NHS, particularly when Johnson says we’re spending so much on it – they’ve bloody decimated the NHS. That’s ours, that is the Labour Party. I can’t express myself enough about that.

I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Corbyn – I think he’s a very good man, I like him. What he’s done and said in the past, they keep bringing that up. They don’t bring up the good he’s done, and that frightens a lot of people off, unfortunately. But you listen to him and Johnson, and I don’t think there is any comparison. Johnson is a comedian. He must be the worst [Tory leader] ever – there’s never been a good one, but how the hell people sit there and listen to him I do not know.