At Cammell Laird

Cammell Laird protest, Birkenhead, 1984. © NLA/reportdigital.co.uk

‘Imagine a roll of barbed wire, but this big.’ Billy Albertina spreads his arms out, gesturing to a brick building near the entrance to the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead. In the summer of 1984, Albertina and his colleagues occupied a half-built gas rig and a Type 42 destroyer, HMS Edinburgh, in protest at proposals to make almost a thousand workers at the yard redundant. Some of the men stayed on the rig for fourteen weeks. They were cajoled, harassed, threatened with bailiffs, and served with writs for trespass. Eventually, the police unspooled thick coils of barbed wire and wound them round the legs of the rig, creating an impassable barrier. The men were forced out by thirst. When the occupation ended, all 37 were tried for contempt of court, for failing to accede to a judge’s order to leave the rig. They were sent to prison for thirty days, lost their redundancy pay-outs and were blacklisted. They are the largest group in Britain to be jailed for union action. There have been several attempts to get their convictions quashed and their redundancy payments reinstated. None has been successful.

The occupation is largely forgotten, while the miners’ strike, which began a couple of months earlier, has acquired near mythic status. By every metric, the miners’ strike was the bigger dispute. It involved more men, lasted much longer and induced state intervention so vicious that certain scenes are embedded in the national consciousness: the Battle of Orgreave, where thousands of police, led by mounted officers, repeatedly charged picketers, took place in June 1984, a few days before the action at Cammell Laird began. The miners’ strike also took up most of Fleet Street’s attention. Albertina, shop steward for the staging department at Cammell Laird, kept track of the coverage. ‘At the start of the strike,’ he told me, ‘we stressed to the men, on no account would any of them commit violence or damage. We’d witnessed some of the miners commit damage. The newspapers ran amok on them. We didn’t want the newspapers being able to run amok on us.’

He failed to heed his own advice. After Albertina and the others got out of prison, they went back to the picket line. Every morning, the strikebreakers would troop past them into the yard, accompanied by a police escort. One man marched at the front, blowing a bugle. Albertina grew increasingly exercised about this, and one day lunged at the man. He was charged with breach of the peace.

These days, Cammell Laird is quiet and looks a bit down at heel, but it used to be one of the most important shipyards in Britain; the Mauretania and two aircraft carriers called Ark Royal were built here. In the 1940s, it employed twenty thousand people. On the day I went there with Albertina, Liverpool, a mile away across the Mersey, was obscured by a navy vessel, dwarfing the sheds on the dock. It was the same gunmetal grey as the sky. The only spot of colour was a tiny orange rescue craft, tucked at the ship’s side. I took a photo and was shooed away by a security guard. He couldn’t stop me taking pictures, since I was outside the yard, but I gave up anyway. I couldn’t get a decent shot of the ship – it was too big.

The biggest employers in Birkenhead now are call centres, which offer insecure, poorly paid jobs, no substitute for the skilled trades they replaced. They are predominantly staffed by women, who supposedly stick to the rules and are perceived to be better than men at the emotional labour that is part of a customer-facing role. The male-coded skill set that Albertina and his colleagues possessed – strength, hand-to-eye co-ordination, physical courage – has become less valuable.

Albertina is the eldest of seven children. He grew up on Scotland Road, not far from Liverpool’s docks, and tends to attribute everything about his personality to his place of birth. In the Scotland Road of his childhood, the population was Catholic. They were very poor. Families had a lot of children, and since the city was sectarian, the men could only get casual work – most of Liverpool’s businesses were Protestant-owned. They had no glasses and drank out of jam jars. They had no blankets and slept under army greatcoats. When the priests came to collect tithes, they demanded silver coins. The people were credulous. They saw ghosts and believed in elves. ‘Stop it,’ I say to Albertina. ‘That can’t be true.’ He insists: one night, a woman claimed she saw some elves on the green. The next night, someone backed her up. On the third night, Albertina’s mother made him walk down with her to take a look, but the crowds were so big, they couldn’t get close.

Albertina used to run a boxing club with his brother Jimmy. ‘One thing I’ve learned. Anyone who’s a boxer and aggressive; it’s in them. I’ve seen fathers say to their lads: “Go on, go and fight him!” You’ll never make a placid lad fight. It’s a waste of time. And it’s wrong.’ His scrappiness came in handy at school. The priests were ‘brutal’: they’d ask boys if they’d been to mass, then test them on the colour of the vestments. If a boy got the answer wrong, he’d be beaten. Albertina renounced his faith at fourteen. He started throwing the priests out when they came round asking for money. His mother remained devout, but his father, a cleaner at Cammell Laird, was almost as lapsed as his son. ‘You’ll find most union men and prominent left-wingers were all people who gave the Catholic faith up. First you question the Catholic faith. Once you do that, you question everything else.’

An alarm trills on his phone. He suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, and the alarm is to remind him to take his pills. It goes off periodically throughout our meetings. It’s easy to forget that Albertina is 77. He boxed for many years, and has the neat, nimble carriage of a much younger man. And his recollections seem sharp. But when his phone goes off I remember: these men are old. Of the 37 who took part in the occupation, fourteen are dead. For the remaining 23, time is running out.

I first met Albertina at the office of Mick Whitley, Labour MP for Birkenhead until the general election was called. The neighbouring seat of Wirral South is being abolished and its MP, Alison McGovern, beat Whitley in the selection contest for the Birkenhead seat. She’s on the right of the party; he’s a member of the Campaign Group. For much of his career, Whitley was a union organiser at the Vauxhall plant in Ellesmere Port. His brother Chris, now dead, was one of the 37. In 2021, he tabled an Early Day Motion calling for an inquiry into the case, and the release of the relevant cabinet papers. He arranged for me to interview Albertina and Eddie Marnell, a former shipwright at Cammell Laird who was a member of the occupation committee and became a GMB official.

Whitley describes Birkenhead as a ‘left-behind town’. According to the 2021 census, 72 per cent of its households were deprived in at least one measure. Crime rates are 56 per cent above the national average. Life expectancy is low: 72 for men, seven years below the national average. Drug use is prevalent: mostly heroin and ketamine. There is a shortage of good housing stock; more than 70 per cent of the inquiries Whitley’s office handles are related to housing.

I ask him what the town was like in the 1970s, when the trade unions were at the height of their powers. ‘Birkenhead and Liverpool were thriving. You had Tate and Lyle. Fords. Massey Ferguson. The docks were doing great. Vauxhall Motors were permanently in the dole office in Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port, recruiting. People weren’t millionaires, but they had enough money. They knew if they lost a job Friday, they could start somewhere else on the Monday.’

He grew up on the Woodchurch estate. Part of the postwar Labour government’s push to build a million homes, Woodchurch was a model development. Unlike modern estates, which tend to be tacked onto existing conurbations, it was self-sufficient. It had schools, shops, pubs and a large church. ‘It was fantastic,’ Whitley says. ‘Well-made houses, big gardens, plenty of open spaces, football pitches. The buses from Cammell Laird to the docks used to flood the estate.’

Forty years on, the estate has a reputation for guns and gang violence. In 2022 a feud between organised crime groups based on the Woodchurch estate and the neighbouring Ford estate culminated in the shooting of Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve. Edwards, a 26-year-old beautician, wasn’t the intended target. She just happened to be sitting outside a pub near two men in the Ford OCG, Kieran Salkeld and Jake Duffy, when Connor Chapman opened fire on them. Chapman was using a Skorpion submachine gun, a military-grade weapon capable of discharging fifteen rounds in less than a second. Salkeld and Duffy were seriously injured; Edwards died. Chapman, who was arrested two weeks later, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 48 years. Edwards’s youth and good looks – and the fact that she died on Christmas Eve – meant there was a lot of media interest in the case, so the police moved fast to make an arrest. But not every murder is treated this way. A few weeks earlier, another local woman, 53-year-old Jackie Rutter, was shot on her doorstep. The shooters were looking for her son. The two incidents are apparently related, but Rutter’s killers haven’t been caught.

Like many career criminals, Chapman started off shoplifting. There was once an alternative route for troubled youths, prone to bouts of petty criminality and risk-taking behaviour. They could have joined the stagers, where a degree of recklessness was seen as an asset. I had to ask what stagers did, since I’ve never seen a ship being built. First the keel is laid. Then segments of the ship are assembled, transported to the slipway and welded together. As the superstructure goes up, stagers construct scaffolding around it, so other workers can gain access. ‘It was a very, very dangerous job,’ Albertina says. ‘We used to put a plank down, 70 foot high, then run across [that] plank carrying another plank. No harnesses, we’d just run across. You had to have bottle. A lot of the Scotland Road lads went over and did the job. And there were a lot of Birkenhead lads, who’d come from similar areas. Some of them were a bit wild. [They’d] been to court for thieving and stuff like that. A lot of them got married, settled down. Then the redundancies came. And it was sad to see. The lads who’d been up to skulduggery in the early days went back to it because they’d lost their jobs.’

Stagers would recommend new recruits, usually men they’d grown up with. Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work than stay off.’

‘I started at the age of sixteen,’ Marnell says. I had a great apprenticeship. I started off on £3 3/3 a week – unbelievable. Only just paid the bus fare and the boat. That was if your mother gave you money, after you’d handed the wages over.’ At 21, he finished his apprenticeship and his pay went up to around £25 a week: enough to buy a house, get married, start a family.

But British shipbuilding was in decline. The industry had been nationalised in 1977 and the Conservatives were itching to reprivatise it. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won her second general election by a landslide and returned to power with a mission to destroy the trade unions. The Tories had been working out how to do this for a while. In 1977, a think-tank paper, the Ridley Plan, which was a response to the Heath government’s defeat in the 1974 miners’ strike, suggested picking off coal first: building up stocks, training police in riot tactics, then provoking a strike. Shipbuilding was another early target. In 1982, British Shipbuilders employed 62,000 workers. By 1987, that number had fallen to five thousand. In October 1983, Cammell Laird employed 3300 people; down from 5500 in 1977. The yard had just two orders on its books – the Type 42 and the rig – and so in May 1984 another thousand job cuts were announced.

The stagers wanted to strike. Albertina had already secured them several significant victories; under his leadership, they had been reclassified as semi-skilled workers, which got them a pay bump. And he’d battled off the most recent round of redundancies. They were used to winning. But Albertina wasn’t universally popular. When he applied to be secretary of the boilermakers’ department, the boilermakers demanded his name be taken off the list. Though they were all part of the same union, the boilermakers objected to the idea of a stager representing them. Some started spitting at him as he walked across the yard. The snobbery displayed by skilled workers towards semi-skilled and unskilled labourers was once so common there was a name for it: craft consciousness. ‘A lot of the craftsmen in Laird’s resented what [Billy] and his partners achieved, the wage rises, the ability to get to the same status as them. It galled them,’ Marnell says.

When the story of a strike is told, factional splits are often occluded. But faultlines – friction between various groups, discord over levels of skill and grades of pay – grow wider as a strike goes on and money gets tight. At Cammell Laird, there was also a generational divide. The older workers wanted to take redundancy. The stagers didn’t. As Albertina says, they were a young department. They didn’t want to spend the next thirty years on the dole. Management claimed they were pitching for new business, but many suspected the yard was earmarked for closure.

A strike was called on 28 June. When management threatened to tug the two incomplete vessels to France and finish the work there, a group of men decided to occupy them. They worked in shifts, taking turns to collect food parcels and water. They told the bosses they would stay put until the redundancies were withdrawn, and set up camp in the rig’s accommodation block, making bunks out of scaffolding poles and mattresses. ‘I enjoyed the atmosphere,’ Albertina says. ‘My brother and Mick’s brother were brilliant comedians. They were always taking the piss, telling jokes.’ But Marnell remembers it rather differently: ‘It was worse than being in prison. You had no heating for a start. No lights. No conversation with your family. That was all taken away from you.’

The men were told to leave. They were warned they’d be prosecuted for trespassing and lose their redundancy payments, since continued action would be interpreted as resignation. The management brought in bailiffs to evict them. Jimmy Albertina said that if they tried to storm the rig, they’d have to answer to the boxers at his club. The summer wore on, and the stalemate continued. Thatcher condemned the sit-in, calling it ‘a great tragedy’. Albertina was a frequent presence on the local news, glowering under his thick cap of hair. Didn’t he think this action was hurting the yard, he was asked again and again. What sort of message did it send to potential customers? Albertina didn’t think any new orders were coming, and believed there would be further closures. ‘If they break us,’ he said. ‘They’ll break the other yards.’ Asked about the threat of prison, he sounded resigned: ‘It’s no worse than facing a lifetime on the dole.’

In August, a few men sneaked away and went back to work. Albertina says they’re still called scabs when they’re seen on the Scotland Road. Their children and grandchildren were called scabs at school. The stain of strikebreaking is indelible. In September, the men were told to end their occupation by the high court. Cammell Laird claimed they had already been sacked and so the sit-in amounted to trespass. The men ignored this too. So the police were sent in. Marnell remembers looking down from the platform, eighty feet up, and seeing the ground swarming with officers. ‘Police patrolling every area of the yard. Police patrolling the outside of the yard. We thought: “What the hell’s this? Is it a war?” Which is what it turned out to be, virtually.’

The police marched up to the bottom of the rig and shouted up to the men. Increasingly militarised and emboldened by their new powers, they were spoiling for a fight. ‘They said: “Some of ours may get hurt. But so may some of yours.” Their exact words.’ They went for the men on the Type 42 first. It was more accessible and harder to defend. A few days after those men had been jailed, the police came back to deal with the rig. They pulled gloves on and unfurled barbed wire, wrapping it round the legs of the rig. The men, who had been climbing down to get water from standpipes in the yard, were now trapped. Albertina remembers that their lips began to swell, as they got dehydrated. ‘They were out here,’ he says, holding his hand an inch from his mouth. ‘You couldn’t make a cup of tea, couldn’t get washed, couldn’t have a drink. The worst part was, as you were speaking, you found it hard to talk. I’m an outdoor person, I’ve done survival [and] what amazed me was how quick it happened. Within two days. On the third day, we had to come off the vessel. We couldn’t carry on without water.’

The men were locked up for the night, then taken to Walton prison. There was no mention in the press or on the TV news that the police had managed to remove the strikers only by depriving them of water. The occupation was framed as an act of childish self-sabotage. Journalists kept calling them ‘defiant’; Frank Field, then MP for Birkenhead, dismissed them as ‘hotheads’. Justice Lawton, who sentenced them to prison, said the occupation was ‘about as bad a bit of behaviour as I have come across in fifty years’.

The government was determined to extract an apology from the men. The attorney general, Michael Havers, was sent to Walton to persuade them. Havers went from cell to cell, trying to talk to each man separately, promising early release. He then addressed them in the prison chapel. All they had to do was say sorry. If they did, they could leave that day. ‘Everyone said: “We’re not saying sorry. We’re fighting for our jobs. No way,”’ Albertina recalls. ‘Not one man gave in. He was a bit embarrassed. He got all flustered and went: “Is there anything I can do for you, then?” Our Jimmy stood up and said: “Can you send in three blow-up dolls and a bottle of disinfectant?” His face!’ He and Marnell rock back on their chairs, giggling.

Albertina has a few stories like this, but Walton was a horrible place, an overcrowded Victorian Class A prison infested with vermin. Prisoners had to swill out every morning. The men were paired up and kept in their cells 23 hours a day. ‘There were lads in there pining for home,’ Albertina says. ‘They were cracking up. Screaming. They just couldn’t take it.’ One day, he was summoned to the warden’s office. His wife had been receiving threatening phone calls. Someone had pushed matches through their door, and notes saying they were going to burn the house down. The notes mentioned his Italian heritage (he’s actually Russian-Polish). He assumed it was the National Front, responding to a full-page profile in the Liverpool Echo, which described him as a ‘card-carrying communist’.

While he was in prison, his mother died. ‘We got woken up at two o’clock in the morning. They said: “Right, get dressed.” We got taken to Walton Hospital in our prison uniform. We stood round my mother and she died. A week later they said to me: “We’ll let you out to the funeral so long as you come back for five o’clock.” So I said: “Of course we’ll be back for five o’ clock.”’ The funeral was disrupted by photographers waiting outside his mother’s house. ‘I said: “Get rid of those effin cameras. This is private.” Next thing, the local priest said: “Billy, can I have a word?” I said: “Certainly.” He said: “I’m from the Catholic Herald. Now, you know your mother was a good Catholic? Do you mind if we take a photograph?” I said: “Certainly, for the Catholic Herald.” Next day. Where’s the picture? In the Echo. The priest had sold it!’

The men got a week off for good behaviour, and were released after three weeks. They went back to the picket line, and stayed there until their union pulled its funding for the strike. It was, they said, unwinnable. The 37 were blacklisted. They couldn’t even get casual employment on the docks. Albertina had to swap his well-paid job for lonely, low-status work as a bouncer. Twenty years later, he was still barred by some firms. Marnell got a job with the council in Liverpool, rehousing homeless people. The yard was privatised in 1986, sold to Vickers, and then, in 1993, closed down. It reopened under new management, but with its old name, in 2008. Despite repeated requests, the company refused to answer any questions for this piece. It is one of only two remaining shipbuilders in the area, one of the few left in the UK, and it still gets some work. Last year it won a contract to build a new Mersey ferry. According to Whitley’s office, it has 650 employees and 150 apprentices – a quarter of its workforce in 1983.

One thing that Albertina emphasised was the importance of having good back-up at home. The wives of the 37 banded together and began to organise, with Mary Mooney as their leader. She and her husband, Mick, live in an ex-council house on the eastern edge of Liverpool, a few minutes’ walk from Kingsheath Avenue. This is where nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot and killed in August 2022 by a drug dealer, Thomas Cashman, who forced his way into her home in pursuit of a rival. The day before, Ashley Dale, who was 28, had been shot at her home two miles away. She was dead because her boyfriend hadn’t been there: he owed money to her killers. It was a bad year for women and girls on Merseyside: they were treated repeatedly as collateral damage, dying when they got between men and their targets.

It can sometimes feel as if drugs have this part of Merseyside in a chokehold, like the only people making real money are the criminal gangs who deal in them. The word ‘graft’ has a double meaning here, both hard toil and a drug-selling syndicate. Robert Hesketh, a criminologist at Liverpool John Moores University, says the line between legal and illegal work is becoming blurred. Connor Chapman, at his trial, said about a Mercedes A Class he’d stolen: ‘Most people weren’t using that car to do crimes in. It was used by people selling drugs.’ His counsel had to remind him that selling drugs was a crime. According to Hesketh’s 2019 paper ‘Grafting: “The Boyz” Just Doing Business?’, gangs supply the excitement, sense of purpose and cohesive identity that a job like staging would once have provided, and even mimic the structure of a department in a shipyard or factory. Gangs are hierarchical, with foot soldiers ‘serving their time’ – effectively completing an apprenticeship – before moving up the pecking order.

In the days after Pratt-Korbel’s death, the area was besieged by reporters. But the morning I visited Mary and Mick Mooney at home, the streets were very quiet. They had only just bought their house from the council when the strike began. ‘I actually regret buying the house,’ Mary says. ‘You were offered a discount then. Afterwards, people were scared, because they had a mortgage. It was a way of stopping you from striking. I wish we’d just kept [the tenancy]. Especially with the housing situation now.’

Mooney also grew up on Scotland Road. She is from a Catholic family, the middle child of five. They lived in one attic room for six years. There was a hole in the ceiling above her parents’ bed with a plastic bag pinned over it. One day, the plaster collapsed on her father. Her mother used to sit in the council offices for hours on end, petitioning to be rehoused. Eventually, the local paper ran an article about her. Only then did they get a house. ‘Are you like her?’ I asked. She smiles and nods: ‘I think so. Yeah.’ She shows me a picture of them together, marching behind a banner that reads: JOBS NOT JAIL. Locally, the strike had broad support. There was talk of making the 37 freemen of Liverpool. The Labour council, whose deputy leader was Derek Hatton, a flashy member of Militant who was expelled from the Labour Party in 1986, gave the wives travel passes to get to Walton. Teachers told Mooney’s children their dad had done nothing wrong. Mooney mentions this in an interview recorded outside the prison at the time. She claims to be a ‘nervous wreck’, but in the clip she seems composed and frank. Asked how much her children understand, she replies: ‘They’re not ashamed in any way. They understand that much. That their dad’s not a criminal.’ Afterwards, she kept being asked to speak at events. ‘I was always nervous. Especially when I was asked to talk at the town hall. It was absolutely packed. I can honestly say that I was shaking. But I managed to do it.’

Mick’s version of events is different from Albertina’s. He has no funny stories about prison. ‘The wing we were on, believe it or not, was called the Unemployed Wing. It was a joke on the screws’ behalf.’ Afterwards, he got a job as a street cleaner. But the company was privatised and he was made redundant. Since then, he has only had agency work. He would like to see their names cleared, but he’s pessimistic: ‘I can’t see that after all this time they’ll give 37 working-class men the justice and compensation they deserve.’

The Mooneys believe Thatcher left her mark on Liverpool even as it rejected her. Their children haven’t been able to buy their own homes. Their younger daughter is living with them; the elder two are renting privately. They think the city has changed in a less tangible way. ‘Everyone has become very materialistic,’ Mary says. ‘I believe that was a generation she made.’ ‘They worked it great,’ Mick says. ‘I hate to say it, but they worked it great. You ended up being one of them, more or less. Because you were a property owner.’

I ask Albertina if he agrees with Mick Mooney that the campaign was unlikely to succeed. ‘I do,’ he says. ‘But I do see a glimmer of hope, more so than I have in the past. I got asked to go to a meeting a couple of months ago. Fifteen Labour MPs promised us that if the Labour Party got in, the first thing they were going to do was bring it up and fight for justice.’ Such promises have been made before. In 2006, Tony Blair was pictured holding a sign saying ‘Justice for Cammell Laird’. In 2008, the men had a meeting with Gordon Brown. About ten years ago there was talk of a film, but the money ran out. In 2014, the European Parliament called for the government to issue a formal apology. But the Tories paid no attention. The men now find themselves in a similar position to the authorities all those years ago – trying to wring an apology out of people who don’t think they’ve done anything wrong.

The most promising current lead was found by a third-year law student, Clare Lash-Williams, the daughter of a trade unionist called Barry Williams, who was a GMB official at the time of the occupation. After he objected to a local gangster sending scabs across the picket line, a man walked into his office and set about him with a hammer. Lash-Williams asked Marnell to give her all the documents he had. She trawled through them, compiling a timeline. And she noticed something strange. Cammell Laird wrote to the men, dating their dismissal to 6 September (I have seen this letter), but the company’s statement of claim to the court on 5 September said the men had been dismissed two weeks earlier, on 23 August. It was on this basis that they were understood to be trespassing at the yard: they were no longer employed there. Except they were. When Cammell Laird applied for this order, it was lying, which is contempt of court – the same charge levelled at the men.

Lash-Williams wrote her university dissertation on the subject. She is cautiously optimistic; Albertina was friends with her father, and says she’ll be ‘dogged to the end’. But he knows, better than most, that plaintiffs can spend decades chipping away at the official version of events only to come away with nothing, because the people in power can’t be made to care. The Shrewsbury 24 – building workers who went on strike in 1972 and were charged with offences including affray and conspiracy to intimidate, several of them given jail sentences – campaigned for 47 years before their convictions were finally overturned.

My last meeting with Albertina was at the McDonald’s on Rock Retail Park, opposite Cammell Laird. Everything is huge here, as in the shipyard itself. The retail units are like monuments to the pile ’em high scheme within: Matalan, Home Bargain, B&M. As we left, I asked Albertina if it would make a difference that Whitley has been replaced by McGovern. Albertina nodded, his gaze sliding back towards the docks. ‘It makes a big difference. Mick Whitley is for the working class. We could have trusted Mick to push it. I was wanting to meet her, see where she stood. But I don’t hold out much hope.’ He looked around. ‘There’s a way out of here. A road that leads round the back. I think.’ I watched him go. He doesn’t cross roads like an old man. He strides out in front of the traffic, assuming it will stop.