In 1973 when my father was out on bail awaiting trial, he travelled up to Scotland and stayed on a remote croft on the Isle of Arran for a fortnight. On the evening of his return I was thrilled to see that he was wearing a massive woollen jumper and that he had grown a beard. He looked somehow exotic and mysterious, like a deep-sea fisherman or a whaler of old.
His reasons for going on this journey were vague to me as a child at the time, but shortly after his return he told us a story about one of his encounters with a local resident.
Always a cautious man Dad had become actively suspicious of strangers as a result of the conspiratorial forces that were gathering about him in the lead up to the trial, and so when a man from a neighbouring croft stopped by for a friendly chat over the fence Dad was even more cool and guarded than usual. “He could have been Special Branch,” he told us simply. “He could have been anyone.”
After the first few opening gambits from the stranger were fielded with monosyllabic responses from my dad, the stranger was growing frustrated but he persisted and asked,
“So what are you doing here?”
“Writing,” my dad said tersely.
“Oh aye,” said the stranger politely, “and what do you write?”
“Wrongs,” my dad concluded simply. At which point the stranger realised he was going to get no chat from this secretive Englishman and he threw up his arms in irritation and trudged away muttering colourful Celtic curses under his breath.
At that time of course Dad wasn’t writing The Key To My Cell, he was writing notes for his defence. Because even at that early stage he had the political prescience to understand that what was happening to him, and to his fellow pickets, and what was about to play out in the courts, was going to have huge and far-reaching consequences for the whole of unionised labour.
Almost fifteen years later, despite suffering the physical ravages of his prison term and being ostracised by his party and his union, he had concluded the long and painstaking process of documenting what he saw as the clear and vital political lessons that needed to be drawn from his experience.
The Key To My Cell was to be the book that would
right the wrongs of Shrewsbury.
As such it was written with an iron discipline, based on rigorous research,
and a fierce focus on the political rather than the personal drama that
he had played his part in. Not to say that the drama in his book does
not stir the spirit and boil the blood – it does all of that in
spades – but it does so in order to politically agitate rather
than emotionally manipulate.
The Key To My Cell is an important book written by an ordinary working man who was made great by his heroic response to extraordinary events. My father spent the full three years in prison for his union activities and his political beliefs. Three years after his untimely death as a result of his treatment in those prisons, I am glad that his book has been given new life, and a new readership, at a time when new evidence of the real conspiracy is granting his conclusions new supporters.
Nick Warren
Johannesburg, May 2007
