Clive Jenkins

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

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The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My castaway this week is one of the most colourful members of Britain's trade union movement. These days he is a wealthy man who's come a long way from his Methodist working class upbringing in South Wales.

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He began his career at the age of twenty as a junior official in the Midlands, and went on to become one of the most powerful trade union leaders in the country.

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The boy, whose early idealism had been fuelled by reading Marx and Machiavelli, found power and influence very much to his taste. At the height of his career he owned a house on the Regent's Canal in London, with a boat called the Affluent Society moored at the end of the garden.

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Now retired, he can look back on a career which coincided with the great rise and gentle fall of Britain's post war trade union movement. He is the former General Secretary of the ASTMS, Clive Jenkins.

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The former General Secretary for some two years now, mister Jenkins, it's difficult to believe that you've taken to retirement easily.

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I'm not retired. I am extremely uh interested in what's going on. I'm going to become the executive editor of a new uh journal on industrial relations and legal law, and various other things as well. You make me sound so interesting, I could barely wait to hear myself talk.

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But you obviously enjoyed that power, didn't you? I mean, do you miss it now? Do you miss the panoply of being a leading member of the TUC? What I miss is not having a dozen researchers and a large secretariat. And that that, I think, is uh the most difficult to adjust to. However, as I'm building up all these other careers, I will have my uh secretariat back. You you in fact retired, it seemed, some two years ago and escaped to your own Paradise Island, didn't you? You upped and off to Tasmania.

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Did you intend to make your life permanently there?

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I was offered a Commonwealth Fellowship by the Australian Government and I was the Friends of the Earth Trust chairman here and I've been fascinated, as everybody is now, I think, and engrossed with the problems environment. And I happened upon, ten years ago, the most beautiful bay in the world.

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That's all.

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I thought, um, what are the problems here? Well, the Japanese wanted to cut down the rainforest, the fairy penguins were under threat, and um w w with my partner, the first signs in the world on a highway were set up which said Fairy Penguins Crossing.

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So blue tongue lizards, uh wombats, eagles, parrots, um paradisiacal. So I've maintained a presence there, but I I'm here now. So you you came back. It's not that you um would you care to admit that you got b bored in Paradise? Oh no, certainly not. It was very interesting, but I was wanted back here. And you wanted to be back here?

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You need to be engaged, don't you? That's true, but also the people who loved me were here.

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Well, we're now going to ship you off back again, this time to an unknown destination, entirely alone, to our desert island. Now does that thought appall you?

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I'm going to be alone for part of the time, and I do like to sit and think.

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Tell me about music. How important is it in your life?

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I find it um it's something which stimulates.

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and and warms me and excites me.

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What's the first record you'll put on to warm and excite yourself?

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Every two years I managed to get, for I suppose, the last twenty years, get to New Orleans, to the French Quarter, and go to Preservation Hall and uh listen to uh classic New Orleans jazz.

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The last time I was there

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I was walking out he was to sit on the floor there, and there's this little man in the corner, with his arms round his knees, with owlish glasses, looking at him, and I realized it had to be Woody Allen, who was a very mean baronetist.

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The Preservation Hall jazz band playing Bill Bailey. You've written Clive Jenkins, and I quote, A Welsh child can never make friends with his parents. What makes you say that? What do you mean?

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I think there are terrible restraints. If you were raised as a as I was, a very narrow Calvinistic uh Methodist. I mean, you can't talk about um

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Human relationships about

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affections and so on. In fact, I got more moisily with my step grandmother.

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It's to grab her.

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back yard and uh go into her kitchen and she'll always have something for me. She always called me.

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Anaria de, which is a term of affection for little darling.

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Um

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But to actually talk to your parents was very difficult. So who did you talk to? I mean, you lived in a kind of extended family with Jenkins' next door and up the road and round the corner, I presume. Well, there were lots of Jenkinses around. Um one whom I didn't know very well, of course, was Richard Jenkins. Richard Burton? Richard Burton, of course.

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He was a distant cousin. But I remember.

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Richie

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When he came out of school there wasn't money to put him back in, and he was to serve in the Portolburton district.

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Cooperative Society, Saturn Drapery. I still remember my mother saying, Do you think Ritchie is all right with that woman? And of course one never knew which one.

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But who did you talk to? You're telling me who you communicated with. I mean, if you were.

Clive Jenkins6:39

Feature

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And the classic uh

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Welsh relationship. There were teachers who actually adopted um Dright pupils. You were articulate even then, were you?

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Yes.

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Your mother sent you for elocution lessons, didn't she?

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Uh she did, but um she ran out of money, I think. Or I got bored. But was the object of the exercise ultimately t to to rid you of your Welsh accent?

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Friedmile Well Jackson.

Clive Jenkins7:09

Yeah.

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Whatever her is saying.

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I certainly failed anyway. But obviously you were always interested in in language. You you won a few essay competitions, didn't you?

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During the war we didn't have the national iistelvod, so the factories in Wales organised the Welsh Workers' Eistelvod.

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And um

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I won the first prize.

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And then the next year I won another First Prize. What did you write about?

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I wrote about factory life.

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I wrote about

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A busy mill

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With um young women working in colorful pinnies, putting

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Deral him in sheets through rollers.

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And uh

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There was a popular perfume then.

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uh called California Poppy.

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And I can still smell it. There was a disaster. I'll never forget this. Um one of the girls was feeding a heavy sheet through and it turned round and cut her in half.

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And uh

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That wasn't very happy. But uh the workforce as such had a very, very high morale.

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I used to but

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Work on the night shift.

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And uh some of the girls didn't work all night because there were all sorts of friendly relationships on the night.

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I see.

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Shall we have your next record there? What is it to be?

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I'd like some spoken word.

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And I'd like John Gielgood's Shakespeare Sonnet No. 30. I had a problem here because there was another one.

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What you're thinking about.

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On an island.

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Dead friends, dead loves. One thinks about, of course, one of the songs from the Merchant of Venice.

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Where is fancy bread?

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In the heart or in the head.

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that I decided in favour of this.

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When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past

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I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

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And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

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Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, But precious friends hid in death's dateless night?

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And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe, And moan the expense of many a vanished sight.

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Then can I grieve at grievances forgone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of four bemoaned moan, Which I knew pay as if not paid before.

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But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

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All losses are restored.

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And sorrow's in.

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Sir John Gilgood reciting Shakspeare's Sonnet No. thirty.

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You're obviously a very, very bright and very articulate child, as we've said. So why did you leave school, Port Talbot County School, wasn't it, at the age of fourteen?

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We didn't have any money. I mean, we were really very poor indeed. I can remember my mother saying uh of

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a dresser we had.

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Your father made that out of uh orange boxes.

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We

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didn't have any money, so we used to use this railwayman's ticket. He went on the railways because um somehow or another there was a problem I don't understand in the local copper works. I remember going we used to go to Blackpool because that was as far as you could get on the free passes, and therefore you felt you ought to use up every mile of the railways. And we were coming back and we took the wrong ferry across the Mersey, and we were rescued by another member.

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of what was then the Railway Clerks Association, who fixed our tickets. But we simply didn't have the fourpences. Did you come to London as well?

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Yes, came to London.

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Twice.

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to go to the zoo.

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What else? I mean, you wouldn't go to the theatre, we could afford the theatre. But yes, to go to the zoo, of course. So they were happy days, although poor.

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I find that a very difficult um

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question to answer

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I believe days of strain as well. One wonders what should be done about one's future, whether one cared about it. I I think yes, I think I was um slightly tormented.

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At what kind of age now, then, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen we're talking about? You were tormented about what you were going to do with your life. Yes. And then I fell into

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The Tender Trap

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of um British tradingism.

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Which sound?

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Embrace me?

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And when I was sixteen I was an area treasurer for the scientific workers, I mean a tiny organization, then a branch secretary, and then I went to a recruitment meeting at the Tinplate Works where the Metal Box was allowing the then General Secretary to recruit. And he said, you're a bright young man, so I agreed of course. And he said, we've got a vacancy for a junior official in Birmingham, Assistant Divisional Officer.

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He said, Why don't you apply?

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So you arrived in Birmingham, what, in nineteen forty seven, aged twenty, to to take up this this junior post in the Union um the nucleus, of course, of the Empire which would one day be yours. Did you take care to be smartly turned out that day? What did you look like?

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The manager of the tailoring department of the co op uh got me turned out, and I was able to take uh six shirts with me, two suits, and um the whole of my savings and a gratuity from my mother, so I took twenty eight pounds.

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But you fancied yourself as a bit of a dresser even then, did you?

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I don't think I did. I don't think two suits and six shirts in nineteen forty seven was quite something. Well, I had to have six shirts because I was sending my laundry home. But two suits?

Clive Jenkins13:00

Don't think

Clive Jenkins13:04

Yeah.

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Two sieves? No, I had to have two silves, I think.

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Shall we have some more music? What's record number three?

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I'd like to have uh Harry Seacombe.

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He is a

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someone I'm have done some programmes with, and I still have uh this sweet memory of going back to my home town, going to the chapel, the Duffren Chapel, and uh the place where

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I used to go twice a day on on Sundays.

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And when I can still remember going back and um

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See my mother's coffin in front of the pulpit, and Harry sang there.

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We'll keep a world coming the hillsides, We'll keep a world coming the verdict, This land you knew will still be singing When you come home again

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Sir Harry Seacombe singing We'll Keeper Welcome

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We were mentioning how you looked, Clive. You've taken a lot of stick in your time, haven't you, for your custom made shirts and your silk socks and your

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Not to mention your boats moored at the end of the garden. Is is that criticism which has cut deep?

Clive Jenkins14:32

Is this

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No, because it was never been by anyone who was serious.

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I mean, if you listen to journalists or television commentators, um

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They're peasants so often.

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who are meritricious and lightweight. Uh Noah.

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I've I've never had a criticism made of me by somebody whom I respected. But you you have, haven't you, become a very different man from the one who set out all those years ago from Portau but you you became, you know, a collector of fine china and an imbiber of fine wines.

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You're very different from your working class origins. There's nothing wrong in that, but you are. What I was doing, of course, was uh constructing new ideas. I was um, therefore, taken up by uh people. Hugh Cuddlib took me up for my mirror column, for example.

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Michael Foote gave me a Tribune column. The Government of the Day made me an oil and gas baron. I was a board member of the National Research Development Corporation as well as British National Oil. And um I learned a great deal. No, I I was always um

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I suppose naturally upwardly mobile. But in the end, I suppose people could call you, and it's a pejorative phrase, isn't it, a champagne socialist.

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Well, Nye Beva was. And I was called the Bollinger Bolshevik.

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But obviously it's not something that ever worried you when people were criticising your

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Your affluence, it didn't matter to you, it didn't worry you. But uh, affluence, uh

Clive Jenkins16:02

Didn't worry.

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Just trivial. In fact I had a couple of houses and um

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A snazzy sports car.

Clive Jenkins16:10

A snazzy sports car.

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And a boat at the bottom of the garden.

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I'm sorry, you find it surprising. I've heard it said that uh Mrs. Thatcher rather likes you.

Clive Jenkins16:22

Which I find sweet, by the way.

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Um how does that go down?

Clive Jenkins16:28

How does that go down?

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I don't have a special view about it.

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Let's have record number four.

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I went to

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Leningrad.

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with my children to give them a holiday.

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And uh we went on

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The M V motor vessel Molotov.

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And uh that's the first time.

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I met.

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THE STAR CROSSSED ARTHER SCARGIAL.

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Who was taking miners' families after the first of the miners' strikes. And we went into Leningrad and

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My horse took me to see the Kirov ballet.

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and they were performing Sheherizada, and I was deeply impressed by the delicacy and the melody.

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The opening of Rimski Korsakoff's Scheherazade, played by the Philemonia Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

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What you spotted, of course, Clive, was that the white collar workers were ripe for recruitment into the Union movement. This was what, during the late fifties, early sixties?

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Various governments, starting with Eden and then Macmillan and onwards, were introducing incomes policies.

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and they were aimed at the large

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so-called blue-collar unions and

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They had an effect of reducing the differentials that the white collar workers had, and they were becoming very unhappy about that. So they were being squeezed between the blue collars and the management.

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But your success story, really, was how you turned a tiny union into one of the biggest and most powerful in the land. Now, w what was the secret? What were your techniques? What did you do?

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I succeeded in communicating.

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I was approached by

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The chairman of an advertising agency.

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He wanted to keep his gifted people happy on the basis our capital goes down in the lift every night, these these are our brains and we came up with the idea.

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Either he or I all came together. He said, If you will buy a page in the Times, I will have it laid out for you.

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and uh we went down to see.

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This man, John Prindle, at his office off Big Street, Ian McCardo and I, and he unveiled the most stunning mock-up.

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of a full page.

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The board and I have decided we don't like the colour of your eyes.

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It um

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Providence.

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Forty thousand inquiries. This is for a union that had, I don't know, maybe thirty or forty thousand members. It was astonishing. So it was appealing to people who could simply be sacked on the spot and didn't have the power of the union behind them simply because of something.

Clive Jenkins20:10

And so

Clive Jenkins20:15

You need to be on

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as as fickle as that.

Clive Jenkins20:17

Yeah, it's

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And we ran four of them. So there you are. You see, you you spotted a gap in the market. You then used clever. Right, you created the market. You then used clever advertising.

Clive Jenkins20:26

Doors the mark

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You then also had a kind of personal knack for publicity and gimmicks and so on as well. No such thing as bad publicity in these circumstances.

Clive Jenkins20:38

Yeah.

Speaker 220:38

Please

Clive Jenkins20:38

Yeah.

Clive Jenkins20:42

Yeah.

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These are all the talents and techniques of a good business man. Now, I wonder if you've ever stopped and thought, Should I have put those talents to use in the middle?

Clive Jenkins20:51

I don't know.

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I don't know any businessman who adequate communicates. My point is that that you might have been able to, that you might have used those managerial skills to to run ICI, for example. Oh, I think

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You shouldn't um misunderstand me.

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The happiest moments of my life

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have been writing injustices, and I've done a lot of that.

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of doing a good deal, and where you can go away swinging your briefcase with the agreements in it, as happy as a radiant bride, knowing that people next week will say, I'm going to have an increase. And they can tell their children that. Let's have record number five, though.

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We

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Received in the United Kingdom.

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as a result of Senator McCarthy victimizing them.

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a number of very gifted

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actors, musicians, and writers.

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One of them was Lariadla.

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An absolutely charming man.

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And uh he said one of the great successes in his life was um to have all the royalties out of Genevieve.

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We're sorry this programme is incomplete and therefore shorter than usual.

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You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.