SOME on the left will have locked in their memory actions and moments which became vital to their political awakening and growth in consciousness, which Mike Richardson’s autobiographical account Tremors of Discontent calls to mind.

Powerfully stark and honest, he recounts and assesses his experiences in the 1970s and 1980s while an active print worker and SOGAT trade unionist in a Bristol printworks.

Richardson recounts his post-war boyhood as the son of working-class parents on Lockleaze council estate in Bristol’s northern suburbs, his secondary-modern schooldays and his first permanent job in a works producing printed packaging.

He joined the workforce as a naive and unpoliticised youth but his gradual growth in confidence and consciousness was provoked and matured by the complexity and militancy of his trade union activities, which broke through his reserve as an individual and changed his life and character.

It is a path many have taken and Richardson describes its progress with a convincing concreteness and candour. He writes of the “ambiguous” class position of clerical and administrative staff such as himself and the difficulties of juggling the specific interests and inter-union relationships of craft unions like the NGA with non-craft unions like SOGAT and NATSOPA.

He writes, sensitively and truthfully, about how his increasing trade union activism as Father of the Chapel impacted upon his family life and how the political context of the times, from Derry’s Bloody Sunday in January 1972, the imprisonment of the Shrewsbury building workers in 1973 and the three-day week of 1974, all contributed to an explosion of political consciousness.

And he remembers the magnetic influence of socialist culture on his life, from first reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, viewing Days of Hope, the Ken Loach TV series written by Jim Allen and reflecting on the anti-nuclear war message of Raymond Briggs’s work When the Wind Blows.

The apex of his narrative is in 1986, in the wake of Murdoch’s mass dismissal of 5,500 print workers at Wapping’s News International works. Richardson was sacked for refusing to absorb the work of redundant staff at the Bristol works and the tumult in his life raised many doubts in his mind: “Was I too hasty? Could I have done something different? I doubted my self-worth.”

Such a story is an amalgam of personal, cultural and political struggle which forges an intimate and profoundly human connection with his readers.

Published by Bristol Radical History Group, £10.