Brought up in the post-war decades on an Ellesmere Port council estate, Roy Jones saw national service as a military policeman. His life as a militant trade unionist in the construction industry prepared him to become a Morning Star industrial reporter of a special type — speaking the direct language of workers, familiar with their lives and struggles and trusted throughout the labour movement.

Written in his direct style and packed with incidental detail about his family, friends, comrades and family, peppered with sharp insights about the great class battles in which he participated both as a militant worker and as partisan journalist his reminiscences are both a recovery of experiences for workers of his generation and a window into the recent history of the working class for the new generations coming into class struggle.

Manifesto Press is proud to bring extracts from this valuable text to Morning Star readers along with a special discounted offer in advance of the book’s publication. Remember 30 per cent of the cover price goes direct to the Morning Star.

Life in the Royal Air Force

In 1949 I was a Royal Air Force policeman stationed in Llandwrog on the north Wales coast. This was a working station where, it was said, surplus poison gas bombs were coated in lanolin and thrown into the Irish Sea.

After 12 weeks’ basic training, the selection process meant choosing from groups A aircrew, B skilled mechanic or C catering, the RAF regiment or police. One choice had to be from group C and of these I chose the RAF police.

Training at RAF Pershore, Worcestershire, saw my most memorable moments which were firstly, the humiliation I suffered when “winning” a boxing silver medal and secondly going to the local pub one evening, drinking three and a half pints of the local scrumpy cider and falling violently sick, over a hedge and into a ditch.

After passing the necessary tests, now a corporal unpaid, I arrived at RAF Llandwrog one black February night in 1949.

RAF Llandwrog was a working camp where the main duties for the 12 police were to maintain a 24-hour guard at the gate of the airfield where four large hangers housed the station’s operations, main gate duty and the Saturday night town patrol in Caernarfon.

The sergeant in charge was easygoing as long as we kept the two Nissen huts we lived in tidy, did our duties and dressed smartly. We mixed with everyone else on the camp although we had use of a corporal’s mess. I was one of eight servicemen named Jones known by their numbers. I was Jones 240!

Life changed dramatically with the arrival of a new sergeant, a red-faced big-nosed Welshman who was immediately christened Cherokee. He was an RAF regular who had decided on change.

To our horror, he immediately decided that we would parade every morning, whether we had worked all night or not. Our beds, kits, huts and ourselves were to be inspected although nothing like this had happened before.

After a couple of days, we were up in arms over our treatment and Cherokee’s attitude.

Fuelled on Sunday night by the NAAFI’s Corporal Clubs ale, complaints of “unnecessary bullshit” developed into a call for action. We decided we would no longer put up with unnecessary bullshit and assembled outside the Commanding Officer’s office first thing on Monday morning to make our demands. If we had any knowledge of things military, we would have known that we risked being charged with mutiny!

Monday morning dawned, I dressed and made my way to the CO’s office to find I was the first there. An Irish lad joined me — but that was it — we had notified our desire to see the CO so there was no turning back.

We discussed tactics and decided to change tack and tell the CO one at a time — that we wanted an overseas posting. After asking the obvious question — have you got a girl into trouble? — the CO granted our requests. In the event, my Irish comrade received a posting to the Middle East and I to the Far East. Our goose was cooked.

The moral of this story helped me for the rest of my working life — if you are up for a fight and only two of you turn up make sure you have a plan B.

Family

My father, Sidney Charles Jones, was born in 1902 in Neath, south Wales.

His father, my grandad, Charles William Jones, was a steelworker, born in 1874 in Manchester. He went to war in France in 1914 aged 40. He was gassed and died as a result in October 1921 without any recognition that he died for his country. Those not killed in action were ignored.

His father Edward Lemuel had moved from Ruthin, Denbighshire to work in Manchester. My roots lie for generations in Welsh-speaking towns and villages.

My mother, Doris Burling was born on April 19 1906. She and her father, George Henry Burling, both were born in Birkenhead. In 1874, his parents moved from Oldham to Merseyside. Both father and son were boilermakers in the great Camel Laird shipyard.

George Henry’s wife Elizabeth Harriet (Manning) Burling was born in 1879 on Inishmore in the Arran Isles, Ireland, the daughter of Chatham-born Edward Wallace subsequently a coastguard in Galway son of Alexander Wallace born in Peterhead in Scotland. Thus, my ancestry includes natives of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Sydney Charles Jones and Doris Burling were married on December 26 1929 at Mother Church, Hawarden, Flintshire.

My father’s working life was shaped by the steel industry. He moved from Summers of Shotton, Deeside to work at the Burnells Iron Works in Ellesmere Port. This was a small family-owned sheet mill, one of the last heavy industrial works and among the most antiquated. The ruggedly hard work of fabricating sheets of metal was by hand with not a switch or a button used in the process.

Imagine an artist’s impression of hell, fire-spewing out when the doors of the furnaces opened while singleted workers shod in steel clogs fed the heavy iron bars, now red hot, to a pair of huge rollers through which they were repeatedly transformed into sheets of different gauge then to be cut and corrugated.

The team was made up of furnace man, bar dragger, heaver-over and roller. The latter was the leader. My dad was qualified for this job but in those days the steelworkers’ union chose who should be the roller and he refused to join because of that.

This highly dangerous working environment led to burns and mutilations for careless workers. It was a common sight around town to see men with fingers, hands and arms missing.

As a child, I watched a neighbour Bob Finney with both his arms off to his elbows clean his own shoes and even more skilfully down a pint of bitter using fitted forearm and hand extensions. Another, Charley, lost one arm and became a barber to earn a living!

The steelworkers’ hard graft risked dehydration so that at the end of a shift it was straight to the Railway Inn with the bar counter covered by pints of mild or bitter for the avalanche of custom arriving.

My father drank his fill with the others. An abiding memory is looking down the road to see a solitary distant figure riding a bike that veered from one side of the road to the other as I shouted “Here he is now Mam,” keen for my dinner which never started without him.

His was a well-paid job during the 1930s and this is one of the reasons we were able to afford the house into which we moved, leaving cheaper houses for those less well-off.

In 1939 Sid went to work back in Deeside, travelling the 20-mile round trip by bike. When returning home one night he was hit and dragged along by a lorry, leaving him with a fractured skull. He recovered enough to go back to work during the war but continued to suffer until dying in 1949.