5 - Freezers of Corpses and Sea Burials: The Liverpool Gravediggers' Strike

Summary

During a sermon in early 1979, a vicar shared his apocalyptic vision with his parishioners:

When gravediggers will allow corpses to mount up rather than carry out their duty, I detect the undermining of the whole structure of our society. This civilization of our[s] has taken thousands of years to reach a point where the dignity of the human being has reached a high level of care and concern. I shall not witness its destruction through inertia.

Such denunciations of callousness and impending anarchy characterize the overall reaction to a strike of 56 gravediggers and crematoria workers in Liverpool. The action struck such an emotive chord with the British press and public that the frenzy subsumed many of the facts of the strike, providing the myth of the Winter of Discontent with one of its most powerful and memorable images. One of the key misrepresentations is that the left-wing NUPE ‘callously’ rejected the government's pleas to put a halt to the Liverpool gravediggers’ dispute. In Callaghan and Healey's autobiographies, both politicians decried NUPE General Secretary Alan Fisher's refusal to bring Liverpool gravediggers back to work. While NUPE gravediggers outside of Manchester did strike, the gravediggers in Liverpool were, in fact, part of the GMWU. This is but one of several misrepresentations that have distorted what actually occurred during those 10 days in early 1979. This chapter will chart the development of the GMWU and the lives of those involved in the strikes. Finally, it will reveal how and why these relatively brief instances of industrial militancy became the focus of such intense media attention in 1979.

In order to understand how the strike occurred, it is necessary to examine the overall history of public sector unionization in post-war Britain. As noted previously, public sector trade unionism grew and became increasingly militant from the late 1960s and early 1970s. This new movement of public sector militancy first crystallized in the Dirty Jobs Strike of 1970. In the government's battle with exploding inflation, the Secretary of State at the time, Robert Carr, sought to make public sector wage restraint an example for the private sector to follow. He noted, ‘If private employers do not resist excessive wage claims, the Government is certainly not going to rescue them. We are not going to treat our own employees in any way unfairly, but we are going to set an example.’