As news emerges that actor Ricky Tomlinson and members of the so-called Shrewsbury 24 are to have their 1970s convictions reviewed by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, we look at the role played in that conviction by Woodrow Wyatt’s Red Under the Bed documentary.
The Monocled Mutineer wasn’t the only occasion that the book’s author John Fairley had found himself at the centre of a ‘Bolshie’ controversy. Just twelve years previously, Fairley, then Head of News and Current Affairs for Yorkshire Television, had produced the studio discussion segment for Woodrow Wyatt’s anti-Trade Union and anti-Communist, The Red Under the Bed documentary. Years later, this same documentary was suspected of playing a supporting role in the conviction of the ‘Shrewsbury Two’ over the part the protesters had played in the 1972 Building Workers Strike. Members of the TGWU and UCATT trade unions had been accused of unlawful assembly and using violent means to intimidate fellow workers. Whilst a total of twenty-four strikers were charged and convicted, media attention had focused on just two: the ‘Shrewsbury Two’ as they became known.
One of the Shrewsbury Two was actor Ricky (Eric) Tomlinson, whose acting talent was discovered in the early 1980s by The Monocled Mutineer’s Alan Bleasdale and Phil Redmond, the creator of Brookside who Fairley had known since his days in Liverpool. Correspondence and papers relating to the Prime Minister’s Office found that Wyatt’s documentary had been commissioned by the Information Research Department. The IRD — whose existence had remained confidential until its closure in the mid-Seventies — had been set-up by the British Foreign Office to provide a ‘counter offensive’ to Soviet ‘Cominform’ propaganda at the outset of the Cold War.
With the support and cooperation of Mi6 and a secret list of approved journalists and politicians, the IRD had set about conducting a series of dirty tricks campaigns conceived to undermine the emerging domestic threat from Communism. And the methods used were as unconventional as they were broad: bankrupting Left-wing groups, burgling Communist Party flats, publishing books — sometimes under highly respectable imprints but more often than not under smaller companies like Ampersand Ltd — and providing subsidies from its £1 million budget to ‘fake news’ specialists within the academic and broadcasting fraternities.
Ensconced in a tall, neat story factory at Riverwalk House in Pimlico, London, the IRD had been shaping public opinion for the best part of 30 years. It was eventually closed on the orders of Anthony Crosland who objected to its links with favoured right-wing journalists who had been dutiful subscribers to its long-range ballistic mailing list whose ‘churnaround’, as far as the department’s targets were concerned, was as devastating as it was quick.
The Guardian’s update on the campaign to clear the names of Warren and Tomlinson on May 26 2020 unveiled newly declassified documents from the Prime Minister’s Office showing how Home Secretary Robert Carr had taken a personal interest in the prosecution of Tomlinson and his men.
At the centre of that personal interest was the Red Under the Bed documentary, written by Woodrow Wyatt, directed by John Phllips and Norman Fenton and commissioned by the IRD on the encouragement of the Conservative government under the leadership of Edward Heath.
One memo from the IRD, dated 21 November 1973, refers to the show’s broadcast on 13 November and reveals how the IRD had a “discreet but considerable hand in this programme”. The Prem 15/2011 file also confirms that the IRD had colluded with the Department of Employment and the Security Service (Mi5) to provide a “large dossier of background material”, including a paper on “Violent Picketing”, to the film’s writer, Woodrow Wyatt.
The programme was, in the words of the IRD a “hard-hitting and effective exposure of Communist and Trotskyist techniques of industrial subversion” — a feather in the cap of the government’s ‘new unit’ and its sister organisation, IRIS. But this hadn’t stopped them from wanting to go further. Much further.
By Means Foul or Fair
According to the newly declassified files, the documentary was originally intended to conclude with Wyatt’s message that the main aim of Britain’s Communist Party was to take over the Labour Party “by means foul or fair”. To support this conclusion, Wyatt had carefully stitched together extracts from interviews with leading Communists, Trade Unionists and Industrialists and presented them as evidence to support the IRD’s theory that the Communist Party of Great Britain was infiltrating the Trade Unions using coercive and violent means to create wide-scale civil disruption. There was only one snag. Brian Connell, the former Intelligence man put in charge of the documentary found that Wyatt’s message didn’t comply with the Independent Broadcasting Authority’s standards of objectivity. Wyatt was enraged. The general feeling among executives at the IRD was that the proposed cuts to Wyatt’s commentary had “left the ending of the film rather formless”. To pack the kind of punch that they had in mind, TV audiences would need to come away from the show utterly convinced that the ‘violent acts of picketing’ organised by Warren and Tomlinson were Communist acts of industrial subversion and that its bid to seize control of the Labour Party and British pits was urgent and real.
The documentary’s ‘principal witness’ was News of the World journalist, Simon Regan, a sleazy tabloid hack specializing in ‘rumour, gossip and nudge-and-wink innuendo’ whose series of reports on violent picketing in November 1972 had been completed under the direction of the IRIS in the first place. The picture that Regan painted for the viewers was a cruel and disturbing one: “I was witness to people being shaken from the scaffolding … I was witness to men being punched and kicked.” Regan went on to describe how the Communist Party ‘Action Committee’ would bus-load pickets into towns and hunt men down. According to the 30-year old journalist, they even went to his pub and threatened to shoot him through both legs.
As a result of the IBA’s misgivings, broadcast was shelved for some six months before Connell had a brainwave. Wyatt and the IRD found that they were able to get around the cuts enforced by the IBA by tagging on a special discussion programme that would immediately follow the main film. The studio discussion segment would be chaired by Richard Whiteley with a panel that would include Barbara Castle MP, Geoffrey Stewart-Smith MP and Alan Fisher. And it was this discussion segment — with John Fairley drafted in as Executive Producer — that allowed Woodrow Wyatt to make many of the points that had been “excised” from the film by the IBA’s standards committee (Prem 15/2011, p.18, Letter from Thomas Christopher Barker to Mr Norman Reddaway).
The finished programme was broadcast on November 13 1973, just as the prosecution was closing its case against Tomlinson and Warren at Shrewsbury Crown Court. And whilst there’s no evidence to suggest that Wyatt, Fairley or other members of the production crew knew the extent to which they were being manipulated, the impact of the film was brutal: the jury who convened in the weeks following the programme’s broadcast found both men guilty of unlawful assembly, causing an affray and conspiracy to intimidate. On December 19 1973, Justice Hugh Mais handed Warren a three year prison sentence and Tomlinson was awarded two years. Four other men in the so-called ‘terror squad’ received lesser sentences.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Justice Hugh Mais’ cousin was author, broadcaster and former journalist, S.P.B. Mais whose publisher, Johnson Publications and its assistant editor, Geoffrey Baber, were deeply enmeshed in the shamelessly right-wing Monday Club, alongside former Mi6 deputy director, George Kennedy Young. Young was subsequently accused by Labour MP John Mann of having played a backstage role in the whole shameful Shrewsbury drama.
In 1917 the ruckus at Etaples had erupted over conditions in the army camps. Some 50 years later it was over conditions on building sites.
Tomlinson left prison in 1975, backed for early release by the Secretary of the TUC. Just as convicted mutineer James Cullen had pointed the finger at Soviet-funded agitators within the British Army for the ‘disturbances’ at Etaples Base Camp in 1917, it was the belief of senior Conservatives that the strike action devised by Tomlinson and his friend, the militant Des Warren, had the full backing of the Communist Party of Great Britain and Soviet Russia — whose adored leader, Vladimir Lenin. Cullen would eventually serve as a founding member of the CPGB.
In the mayhem of the moment, were parallels being drawn among patriarchs at the IRD between the disturbances at home and some dimly remembered riot at a military base camp in France?
Mutiny at Etaples Base
Within months of Tomlinson’s release, a little known paper by two former Oxford academics had been published in Past & Present, a Marxist leaning quarterly published by Oxford University Press, founded by editor — and Balliol Communist — Christopher Hill. The title of the paper was ‘Mutiny at Etaples Base in 1917’ (Past & Present, Nov 1975, No. 69). It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the journey of Bleasdale’s drama from fractious war-time disturbance to Tory-seeking projectile, and came just ten weeks after Ricky Tomlinson’s storming of the gallery at the TUC conference in Blackpool.
The paper’s authors, Gloden Dallas and Douglas Gill were scholarly roughnecks with a long enduring passion for Revolutionary Socialism. Dallas was an uncompromising and meticulous Socialist-Feminist historian whilst Gill’s status and reputation had been blisteringly assured by his proximity to the punkish pan-anarchist newspaper, Black Dwarf in the 1960s. The rag’s doubly heavy sans serif typeface couldn’t have made its agenda any clearer: Agitate, Educate, Organize. It was a far cry from the more procedural and stuffy efforts Gill had produced for the New Left Review — ‘Cold War Origins’ in 1966, and ‘Common Men in Vietnam’ in 1968, a slightly awkward conflation of smug morality and greenhorn foreign affairs.
After the temporary departure of Tariq Ali in 1969, Gill had found himself directing the newspaper’s editorial and production policies. A headline-grabbing raid by Scotland Yard on its Carlisle Street offices the previous year had endowed it with a gravitas and influence traditionally beyond the reach of fringe student rags in Britain. Among its founding members were Hackney activist, Roger Tyrrell, Socialist Feminist Shelia Rowbotham — a Leeds-born pal of Gloden Dallas — and Clive Goodwin who would eventually become literary agent for Bill Brand writer, Trevor Griffiths, Dennis Potter and Jim Allen. It was a profoundly talented, hugely combustible mix, creating a stormy, litigious vacuum that would over its four-year history suck in contributions from era-defining icons John Lennon and David Hockney, as well as political and cultural game changers like Fidel Castro and Bertrand Russell. Gill would eventually leave the paper with a windfall donation from a South American millionairess and embark on a less successful venture with Labour activist and Indian investor, Vidya Sagar Anand, with the encouragement and support of the Castro-backing editor of the International Idiot, Jean-Edern Hallier.
Black Dwarf co-founder Clive Goodwin would die in Los Angeles, in the company of his client, Trevor Griffiths. The pair had been discussing the script for Reds (1978) with Warren Beatty at a hotel in Beverly Hills when Goodwin was suddenly taken ill. Thinking that Clive was drunk, the hotel called the LAPD and Goodwin died in Police custody on November 15th 1977. An autopsy would later reveal that the ‘drunkenness’ he’d been experiencing had been the onset of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Des Warren who had been imprisoned like Tomlinson for ‘conspiracy to intimidate’ never recovered from his spell in prison and died after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease in 2004. Tomlinson was a little more fortunate. French-Latvian director Roland Joffé, an associate of Alan Bleasdale from his days on Play for Today, handed Tomlinson a lifeline with a role in ‘United Kingdom’, a typically Left-Wing take on modern Britain written by Joffé’s friend, the Socialist playwright, Jim Allen. Attendance at a series of Worker’s Revolutionary Party meetings in the 1970s had seen Joffé and Allen both blacklisted at the BBC as possible security risks. Joffé’s response had been to direct the hard-hitting political drama, Bill Brand with Clive Goodwin’s Reds writer, Trevor Griffiths, the former editor of Labour’s Northern Voice who gave Revolutionary Marxism such an emotional human depth with films like Rank and File and Land and Freedom.
The Aftermath
In his 2002 autobiography, Tomlinson makes little secret of the fact that his success was down to Joffé, even going so far as to name his beloved bull mastiff dog after him. In 1988, The Monocled Mutineer’s Alan Bleasdale would make an abortive six-week trip to the Soviet Union to research a film idea for Joffé and a film company in Hollywood. Joffé had heard rumours of an obscure Russian enclave in Moscow that had never been touched by Communism, but which was now facing the inevitable economic and cultural reforms that would arrive with Glasnost. Bleasdale came back empty-handed, having found nothing to substantiate the idea. He claims never to have heard back from Joffé (The Manacled Mutineer, The Guardian, May 30 1991, p.22).
Roffé would embark on a long term relationship with Monocled Mutineer star, Cherie Lunghi who had collaborated with both Joffé, Allen and the drama’s producer Richard Broke on other projects over the years. Their daughter Nathalie was born just days before the first episode of the series aired at the end of August 1986.
John Fairley’s own experience in Soviet-themed productions was extended by the very well received, Cold War Games, with Jonathan Dimbleby (1982) and Red Empire, a seven part mini-series produced by Yorkshire Television. The programme was presented by Robert Conquest, an indomitable former staffer of the secretive IRD who had commissioned ‘Red Under the Bed’ 1. Conquest had at one time been contracted to the department’s Ampersand Ltd and Bodley Head, the Mi6-supported publishing fronts that churned out hundreds of IRD-subsidised books over a prodigious twenty year period.
By this time, the IRD had been disbanded and Conquest was continuing his activities as a visiting scholar and research associate at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute — the centre of anti-Communist research in America.
Fairley’s creative encounters with crisis and insurrection went back further still. In 1976, Fairley had found himself roped in as Executive Producer on General Strike Report: May 1926 with Robert Kee — a close friend of IRD adviser George Orwell and a partner of Russian spy, James MacGibbon. The ambitious 15-minute show was a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the 1926 General Strike called by the TUC that culminated on May 12, 1976, the 50th Anniversary of the strikers’ defeat. The “beautifully simple idea” telescoping the then and now, covered the events of the strikes in 15-minute news bulletins each night after News At Ten. Fairley’s format, mashing the vintage film clips with the usual roll-call of talking heads and news presenters, achieved a thrilling simultaneity with the past. Its effect, deliberate or not, was to pump considerably more urgency into the prospect of industrial collapse and the tumultuous emergence of race riots in 1970s Britain.
The show’s uniquely postmodern, self-referential ‘real time’ approach with Kee impeccably cast as his own First Report persona, was something of a first in British Television. The series didn’t just represent a new way of engaging with the past, it offered an invaluable insight into how information could be manipulated and how reporting had evolved. As Peter Lennon wrote in The Sunday Times, “the people of 1926 were never informed like this.”
Like much of the industrial action backed by the TUC in the early 1970s, the Tories had convinced themselves that the nine day general strike in 1926 had been provided with financial aid from the Soviet Republic. And with the sudden resignation of Harold Wilson taking place just weeks before the series was aired, Britain seemed to be heading towards certain decline. A rumoured coup d’etat by retired military top brass only added to the paranoia.
Fairley and Kee next collaborated on Faces of Communism, broadcast shortly after the publication of The Monocled Mutineer in 1978, when Fairley served as Yorkshire TV’s Head of News and Documentaries.
In 1982, Fairley and Kee were reunited again when they worked together on the launch of pioneer breakfast show, TV-AM, with Kee drafted in as journalist presenter and Fairley as Managing Editor. One of the guests who appeared on the day of the launch was Jennie Erdal, who talked to TV AM shareholder and presenter David Frost about Red Square, a must-read Russian spy thriller published just that week by Fairley and Allison’s publisher (and Frost’s business partner), Naib Attallah.
To add to the list of coincidences and curiosities, it transpires that Tony Essex — Fairley’s mentor at Yorkshire Television — even had the distinction of serving Monocled Mutineer fall guy, Alasdair Milne. on The Great War series first broadcast in 1964.
continue reading this story: Spies, Secrets & Mutiny: The story behind The Monocled Mutineer
Notes
1 Several months prior to The Monocled Mutineer being published, the Information Research Department was wound-down and closed. Ironically both Ricky Tomlinson (the man convicted as a result of the Red Under the Documentary) and Richard Whiteley (the show’s presenter) ended-up fronting Channel 4’s flagship programmes Brookside and Countdown on the day of the channel’s launch on Nov 2 1982. Despite several appearances on Whiteley’s Countdown show, Tomlinson would subsequently accuse Whiteley of working for Mi5 (a misrepresentation of the facts, if ever there was one). The Red Under the Bed documentary is back in the news as the Court of Appeal announces that it is due to review Tomlinson and the Warren’s convictions. See Ricky Tomlinson’s criminal convictions to be re-examined. The IRD & IRIS had worked with Simon Regan of the News of the World to produce the dossier on ‘violent picketing’ used to support the documentary. Regan, who went on to found the Scallywag journal, would also appear in the film.
More reading
How the FO waged Secret Propaganda war in Britain, The Observer, Fletcher, 1978, Jan 29
Ghosting, Jennie Erdal, 2005
Ricky, Ricky Tomlinson, 2002
Heartbeat and Beyond: Memoirs of 50 Years of Yorkshire Television, John Fairley and Graham Ironside, 2017
Pickets Terror Squad Put Behind Bars, Daily Mirror 20 December 1973, p.7
