Oh, it’s such a lark being a volunteer and helping to break this damned strike, don’t you know. Just listen to this!
‘Seeing it Through’
Tommy is stoking an engine,
Grandpa waves flags red and green,
Innocent Florrie
Is driving a lorry,
While Millicent runs a canteen.
Daddy, of course, is a Special,
Mother is ready to nurse,
And we all think alike
That this jolly old strike
Is bad – but it might have been worse!
‘I am frequently hearing from friends of witty things scrawled on chalk on buses and tubes during the strike. Here are some new ones:
“To stop bus, wring conductor’s neck – once only …”
“Gentlemen are requested to throw their matches on the lines, as I have been detailed to sweep the platform each night.”
And some undergraduates poked fun by writing this on the side of the bus they were taking out: “The Red Bus with the Blue Blood” and the volunteer bus conductor said that at ‘Highgate, Hendon, Holborn, Hampstead, Hackney and Harringay I dropped passengers but not aspirates.’ Another christened their vehicle “Soviet Sue” and chalked up on the other flank was the announcement “By permission of nobody …” poking fun at the TUC and strike committees with their wretched permits and permissions.
Honestly, you’d see this wonderful English humour that is exclusively English writ large on bus after bus.
But it was hard and serious work too:
‘We rolled milk churns, unloaded meat, fish and vegetables at the expense of shins and hands, muscles and sleep, to say nothing of the wear and tear on our 22inch Oxford Bags and Jermyn Street pull-overs. Driving and stoking trains, driving buses and lorries … we risked quite a lot at the hands of pickets and roughs.
And let’s remember the women who fed us at the impromptu canteens – at the Y.M.C.A., in Hyde Park, at Paddington under Lady Churston, where Lord Portarlington marshalled the volunteers and handed out cigars and witticisms to the Specials; at Scotland House where a collection of girls and women whose names would gladden the heart of any society journalist worked in shifts in the basement canteen.’
‘And I’d so often heard it said … that my post-war crop of our nation was hardly a vintage one. I’ve been constantly told that Jazz and Oxford bags and pork-pie hats had sucked all the sap out of our rising generation and that the country could not hope to find a new breed of fighters … Well now the doubters have discovered how absolutely tip top and tickety boo we are: confident young men who, under good officers, took our place in a flash, and learnt our jobs in an incredibly short space of time. High efficiency, unquestioning submission to discipline, a wonderful spirit and good manners, these were, and are, the high lights in the picture of the fine young reserve of which I have been proud to be a member.’
And let’s not forget my club-able chums :
“White’s supplied a full quota of members who volunteered as bus and train drivers and special constables … I saw five well-known hunting men come down the club steps into St. James’s Street wearing smart blue uniform or armlets. Most of the other clubs did the same. Lord Chesham was one of the first to drive a train. He got his training during the railway strike five years ago … Major the Hon. Lionel Tennyson, the cricketer, was also a special constable. So was Sir John Milbanke, the boxing baronet.”
‘And one thing the strike has done – it has given the pull-over a place in history. If there had been no strike, the ‘fair-isle” would have dwindled into a mere incident of fashion … As things are, it will remain forever a symbol of the gallant outburst of the spirit of youth, which brought a glory of high and joyous endeavour in all the dismalnesses and meannesses of the strike-fortnight, and will ever do.
In signal-boxes and train-cabs, in dockyard and mean-street, engineroom and workshed, the “fair-isle” throughout those wonderful days stood for courtesy, keenness, courage, for all that it means to be young in England.’
‘… But after the strike was over the real tube men had great sport poking fun at us – they used to stand on the platform and say [very U-accent] “Mind the doors please, pahss along the cah please.” They had the commuters in stitches for weeks afterwards. “Pahss along the cah please.” And they had great fun taking us off, you know, with what they called our highfaluting voices …
We had to put up with it for about three months … We couldn’t do anything about it because everybody was laughing …’
‘But I’m pleased to say that the debutantes’ Season, carried on. It would have been a thousand pities if it had been found necessary to cancel any of the Courts, as apart from the disappointment caused to some hundreds of debutantes, the set-back to business would have been very badly felt in certain quarters. Your rabid revolutionary, in his fulminations against the existing order of things, usually takes good care to forget the amount of employment which depends upon such functions as these; a point which many folk would do well to remember.’
And let’s also jolly well remember the jolly good job done by the BBC during the bally strike
(Taken from A Lark for the Sake of their Country )