on the eve of the most important industrial dispute since the miners strike, the Guardian looks at the last fire-fighters strike in 77.

IMO, It is clear that that public sympathy for the strikers is 'soft' and may evaporate if or when there are casualities. If there are to be support neworks, it is paramount that they are not controlled by the SWP or even by anarchist groupings but have a wide range of opinion guiding them.If this is lost, then the rest of the unions will be next and GATs, Tripps will be common in UK as a main force of resistance will be lost.

comments welcome


Dad's Army mood turned sour in '77

Jamie Wilson
Wednesday October 23, 2002
The Guardian

As strikes go, it all began in a civilised fashion.
On the first day of the last national firefighters' strike, November 14, 1977, two dozen union members left their brazier on the picket line to respond to a police call for help at a hospital fire. Acrid smoke from a paper store in the basement of St Andrew's in Bow, east London, filled the wards on three floors.

Five green goddesses (even at that time described by the Guardian as "venerable") manned by 30 soldiers of the Royal Artillery had arrived at the hospital. But the army found that without breathing apparatus its firefighters could not enter the thick smoke.

Within minutes, dozens of firefighters, driving their own cars, had turned up with breathing equipment to save the day. "I am, after all, human," one picket said. "We cannot let people die."

More lightheartedly, at Abingdon in Oxfordshire, strike discipline also cracked - when pickets saw smoke pouring from the windows of their local pub.

During the weeks of the strike, both the firefighters and the soldiers drafted in to replace them were treated in the press as heroes. The Dad's Army mood was replicated in rural areas. There the green goddesses were spread thinnest, and many people prepared fire fighting equipment even more makeshift than that of the soldiers - including a group of farmers in Essex who assembled tractors, water tanks, pumps, and hoses in a barn near Colchester.

In London thousands signed a petition supporting the strikers. The National Assembly of Women sent a letter to the then home secretary, Merlyn Rees, urging him to pay firefighters "a wage more fitted to the importance of the service they are providing".

In Northern Ireland, even the IRA got behind the strikers, claiming it was trying to help by not escalating a fire bomb campaign started just before the stoppage.

As the dispute dragged on, and with positions becoming more entrenched, the mood began to change.

Amid mounting criticism of the inability of emergency service firefighters to handle several major fires, including a blaze at the £70m Tilbury B power station in Essex, the government was forced to deploy 33 specialist RAF fire teams to 13 cities.

Pickets clashed with soldiers, and fury mounted over ministers' refusal to allow the substitute firemen access to equipment in fire stations in case it exarcebated the strike. The Guardian reported: "In Cardiff anonymous threats have been made to petrol bomb the homes of 18 striking firemen if they do not answer emergency calls."

By the end of the third week, on average three people a day had burned to death in fires. Each case (from two children killed in a house fire in Belfast to a grandfather trapped in a flat in Liverpool) was minutely examined by the press to see if the presence of regular firefighters could have made a difference.

The Home Office was keen to point out that the death toll was normal for the time of year.

The deaths of two soldiers of the Royal Irish Rangers, killed when their green goddess overturned on an emergency call in Manchester, could not be discounted so easily.

The Sun warned that the deaths "should serve notice on the striking firemen that public sympathy for them is fast running out".

The accident also focused attention on the safety of the vehicles. The Daily Mail quoted a senior London fire officer who claimed that, compared to a modern appliance, the godesses had worse road holding, inferior brakes and steering, and a greater likelihood of rolling over.

By December 22, with the TUC refusing to back the FRBU's 30% pay claim, cracks were emerging in the strike, with 60 men at Stevenage and Hertford returning to work, and others in Surrey drifting back.

Finally, amid angry scenes and demonstrations outside a Fire Brigades' Union delegate conference in Bridlington, North Yorkshire, the firefighters voted to accept the employers' original 10% offer and end the strike more than two months after it had started.