University Of Keele Students’ Union Bar, Early 1980s, with grateful thanks to Peter Meade, Keele Alum & Photographer – check out his amazing work through this link.
There was a great deal to learn when we started our Keele Union Committee roles, not least our own portfolios (in my case Education & Welfare) but also the general management of the Students’ Union as a business. One issue dominated those early weeks of our tenure in the summer of 1984 – the matter of significant stock losses across the three bars in the union – sums that were turning a potentially profitable (or at least break even) business into a significantly loss-making one.
The subject was well covered in Concourse by Vanessa Kent while I was busy doing my finals:
I recall that we were advised by the Unions’ Permanent Secretary, Tony Derricott, that our predecessor committee had started but not concluded a disciplinary process against the bar managers, Tommy Armour and Ralph Newton. It was, we were advised, imperative that we concluded that process one way or another in a reasonably timely fashion.
I don’t mention the problem directly in my diary until the matter came to a head, but some of my diary notes indicate roughly when things panned out.
I mention a long Union Committee meeting 8 June and use the word “corruption” to describe a central topic. I want to say from the outset that we concluded in the end that management/permanent staff corruption was not involved. The problem, as we identified it, was to a large extent, management’s inability to control part-time student bar staff, some of whom would support their friends’ drinking habits through low charging or no charging.
The sums of money were very significant. We estimated the stock losses to be running at £10,000 to £15,000 per annum at that time – in beer purchasing power terms that’s more like £100,000 to £150,000 per annum in 2024 money.
Each mention of Union Committee in my June and July diaries talks about the meeting being long and/or “dragged on”. It was this topic that dominated the agenda, although there were of course many other items to discuss as well.
At least one or two of those meetings in July were also interim disciplinary hearings. We took the view that our committee needed to examine all the evidence and allow Tommy and Ralph time to explain the substantial stock deficits and their plans for rectifying them. This required us to allow enough time for subsequent stock takes to occur and then be reported back to us.
Kate and I visited the Union’s solicitor in late July for advice on process, knowing that the matter almost certainly could not fairly be concluded before Kate Fricker was going to be in the USA on holiday.
The upshot was, a meeting on 31 July at which the committee agreed to issue a final warning based on incapacity – i.e. that the managers seemed incapable of explaining the losses and/or producing a plan of action to solve the problem.
We set a deadline and meeting to review any subsequent findings/explanations that the managers might produce, in consultation with their trades union reps, timetabled for 3rd August. We (Union Committee) agreed that I would chair that meeting in Kate’s absence. I recall that Kate was not at all happy about needing to devolve that responsibility, but it was clear from the legal guidance that we needed to progress using that timetable, rather than wait for Kate’s return..
My diary page for the preceding day, the day of the concluding hearing itself and the day after reads as follows:
Thursday 2 August 1984 – Busy day at the office – getting things ready for tomorrow etc. Melissa [Oliveck] came up – cooked her a meal and went down union after and [Melissa] stopped over.
Friday 3 August 1984 – Gruelling day. – UC [Union Committee] meeting went on for over four hours – sacked Ralph and Tommy. Changed locks etc – then went out in evening with Ashley [Fletcher] Frank [Dillon] and Melissa to KRA [Keele Research Association – postgraduate bar].
Saturday 4 August 1984 – Most of the day in the office sorting stuff out – came down union in evening.
I put a great deal of effort into making sure that I was fully prepared for either eventuality – a decision to dismiss or a decision not to dismiss. While we thought it unlikely that Tommy and Ralph might produce explanations and or plans of significantly higher quality than before, I wanted to be ready to announce either possibility with clarity and conviction. I wrote quite detailed notes on “what to say if we dismiss” and “what to say if we do not dismiss”, not least because I was so darned nervous I thought I might freeze without prompts. I wrote those notes slowly in block capitals too, to ensure that I could read my own handwriting, even when feeling nervous.
The fact that I note cooking for Melissa and her “stopping over” at the flat suggests that Pete Wild, the Treasurer, must have been away at that time, as Pete also lived in that flat. But apart from Kate and Pete I think the rest of the committee was there for that gruelling 3 August meeting.
I didn’t shirk from my responsibility – looking those employees in the eye – Tommy who had served for 16 years, Ralph for six – telling them that they no longer had jobs and explaining why. I firmly believed and still believe that it was absolutely the right decision for the Students’ Union. But I, along with the other members of the committee, felt a great deal of sympathy with the sacked employees, who, we felt, were victims of circumstance. The scale of the Students’ Union bar business “had got big on them” and they simply were incapable of managing a large three-bar outlet of that scale. Both had started as part-time bar mangers.
I spent a long time in the office the following day, Saturday, not least formally typing up the decision and getting that into the post that day, in order to comply as fully as I knew how with the rule in the staff handbook that letters of dismissal should be sent as soon as possible after a dismissal hearing.
The matter was far from resolved in early August. Tommy and Ralph’s NUPE (National Union of Public Employees, now part of UNISON) rep, Derek Bamford, told us in no uncertain terms that they would be pursuing every possible avenue of appeal, which they did. There will be plenty more about this matter in my Ogblog pages covering the period right up to the end of 1984.
The experience has had a profound effect on my attitude towards employment matters for the decades since. In my management consultancy years, late 1980s until around the turn of the century, I was always hard on colleagues who “played fast and loose” with company reorganisations, especially in circumstances when they would not have to see through their recommendations and were disparaging about clients’ reluctance to dismiss people. “Have you ever looked long-standing employees in the eye and told them that they no longer have jobs?”, I would tend to say, to ensure that such decisions were well thought through, made only when necessary, and delivered sensitively. In my own firm, we have very rarely dismissed a member of staff – I could count the times over the decades on the fingers of one hand – and I consider such rare occurrences primarily to be a fail on our part as employers.
I’d be really interested to hear from other members of that Union Committee on how they remember this aspect of our work together, and how it affected them. Either privately or in a form that I might publish as a postscript here.
Re the sacking of Tommy and Ralph, SU Bars Managers. I wasn’t on the SU Committee that decided their fate but I have a grim memory of their appeal to a Union General Meeting sometime in the autumn term (I think) of 1984. I was the then ‘Speaker of the House’. It was a textbook example of how not to conclude a disciplinary process. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the actual decision to dismiss originally, it was a hard to watch spectacle at that UGM where both Tommy and Ralph tried to appeal , in vain, to the wider student body. I recall Doreen and others from the permanent SU staff attending supportive of their colleagues and the looks on their faces when the meeting itself, well attended I recall – a couple of hundred people there – degenerated into an aggressive slanging match. The bars were open, students were drinking, the atmosphere was the very opposite of conducive to coming to a considered view about what the fates of these two men should be. Tommy made an inarticulate (and admittedly unconvincing) speech about why he thought his appeal should be successful but seemed bewildered by the hostility directed at him from a section of the student audience. His SU staff colleagues appeared horrified. It was not one of Keele SU’s finest moments.
Very interesting observations, Mark, which will become yet more pertinent when I write up my perspective on the horrors of that UGM night. Ahead of that episode, the Tommy and Ralph saga will cover some low level stalking and (I kid you not) even a bizarre episode of kidnapping. On the central point in your reflections, that a UGM is no way to conclude a disciplinary process, I completely agree. Not only do I agree, but I can tell you that I tried hard the previous year, when revising the constitution, to get that particular rule changed. I was advised in no uncertain terms that the SU staff would strike if “threatened” with such a change. The staff considered that clause to be the ultimate protection, as no appeal to the UGM against a staff dismissal had ever failed to be upheld…until that Tommy and Ralph appeal. In a twist that could break the most robust irony meter (as Private Eye would put it), part of the NUPE case to the Industrial Tribunal was that the UGM element of the appeals process was inappropriate. That aspect of the applicants’ case, along with the rest, was rejected by the tribunal unanimously. We should meet up to discuss our recollections of that UGM evening ahead of me writing it up in October, Mark…not that we should need such an excuse to meet up again sooner rather than later.
I was at Keele a few years before these events – 75 to 80, and worked the bar with Tommy, then with both of them when Ralph was employed. I wasn’t at all surprised that Tommy was sacked – more surprised with Ralph though. Tommy ruled the bar in those days rather like a mob boss, and I doubt Ralph had much say in matters. Just one bar, often comprising just one or two shutters, and most committee members kow-towed to him too. I worked during all of those years and due to a year LOA, worked one year pretty much full time. I got on with both of them, but there was no douct in my mind that Tommy was always a rogue. He never had qualms about bragging about his fiddles to a very youthful me, and I guess it eventually caught up with him.
Interesting comments, Andy. We did not uncover any dishonesty on the part of either manager as part of the disciplinary process; nor did we seek to. The process and decision was solely a matter of incapacity. The managers couldn’t explain the stock losses other than to state that it must have been down to student bar staff dishonesty. More importantly, it became clear that they couldn’t capably manage that sizeable (and increasingly large and complex) bar operation. It had outgrown their capabilities.