English Bridge Shrewsbury John Kenyon, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons
We ended up spending four days at the Industrial Tribunal in Shrewsbury. The court had scheduled just these two days for our case, but the case ended up stretching to four.
This article is my account of the first two days.
The Tommy and Ralph saga had reached the dismissal stage in August…
…then it went through the inappropriate but constitutionally necessary appeal to a Students’ union EGM in October…
…after which it was more or less inevitable that their NUPE representative, Derek Bamford, would drag us all through an application to the Industrial Tribunal for unfair dismissal.
Here are my diary notes for those first two days of the tribunal and the aftermath:
Tuesday, 18 December 1984 – To industrial tribunal Shrewsbury today – ate with UC [Union Committee] after and went home for early night.
Wednesday, 19 December 1984 – Gave evidence all day at tribunal – very gruelling. Very tired in evening – UC ate, drank and played charades together.
Thursday, 20 December 1984 – Got up quite late – EUC [emergency Union Committee] in morning – dossed around and drank in afternoon – cooked John and Kate meal – came down to London in evening.
I’m finding it hard to put into words just how mentally exhausting and emotionally draining I found the whole process. I have just a few specific recollections and a few impressionistic ones.
I remember sensing that this was an ordeal for absolutely all of us…with the possible exception of the legal leads – in our case the solicitor John Cheatham and in Tommy and Ralph’s case the NUPE rep Derek Bamford.
I remember Tony Derricott, the Students’ Union Permanent Secretary, telling us that one of the applicants was being unwell in the toilets, as a way of reminding/informing us that the event was an ordeal for everybody. He counselled us to be gentle with everybody involved.
I don’t remember much about that first day at the tribunal. It was, if I recall correctly, all taken up with the applicants setting out their case. I’m not sure whether both Tommy and Ralph gave evidence; I think Derek Bamford did most of the talking. The gist of their case was that we hadn’t really been through a proper process, we had merely gone through the motions of a proper process, having reached foregone conclusions prior to the process. Their case also placed much emphasis on the fact that the bar stock losses had not ceased on Tommy and Ralph’s departure.
The second day of the tribunal was the truly gruelling day for me. My evidence in chief took less than an hour. Derek Bamford had clearly latched on to me, as the person who chaired the dismissal meeting and announced the dismissals, as “the person to go for”. He proceeded to cross-examine me for several hours – i.e. what turned out to be the whole of that second tribunal day.
It didn’t help that I had a nasty head cold by this stage of the proceedings, which I had tried to mask with cold remedies at the start of the day but which was increasingly unmaskable as the day went on.
Bamford’s barrage of questions in my direction went through every element of the case.
Derek Bamford’s main line of attack on me was the notion that the decision had been made before that final hearing. He asked how it was possible for me to announce the dismissals with such detailed notes on the day. I had provided in my evidence bundles the notes I had prepared, ahead of the meeting, with bullet points to help prompt myself. I had prepared notes for both possibilities – that we decided to dismiss that day or that we decided not to dismiss that day. I explained that we, like the applicants, were nervous ahead of that meeting and that I felt the need to prepare with speech notes for either eventuality. Bamford poo-pooed that line of argument as a mere device on my part.
Then the following exchange, which I remember almost verbatim.
BAMFORD: OK. But then how come we received detailed letters confirming the dismissals on the Monday morning after the Friday afternoon meeting? They must have been posted on the Friday evening or Satursday morning.
ME: They were posted on the Saturday morning. The Constitution requires us to follow up dismissals in writing as soon as possible. I got up early on the Saturday to write and type the letters and catch the midday post, so that you would have the details in writing as soon as possible.
BAMFORD: (With a dramatic wide-armed expression of disbeief) Do you expect this Tribunal to believe that story.
ME: Yes I do. It is the truth. It is my sworn testamony.
BAMFORD: (As if catching a fatal flaw in a witnesses argument) Ah, but you didn’t swear, did you? You chose to affirm.
ME: You know what I mean.
CHAIRMAN: We all understand what Mr Harris means…
Actually, John Cheatham had advised me, ahead of the tribunal, to swear rather than affirm, when I told him that, as an atheist, I would choose to affirm. I had explained to John that I couldn’t in all conscience heed his advice, as swearing on a Bible would feel untruthful to me, which is not exactly a great start in giving faithful testimony. But I felt truly awful when the other side tried to make capital out of that decision.
I also recall Derek Bamford asking me a lot of questions about the EGM meeting, not least whether I was comfortable with that process. I remember stating clearly that I was not comfortable with the process but that we had to abide by the process as laid down in the Constitution, which gave the dismissed staff the right to appeal to that body. Derek Bamford implied that I and the committee had gamed that process to our advantage, which was really not true and not fair in the circumstances.
I remember I was thoroughly drained and feeling very low when we got back to Keele that evening. The diary says that we ate, drank and played charades that evening, so we must have done.
We convened an emergency Union Committee meeting on the Thursday for two reasons, as I remember it.
First and foremost, to discuss the two choices the Tribunal had offered us for the resumption:
- 28th and 31st December 1984 (the default dates agreed on the day, subject to confirmation of our availability);
- two days in late January 1985, if we asked for the dates to be moved.
Although some of the non-sabbaticals had unmoveable commitments over “twixtmas”, those of us who were most bound up in the matter – not least me, Kate and John, were all willing to come back straight after Christmas and wanted the thing over with as soon as possible. The applicants had already made it clear that their preference was to return soonest. We all agreed it would be for the best to get the matter concluded before the end of 1984.
The other reason for the emergency Union Committee meeting, though, was to discuss what we would do if we were to lose the tribunal. I made it clear, as I had in the matter of the EGM Appeal, that I would resign if we lost but I didn’t feel that anyone else need do so. I’m not sure what else, if anything, came out of that emergency meeting.
By the time I left Keele on that Thursday, we were all over Page 5 of the Evening Sentinel.
Sentinel On SU Tribunal report on 19 December sitting 20 Dec 1984, Thu Evening Sentinel (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England) Newspapers.com
That Evening Sentinel report made us feel quite pessimistic about our chances at the time. On re-reading the report forty years later, I’m not sure why it made us feel so. Perhaps it was because Derek Bamford had briefed all the Union staff that we were certain to lose and that we had put all of their jobs at risk, so the above newspaper article read, to them, as confirmation that the case was going the way of the applicants. The staff certainly gave us the impression that the paper was suggesting that we were likely to lose.