When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (30 page)

Everyone had a property story: the reporter, ambitious to move to London, who had seen the value of his house dive by £20,000, effectively meaning he couldn't afford to move; the helicopter pilot who had been transferred to England, and had had to leave his family behind because they couldn't sell their house. Even the city's Gordon Barracks stood forlorn and empty, waiting for a buyer. Aberdeen was ringed with modern housing estates rushed up by national development companies during the boom. Villages which once had half a dozen houses, a church and a bog, had become communities with three or four thousand homes. Every inducement was offered to buyers, including 100 per cent mortgages that covered carpets, curtains and kitchen equipment; there had been, I was told, joy rides in helicopters and weekends at Aviemore. ‘It was easier to buy a house than a car,' said a solicitor. Ten thousand redundancies later these estates were plastered with ‘For Sale' signs. In one notorious street – Lee Crescent North, in the Bridge of Don to the north of the city – there were sixty-one houses for sale the week I was there. The carpets were worn, the fine washing machines chipped, and there were no helicopter rides on offer; houses were worth up to 20 per cent less than the value of the original full mortgage. The
Property Register
, put out by the Aberdeen Solicitors' Property Centre, swelled to more than twice its former size. Aberdonians had traditionally bought new houses on bridging loans before selling their own. Once the bottom fell out of the market, the system jammed solid. Solicitors, who act as agents for most property sales in Scotland, were widely blamed for lack of imagination: they didn't know, said the critics, how to build property ‘chains'. They had had it, said the man who couldn't sell his pile, too easy for too long. But the solicitors in turn were not kind about the buyers and were angry about a ‘Panorama' programme that had interviewed people unable to sell. People who took out 100 per cent mortgages at prices above professional valuation had only themselves to blame, they said. It was mainly the English, I gathered, who had been caught: Aberdonians had been too canny to pay inflated prices and most Americans were shrewd.

Johnnie Patterson, like Ted McDowell a Californian, was still in town after the crash because he too had married a Scot. By early 1987 he was clinging to the wreckage. He had come to the North Sea near the beginning, in his case aboard a rig that had been pulled out of Trinidad, refurbished in Florida, and towed across the Atlantic. He had worked for the same company, Santa Fe, for nearly seventeen years, rising to ‘senior tool-pusher', top man on the job. It was his rig that had discovered the sizeable Thistle field. He had earned five thousand dollars a month clear of tax, which was handled by his company, and been given airline tickets once a year equivalent to a return fare to Los Angeles. Life had been good, and he had been planning to move to a smallholding outside Aberdeen so that his wife could have a horse.

Eight months before I met him, he had been ‘let go'. He sat in his split-level living room – pool table, two televisions, Alsatian puppy, parakeet – dressed in Texan boots, open-necked plaid shirt and jeans, and listed his problems. His house, which had been valued two years previously at £95,000, had been on the market for six months, most recently at £75,000, and he had not had a single caller; his twin ten-year-old sons were in a boarding school and would have to be pulled out at the end of the school year if he didn't get a job; he believed he now faced prejudice because he was an American and companies were nervous that he would be looking for ‘big bucks'. Twice he had been told that he was overqualified. Cost-cutting had led, he said, to labour agencies providing scratch drilling crews. ‘They expect these people to go out and drill an oil well. All I can see is screw-ups.' However, he was an optimist after the American fashion, and believed something would come along by summer. If it didn't, he would probably take his Scottish family back to California where he had some property, and seek work in the construction industry. His American nationality gave him an option not available to British oilmen.

Where I did find a bleak sense of defeatism was in the offices of the trade unions. Since the boom days the unions had suffered two grievous blows – the drop in the oil price with the massive local redundancies that caused, and Mrs Thatcher's successful assault on their powers. Their greatly altered fortunes were another of Aberdeen's microcosms of national trends. Tommy Lafferty, of the construction section of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, sat alone in his offices wearing a yellow sports shirt and chewing the end of a large cigar. His walls were decorated with photos of giant oil platforms and the Sullom Voe terminal on which he had worked; occasionally he left his desk to point out with pride one of the platforms. He had started life as a steel erector, travelling the country on big jobs such as power stations, a ‘gipsy' as he put it. His branch's heyday had been during the construction phase, when a man might earn comfortably over £20,000 as a rigger, steel erector or scaffolder. But there were no union agreements with the production companies, and a man doing identical work once a platform had come on stream might find his wages cut by half. It was a difficult industry to organize at the best of times; during a recession it was clearly a nightmare. An official would have to stay offshore for a continuous 28-day stretch to meet everyone employed on one structure.

Mr Lafferty was ‘angry, annoyed, disappointed' by the turn in events. He said: ‘Once they no longer needed us, we were thrown to the wind, all in the name of commercial enterprise.' All the perks had gone – the air fares, the paid waiting time, the generous notice, the taxis, the sick leave, the payments when the weather was too bad to put to sea. ‘I thought we had problems then. I wish to hell we could go back to them. Problems then were connected with working: now they're all to do with
not
working,' he said sombrely. ‘For every job that comes up, we've probably got twenty men chasing it. We get car loads, six at a time, travelling perhaps from Tyneside, sleeping rough. It's pathetic.' As we talked, the phone rang. It was one of his members who had been put ashore from a production platform for challenging the allocation of overtime. Although the man was not covered by an agreement, he was lucky in that Mr Lafferty knew someone with the company and had managed to get him reassigned to another platform. ‘Son, the protection I can offer you is nowt. Watch it, and don't put your head above the parapet. Keep your trap shut,' he said. It was not exactly fighting talk. To me he said sadly: ‘It couldn't happen onshore. The shop steward would get the lads together, explain what had happened, and stop it.'

Industrial tribunals heard almost daily claims of unfair dismissal. In one case an engineer said that he had been promised a salary rise after three months, which hadn't materialized. Instead he had been asked to take cuts in allowances and bonuses, which meant that his pay would be 27 per cent lower than when he started. The company also froze all other wages, closed their sales department and made some workers redundant. The engineer resigned, complaining of constructive unfair dismissal. The tribunal, however, ruled that the company had acted reasonably. ‘We lose nine out of ten such cases,' a union activist complained sadly.

Harry Bygate, who came to Aberdeen to organize the National Union of Seamen in 1974, is another of the old school. His name was scrawled in homely fashion in Biro on a block of wood at the front of his desk. Through the good years he had played to the old rules, and had built up membership on the supply vessels and rigs, and established closed shops. In 1987 his members were either redundant or accepting massive pay cuts. Contractors were bidding the market down. They obtained a list of names and addresses from the company they had undercut, and then offered the same men their jobs back at 20 to 30 per cent lower wages. ‘They all tell you the same story – they've dropped £100 a week,' Mr Bygate said gloomily. Jimmy, a sailor made redundant from anchor-handling tugs, had been paid £1,400 a month for two weeks on and two weeks off, with thirty-six days' holiday, up to six months' sick pay guaranteed, and private health insurance. The last offer he had was for £400 for two weeks on, with nothing for the two weeks off. He had no children, lived in a council house and his wife worked, so he told the agency to ‘stuff' their job. Other men with commitments were doing the same job for half the money. It was, he said, ‘raw greed' by the operators.

Two further victims of the shake-out sat in the offices of the Professional Divers' Association, and told stories of even greater financial falls. One, a Geordie, had dropped from £35,000 a year to £10,000: he was meeting his commitments because his wife was working. The other had suffered a compression-related injury – a ‘bubble on the brain' – that had caused him to walk off the end of the rig, and he could never dive again. He had been paid £35,000 a year for twelve years. Divers, they told me, had always been regarded as difficult customers – ‘awkward sods, expensive and unpredictable.' Now the boot was on the other foot. ‘Offshore the diving superintendent is god. If you show him any disloyalty, you've lost your job. If he said “jump!” you were supposed to say “How high, Sir?”' said one. Many divers, he added, came out of the services, and had a ‘backward approach' to trade unions. ‘We're only aristocrats now if we're rescuing people, otherwise you must be joking,' said the other.

Two or three freshly qualified divers ring the association each week looking for work. The divers complained that the men were being lured to the training schools on false pretences. ‘Training schools coerce people who have redundancy payments burning holes in their pockets. It could cost £6,500 for a gas diving course,' said one. ‘They're told that there's oodles of work in the Middle East or America, but the recession is worldwide. Qualified men with experience get whatever work is going here.' They believed that the profit from the North Sea had been squandered. ‘We've been flogging our guts away to support people on the dole,' said one, adding hastily that he was criticizing the government, not the unemployed. ‘The money should have been used to put more people to work,' he said. Like Professor Kemp, they also thought that Britain should have been more nationalistic. ‘All possible work should have gone to our people,' said one.

Aberdeen's recession hit the local service industries hard. Oil companies used to take whole floors of hotels on the off-chance someone might need a room. Men like divers were put up overnight on their way to and from the oil fields: taxis were taken as a matter of course. A partner in a men's clothing business told a story that illustrated the change. He saw in the street a man who had already bought eight suits from him in the first ten months of 1986. He racked his brains to remember whether there were any new styles in stock, expecting that to be his customer's first question. Instead the man greeted him: ‘Hello Mr D, you haven't got any jobs, have you?' This man had been eleven years with one company, and until the month before had been earning £2,100 a month. In the boom days the chief problem for the clothing stores was how to hold on to even the dimmest staff. ‘Mr D' remembered an eighteen-year-old getting a job offshore – ‘he was no Einstein, the kind of guy if you said “hello”, he'd be stuck for an answer' – who came back at the end of his first fortnight at sea with £150 in his pocket, which he showed to the other assistants, who became very despondent about their own comparatively meagre wages. Later the boss heard that the young man had fallen from a rig and been taken to hospital with hypothermia. ‘I cashed that in with the other lads as quick as I could,' he said. ‘They weren't so disgruntled then.' The income from Mr D's shops had fallen by 25 per cent – from an annual turnover of £1.3 million to £1.0 million – and they had had to lay off ten of their twenty-eight staff. ‘For the first time in our business lives we have moved back. When everyone's doing badly, you've got to sit it out. There's no point even in advertising,' he said philosophically.

One of Aberdeen's most discussed losers was publican Bob Paige. He also was philosophical: ‘I'm skint,' he said simply, ‘but the easiest thing would be to say the world's been unfair to me. Yes, one enterprise went wrong, but I have done some good things in my time.' Mr Paige bought a ‘spit and sawdust' city-centre pub, tarted it up, concentrating on good quality food and wine, threw out the pool table, barred the old regulars and the kids he darkly suspected of drug-taking. Within a few months he was out of business with his £100,000 house on the market to pay off his debts. He had had a good track record, running a successful ‘English-style' bar by the harbour, where he sold real ale in premises that had once been used for professional purposes by the town's whores. The boom ended exactly as his refurbished pub, Babbie Law's, opened. He said: ‘Oil companies knocked all the expense accounts on the head and opened cheap canteens,' and the restaurant side of the business, on which he had pinned his hopes, collapsed. He admitted to miscalculations, but blamed the recession for his woes: other pubs had since gone bust, and he was convinced the ‘trickle would become a flood'. His former customers argued that he killed Babbie Law's stone-dead with his changes.

Aberdeen Harbour celebrated its 850th anniversary in 1986; fish has been landed and sold in the town since medieval days. With the loss of fishing grounds like the Icelandic waters, the overfishing of those that remained, and high landing charges in Aberdeen (covered by the national dock labour scheme unlike Peterhead to the north, where charges were considerably lower), the industry had declined through the oil years. The large trawlers had been converted for use as standby rescue vessels, and many of the crews went to work in oil. Two thirds of Aberdeen's fish market lay idle most mornings. Tommy Symmer, who had been showing people round the fish dock for seventeen years, looked through his rheumy eyes across the open water to the far side of the Albert Basin and said: ‘One time you could have walked from bank to bank on fishing boats, no bother, no bother.' When I arrived shortly after dawn, there was one last boat, the
Hélène
from Peterhead, unloading. It had been a good morning, half a dozen others had been and gone. The previous day there had been just two boats.