John Hamilton interview transcript
early family life and the rolling stonemasons
"I was pretty well born in this house. I'm an only boy - the only child in the family. My father was a monumental mason, like my grandfather, and they were the 'rolling stonemasons' of those days. They went over to America as 'rolling stonemasons', going from town to town, and he worked for a time on Harvard University when it was being built. My grandfather, equally a stonemason, worked on the English church in Paris and another near close example of their work, was in Hamilton Square in Birkenhead - there's a monumental piece of stonework in the middle of the square. Well my grandfather was the designer for the whole thing and my father did the plaques, and they were called a rolling stonemason you see, they went from job to job doing it.
My father got involved in the Trade Unions' work and he got a job going round the quarries getting the workers joining the Trade Unions. He then moved from there into the political life, Trade Union as a political business, and he became a lecturer for what was called the National Council of Labour Colleges, the NCLC, and the idea was to educate men, working men, in history, geography and so on. But of course their idea was to change the course of history, instead of the ordinary history that you would get pumped into you in schools about kings and queens and that, but economic history, the history of the working class and that set up a whole movement in the whole country. He used to go around to the miners' lodges and talk to them about the working conditions and the miners, they all had to pay a penny, you know, to attend, and that was his wages."
1927 - Labour, the orange and the green
"I can always remember when we had elections, which were very popular in those days, you know. My father was standing in St Domingo ward and he won the first Labour seat off the Protestants in 1927. St Domingo was a real protestant area, and the experience of that was amazing.
The year that my father got in, happened to be the year that Fred Robinson, another Labour man, got in, in Scotland Road division, Vauxhall area. The interesting thing was that Fred and Isaac Robinson, stood against a Catholic priest. The priest was standing for the council and they were Catholics but stood against a priest because they didn't believe that priests should interfere. (Laughs). And they won! That was, you know, a terrific experience, that a priest was defeated in his own parish, you know, by these two upstarts! (Laughs).
In those days, all the election counting of the votes was done in the Municipal Buildings in Dale Street. My father came out of the count highly jubilant. He was, sort of, chuffed with the idea 'I've beaten a protestant!' Only to see Fred Robinson running out of his room with a whole mass of women chasing him, because he'd beaten a priest, you see! (Laughs, loudly).
The next thing was, Fred was dashing out into Dale Street, and running to catch a tram, only to have his coat ripped off by these women who were howling at him. (Laughs).
Of course, after that, Archbishop Downey ordered that no Catholic priest in future would stand for council."
education, education, education
"I went to training college, as it was called in those days, to train to be a teacher - that was during the war period - and then I went into teaching just after the war. I went into one of the earliest comprehensive schools, in Kirkby. I remember the classes there, the children were coming in from the Scotland Road area being re-housed into Kirkby. When the first boy won a scholarship to Oxford the teachers cheered [laughs] 'we've done it' [laughs] 'we've got him in' and it was a wonderful feeling.
My father was in politics since 1927 and when he died I decided, I'd been in the background writing things for him and sort of being his political understudy, and I thought well I'll go in and carry on his work and particularly on education. I was getting interested in the idea of comprehensive schools and so I got involved in that after the war and I stood for the Council and got in, it was the Granby Ward.
Well I think the educational system, the comprehensive school system, would have been the best system eventually and you could have stepped up from there. It's a pity that its been down-graded by the present government. It's not a system of competition and they're destroying the sort of ethos that's in the schools and all we're getting is the sort of competition coming in back again, positions of success and failure."
1983 to 1987 - Liverpool City Council versus Margaret Thatcher's government
"We got to the point, when the Thatcher government got in - the Callaghan government lost - and she started putting the pressure on with the Rate Support Grant. You can manipulate the Rate Support Grant quite easily, Labour had done it but she did it with a vengeance. So that the cities or towns in the south of England like Brighton and Eastbourne and so on, was actually floating in money, whereas we had been cut in order to balance them out. The result was of course, in the industrial north we were having to put rates up and cut our services. Of course the general public doesn't see all that, and see the mechanics of the whole thing, and of course we were getting the blame for poor services with high rates.
It came the year when they cut 30 million pounds off us in the Rate Support Grant and that was the particular year when they were offering us a Garden Festival site and the cost of that, which the government would pay for, was 30 million pounds. So they were shifting it from one pocket to another. They were getting the credit for the Garden Festival, which they were taking off our money which we needed for basic services and so on, and again we were in the situation of Liverpool, the last in the queue as it were, still standing there by our faith, and that. And we went right to the bitter end and got expelled from the Council by the High Court.
I always remember Lord Woolf who tried us with the Lord High Justice, you know the Lord Chief Justice at the present moment, saying that 'it didn't matter how much the people needed the money, it didn't matter whether they'd lost their homes or not, it didn't matter whether they were hungry or not, our job is not to go bankrupt, not to exceed more than you're entitled to and you've got to let people go unemployed, and to go without houses - that's not your worry - you have to obey the law and let those people suffer'."
what is militancy?
"An awful lot of people in the Labour group, like myself, who had no thought about militant as such, just didn't like the whole situation we were in and we were prepared to stand up to it. You might as well say that Sylvia Pankhurst was a militant because she was demanding votes for women. Every sort of step forward in political life has been a 'militancy' that has done it, in a sense, and I put the word 'militancy' in inverted commas. It's not really a militancy, it's really a sort of social feeling.
Mrs Thatcher experienced that, bear in mind that we came in on the council here, in that period where we came very near to getting the majority at the time, when there were riots in Liverpool, with Black people, and if you like you could call that militancy. And Mrs Thatcher when she came to Liverpool said that it was the most frightening period of her life, she really thought that a revolution was starting when it had started in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and so on with Black riots, and she could see it, and she thought it was the end of her days."
community spirit
"Community life is changing, there's no longer the same type of community life. If I go back to my childhood and the old Coronation Streets of that period, there was a community spirit, they helped one another, because they were in the same stressful position as each other, and they knew what it meant to be helped when you were in real trouble. Now that's something we can't lose, we mustn't lose. But at the present time, we're all isolated and insulated from one another and only concerned about getting on ourselves, rather than thinking of the whole group, the community is breaking up.
And so of course there's no politics, nobody's interested in politics, because they don't worry about money in that sense, or my job, 'so long as I'm alright I'm not worried and I don't care a damn about the politics and what's going to happen next'. It's very short-sighted and it's very like the sort of American system where people are just sort of going for easy money, easy quick gain and I think that's going to be to the detriment of society."
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