Tribute to My Father: Ministry of Labour, Wiltshire

Told as a tribute to my Father, my story is a recollection of a series of events that initially occurred while he was serving as a Deployment Officer in the (then) Ministry of Labour (MoL) in an office at Hawthorn near Corsham in Wiltshire during WW2 and some years after the War as a Branch Manager in the nearby town of Melksham.

It all started one morning (exactly when I cannot recall) when my Father received an order to make arrangements to move a large number of Dockers from a Port on the west coast of Scotland down to Avonmouth near Bristol. No precise reason for this re-deployment of workers was supplied so he took it that the Port of Avonmouth was soon to receive a substantial amount of cargo that would need additional labour to get it unloaded.
At this point I should point out that my Father’s job as a Deployment Officer was one that required him to remain impassionate and unaffected by the degree of distress that the movement of labour had on the people directly involved or their immediate families. In this respect my Father was arguably not the best choice for the job because he was actually a very sensitive and often emotional chap, but that was ‘the job’ so he just had to grin and bear it, keep the goings on secret and try to sleep at night after he had been involved in such activities.

The exact way in which events like this one were arranged is unknown to me but I do know that it meant organising the rail/road permits plus suitable accommodation at Avonmouth (in this case) for the Dockers when they arrived. Bearing in mind the level of communications available at the time the logistics and organisation must have made it a formidable task, nevertheless it all took place. It was normal to inform the local Ministry of Labour Branch Manager that an event like this was about to take place and leave it to him to follow through from there. This done, my Father passed on the information to the Avonmouth MoL branch and got on with his work as usual.

Incidentally, it was an accepted fact that people who had jobs classified as a ‘reserved occupation’ could be ordered to move to other parts of the country at virtually a moment’s notice, no questions asked, but when a large force of hard nosed Scottish Dockers are moved from one end of the country to the other the atmosphere when they arrived in Avonmouth must have been pretty highly charged but just the same under control.

About six days after the Dockers arrived at Avonmouth my Father received a frantic telephone call from the local MoL Branch Manager who informed him that none of the redeployed Dockers had had any work to do since they arrived and neither was there any likelihood of anything for them to do in the foreseeable period. Things had got to the point where they were now in fighting mood and ready to take the law into their own hands and return to Scotland unless something was done very soon!
My Father reported the situation to his superior who detailed him to go over to Avonmouth and “get things sorted out”.
We lived in Bath during WW2, Father never had a car and was unable to drive so he left early the next morning taking the Train and Bus to Avonmouth where he had arranged to meet with his colleague the Branch Manager before meeting with the Dockers. Somehow word had got out that my Father was on his way and he was confronted outside the MoL Office by all of the Dockers he’d been instrumental in redeploying on what appeared to be a purposeless mission.
Now, I have to say that one of my Father’s unsung attributes during his time in MoL was that he was by nature a very good negotiator having had to face up to the problems of penniless unemployed Coal Miners in Somerset during the 1930’s who needed and deserved benefit but were ill advised by their employers. This ability was again put to good use, he managed to make himself heard and asked the Dockers to select a few men who they were willing to trust and this done they disappeared into the MoL office to ‘have a chat’. What was said during this meeting is unknown but Father managed, if only temporarily, to calm things down. I doubt he had much of a foundation on which to keep their trust, nonetheless, the situation was contained and the Dockers returned to their enforced idleness for the time being and Father returned to his office at Hawthorn to report the state of affairs.

Whether it was that his superior had taken action or that ‘someone out there’ had been with him in his time of need we’ll never know but within a couple of days Father received the order to send the whole contingent of Scottish Dockers back home and he rapidly made all of the arrangements.

This was to be the last he would hear about this incident for the duration of the War. However once the War was over (as I said at the start) Father was himself put in charge of a MoL Office in Melksham and as a result he had to attend regular Regional Managers meetings in Bristol. It was at one such meeting that they were addressed by the then Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, Sir Godfrey Ince - whose name I recall readily because he was the Special Guest of my Employer and who presented me with my Engineering Apprentice Indentures at an annual event in Cheltenham. My Father came to my presentation and related this whole story as a result of seeing the Special Guest. However, to return to the final part of this story, during Sir Godfrey’s address to the Regional Managers meeting in Bristol he took the opportunity to thank those people who unknowingly had served their country in various covert ways during WW2 and went on to mention one particular incident about the apparently pointless redeployment of a number of Scottish Dockers to the local Port of Avonmouth. He went on to mention that we had been losing a number of cargo ships (nothing to do with the main convoys in the North Atlantic) mysteriously but very accurately, from a timing point of view, sunk by German U-Boats hence espionage was suspected. So, a sprat to catch a mackerel was launched and this redeployment operation was devised, the informer was caught and possibly a U-Boat sent to the bottom by one of our Navy Boats in the approaches to the Bristol Channel.

The bottom line of this story is that many people were heroes often in unknown ways during WW2 and it makes me proud of the part my Father played during that dark and daunting period without (like many others) receiving or expecting any recognition.

Dedicated to the memory of Alfred Leonard Styles 1893 — 1976 from his Son Roy and sent for inclusion in the BBC World War 2 memoirs.

9th November 2003

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