Severity: Notice
Message: Only variable references should be returned by reference
Filename: core/Common.php
Line Number: 239
Written by Ron Noon at 23:24 on Friday, February 20th 2009
When the refinery closed sacks of unsorted documents were “transferred to the home of John Maclean, the continuing Secretary of these changing bodies”. It was in that Bellairs council home off Queens Drive Liverpool that J.A. Watson (Company historian and former chemist) was allowed “to sort through some of it” before “the several hundred weight of papers” were eventually transferred to the archives of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, now Liverpool Museums. “What is most strikingly apparent is how the initial committee, starting with small beginnings eventually took upon itself the responsibility of having a finger in many pies, so much so that that eventually John Maclean and Albert Sloane, a future co-Chairman, were working practically full time on the affairs of the Committee or its associates.”
One of my early interviews with John provided a tangible archival task which is “unfinished business”. He told me that in the plastic bags of documents, (subsequently decanted into brown museum boxes), I would find “exercise books. They were my day to day diary, every meeting I went to I scribbled something in. It was my bible, I was able to refer to dates and times and places…Whenever we had conversations like we’re having now about the past, I never trusted me memory. I always said, right hang on a minute and flick back’.”
He then exhorted what he regarded as the “single biggest task” which is quite obviously “to collate all that material. Do it in date order so that it starts to make sense of the story. We changed our name on route quite a few times. It started off as a management trade union committee. We soon ditched the management… and they were a bit of a hindrance to us, so we formed an action committee”!
This was Scouse McLean, named after his dad’s favourite working class hero, from Glasgow’s Red Clydeside, and a scouser that loved irony and Shakespeare! “And then we turned track again to get rid of the word action, because we’d decided that we were going to go political and there were action committees all over the place that were making rude noises and we were n’t rude people. We were nice people. We wanted to do it the polite way and get introductions going round. It worked. We were n’t very polite people, we were n’t very nice people. We had to pretend to be. And we ended up meeting Ambassadors, going over to Brussels. We became an essential part of all the discussions which took place. None of them took place without us except those that took place between Tate & Lyle as a company wriggling and squirming to try and get what they could out of it, and at the same time they regarded us as a tool that they could use, and we regarded them as a tool that we could use. Our objective would be retention of jobs and the place. Their objective was the retention of their profit centre.”