Ricky Tomlinson: ‘I was one of the last political prisoners in the UK’

Ricky Tomlinson has made his family promise that the inscription on his gravestone will say: ‘One of the last political prisoners to be imprisoned in England’. “Because that’s what I was,” he says.

Best known for playing Jim in The Royle Family, Tomlinson is this week appealing a conviction from 1973 for conspiracy to intimidate during the national building workers’ strike. Long before he was an actor, Tomlinson was a plasterer and trade unionist.

The 81-year-old spent two years in prison for his involvement in a picket on the Brookside housing estate, Telford, on September 6 1972, after which 24 trade unionists were charged with unlawful assembly, conspiracy to intimidate and affray. Tomlinson was sentenced to two years in prison, but has always denied allegations that he committed an offence.

“It was a political trial,” says Tomlinson.

This week, the Shrewsbury 24, which includes Tomlinson, finally have the chance to appeal their convictions. After nearly half a century, the case is being heard at the Court of Appeal today on the grounds of new evidence that original witness statements were destroyed by police at the time of the trial. Tomlinson’s legal team, from The Public Interest Law Centre, will also argue that the screening of documentary The Red Under the Bed during the trial unfairly influenced the jury. Critical of the trade union movement, it showed footage of people marching in Shrewsbury, including Tomlinson and four other defendants.

“It’s a major miscarriage of justice,” says Paul Heron, lawyer for Tomlinson and co-founder of the Public Interest Law Centre. “We hope that the Shrewsbury 24 are now fully exonerated. They are only guilty of unionising and winning.”

When we speak over Zoom in the week before the appeal, Tomlinson is animated, laughing with a wide-open smile as he jokes about some of the darkest moments of his life.

From a working class background in Liverpool, Tomlinson joined the building trade in his teens and trained as a plasterer. His work informed his politics. After a brief stint as a supporter of the far right and the National Front – “It only lasted a few months and it was about immigration,” he says – he soon swung to the left. He became an ardent trade unionist, keen to improve conditions at work.

“Everything was wrong on the building sites,” says Tomlinson. “They were the killing fields. In those days, the death rate was equal to the farming and mining industries put together. Someone died practically every day. And if they weren’t dead, they’d be severely injured.”

Tomlinson remembers walls falling down on colleagues and people falling off scaffolding. An injury on the Wrexham Bypass stands out – he recalls two brothers screaming from a ditch they had been digging. One of them was bleeding severely.

“His brother had hit him in the head with a shovel accidentally,” says Tomlinson. “There was blood everywhere. I tried to get him to come to hospital but he wouldn’t. He said he didn’t want to lose the money. So he worked like that all day, covered in blood. It was absolutely dreadful.”

There were also scant provisions on site for construction workers in the 1960s and 1970s.

“If it rained, you got soaking wet at 8am and you had to work in those clothes till 5pm or you lost your money,” he says. “If you wanted to go to the toilet, you went out into the bushes.”

One of his first victories was to get a toilet installed on site. “After months of negotiation, we got one toilet for 200 men,” he says. “But there was still nowhere to properly wash or dry yourself. The office staff had their own cabin with hot and cold water and tea-making facilities.”

In 1972, building workers organised a national strike that lasted for 12 weeks. By then, Tomlinson was a union representative for north Wales.

“We wanted £30 a week for 35 hours work,” he says. “And better health conditions. In all my years in the building game, I’ve never met anyone who wants to be on strike. You go on strike as a last resort, because there’s no other way of getting your grievances sorted out.”

Tomlinson paints a picture of the strikes as bolshy but not violent. He would put his son, Clifton, who was about four, on his shoulders and take him to the pickets every morning.

On the morning of the strike at the Brookside estate, Tomlinson left Clifton at home, because the journey was too long. But the rest of the day went down like any other, he says, denying that it turned violent.

“There was a little bit of shoving and pushing and I suppose the odd door frame knocked over, but nothing that didn't happen every single day,” Tomlinson recalls. “There was a shadow bank of 80 police. They never took a name, they never took an address, they never took a statement. They never cautioned anyone and they never arrested anyone.”

But months later, there was a knock at Tomlinson’s door. He was under arrest. “I got the shock of my life,” he says. “I’d never had any involvement with the police before that.”

Tomlinson was one of 24 people charged with unlawful assembly and affray, among other allegations. In a trial that lasted 55 days he was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, one of the longest handed out to the men who became known as the Shrewsbury 24.

“I think the British police are the best in the world,” says Tomlinson. “But on that particular day they let the whole force down.”

Before his sentencing, Tomlinson gave a rousing speech in which he said the trial had been political. “The judge was banging his gavel, he didn’t like it,” he says. “I said to the jury: ‘You’ve been kidded here’.”

At the appeal, which concludes on Thursday 4 January, the Public Interest Law Centre and Shrewsbury 24 Campaign are arguing that statements used in the trial from 700 witnesses changed from the first draft to the third but that police destroyed the original copies and didn’t produce them at the trial.

The screening of The Red Under the Bed documentary will also be used as evidence of political influence during the trial. Two informers and an undercover officer acting as an agent provocateur are said to have been involved in the strikes.

Tomlinson has applied for core participant status at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but was refused. He is appealing the decision.

Throughout, Tomlinson has maintained the bold sense of humour he has become well known for in The Royle Family. Once, in prison, when he learnt the governor was holding two pictures of his children that his wife had sent, Tomlinson lined up on a Sunday for inspection with just a red tie on – completely naked otherwise.

“Half an hour later, the weasel came back with my photograph,” he recalls, bringing his hands to his face to mimic the whiskers of a weasel. “When I look back, I don’t know how I had the bottle to do it, kid. But I did, and I got my photograph. That was just another little escapade.”

The impact on Tomlinson’s life was material – his first marriage broke up and his cottage, which he spent years renovating, was repossessed because he couldn’t find work after leaving prison. He has a lasting phobia of cockroaches because of conditions in his cell.

Tomlinson’s life turned around after he answered an advert in the Liverpool Echo for an audition at London Weekend Television, which led to his acting career.

But for his friends and colleagues, the impact of the convictions was permanent. They were blacklisted from work on the controversial lists drawn up by businesses and undercover police, and lost their homes.

“Some of those lads suffered dreadfully,” he says. “Some of them have become recluses, they’re like bloody hermits. Some of them are in bad health. It’s absolutely awful.”

He adds: “I feel for the lads who are dead. They got no recognition. Some of them lived in squalor. They did nothing wrong, but they couldn’t work because they were blacklisted.”

It is for these men that Tomlinson is fighting his conviction this week, alongside 13 other defendants and their families from the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign. One person who is always in Tomlinson’s mind is his friend Des Warren, who went to jail with him.

“He was a big, strong lad when we went to jail,” says Tomlinson. “A steel fixer. When he came out, he was like a bloody scarecrow.

“He had such a bad time in prison. They were giving him the sleeping draught. He never worked again – and now, Dezzie is dead. That to me is the biggest tragedy of this whole thing.”

Warren won £3,000 in compensation for ill-treatment in prison before his death.

Tomlinson, who recently lost a brother to Covid, isn’t attending court in person, but will be following proceedings from afar.

“We’ll have a good go,” says Tomlinson. He admits: “It won’t alter my life one bit,” but it will mean a lot to friends and colleagues whose lives were destroyed in 1973.

Tomlinson is comfortable now and is pleased to be able to give his four grandchildren and great grandson things that he never had growing up. “It hasn’t exactly been rags to riches, but it’s been rags to a second hand suit,” he says. “This is the latter part of a long journey. I’m 82 in September and you never know what’s around the corner.”

Cara McGoogan tells the story of the Undercover Policing Scandal in Bed of Lies, a gripping seven-part Telegraph podcast. Listen to the first episode on the audio player above, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.