I was out on the stones for the whole of the 1960 strike,like a lot of others I was flat broke and living on good will. I was amazed at the bitterness shown by some men toward the scabs. I was of a left wing persuasion (dad had been a shop steward) but I could never countenance violence against scabs. I am not a starry eyed dreamer, I have grown up with The British Road to Socialism,The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist's et al,but I was horrified to see an attack on a litttle Scots guy aboard the Carinthia . His crime was to hav e worked while we were out;his punishment was a savage kicking ,in the dark, as we sailed down the Mersey. I did intervene because my whole upbringing led me to eschew violence. I have met men who carried little black books which contained the names of scabs, I detested them. I was a socialist and a trade unionist ,and in my experience this type of creature never fought for the rights of mankind ,they just sought to perpetrate violence against those weaker than themselves. And before you ask, I was never a Bosses man, just someone who believed in a square deal,
BrianD