The Matron of Sherwood Rise

Across from the Union office, on Nottingham’s Sherwood Rise, was this nursing home for the elderly.  Privately owned it employed some twenty or so care staff in a very large old Victorian rather splendid house with extensive gardens.      The care staff were, as is nearly always the case, underpaid and called upon to work excessive hours and not unnaturally, given that the union office was right across the road, they approached us for assistance and we signed them all up into the union.   Normally we only recruited public employees but were not averse to taking on  exploited employees working in comparative types of employment to that of our  public sector  membership.

The private owners of the nursing home were not well pleased at their employees all joining the union and although they met us and entered into wage negotiations they were clearly determined to weed out any union members from their workforce.     To this end they instructed the matron/manager of the nursing home to try and clear out any active trade unionists.

We had appointed one of the care staff, a mature lady in her 50’s as the shop steward and she was dead keen and took to the role like a duck to water.    But she fell foul of the matron who engineered her dismissal on trumped up charges of gross misconduct.    It was of course meant to be, and was, a message to those in the union that they should keep their heads down, leave the union and not rock the nursing home boat.

A strike was not on the cards and we had little choice but to go to the Industrial Tribunals to seek redress.   There was a provision in the relevant employment statutes  that outlawed discrimination and or victimisation against employees engaged in union work or who were so discriminated against or victimised  solely because of their union membership or activities.   So, we filed for unfair dismissal on exactly those grounds.

The owners appointed local solicitors to defend the claim and it duly came on for hearing at the Tribunal courts in Birbeck House on Burton street, Nottingham.

Their chief witness was the matron.   She was a young woman, very attractive, very dynamic and utterly ruthless in her management of the care staff.     She gave, on the first day of the Tribunal hearing, compelling evidence of misconduct by our shop steward, which on the basis of our instructions from our shop steward was false and a shield to cover  her victimisation  for being in the union and being an officer of the union.

I was to cross examine her upon her evidence when the Tribunal re-convened on a date some two weeks after she had given her evidence in chief.

The shop steward revealed to me, that the matron was not herself, above a bit of misconduct in the nursing home and that there existed photographs of her, in the bathrooms and bedrooms of the nursing home, published in a magazine called, well I can’t now remember the exact name of the magazine, there was nothing cryptic about it, something like “ Readers wives you’d love to shag”    

Well I was interested of course but our steward couldn’t remember when the edition of the magazine in question had been published.   “about a year ago” was as close as she could get.

There was a “dirty” magazine and video shop on Mansfield road, called the Cameo, and thus it was, that on official union duty,  I entered the said shop and asked the proprietor for a full years run of back copies of “Readers wives you’d like to Shag”

“It‘ll take a while” he said, “I’ll have to put in a  special order, we’ve got some “Readers daughter’s you’d like to shag, would they do?”

I was happy to wait for the special order and asked him to call me when they came in.  I left him with a copy of my union business card.

I think my secretary, Wendy, was rather suspicious when they finally arrived, but I assured her it was all for legitimate research.     I waded through the back copies looking for the matron.    Sure enough, there she was,  in all her glory.   Not just in one issue of the magazine, but in three.   I recall that the best image was of her wearing her matron’s cap in one of the nursing home bedrooms and carrying a coiled leather whip.  She was a woman of firm discipline.    I can’t quite remember whether there was any male elderly residents in the photographs, or indeed any female elderly residents, but they were, for my purposes the smoking gun.

I quite enjoyed drafting the letter to the Nursing home’s solicitors enclosing a copy of the magazine and advising them that I would need to cross examine their chief witness as to her own attitude towards gross misconduct.

Very quickly indeed, the case settled, and our shop steward was restored to her job.   The matron resigned and a degree of harmony retuned to the nursing home.

I met her, a couple of weeks later.  I was in the Victoria shopping centre buying a pair of shoes.    I failed to notice that she too was in the same shoe shop trying on a pair of high heels..      She spotted me and aggressively confronted me, hitting me on the arm with a shoe and shouting at me for being a sod.   It wasn’t a vicious assault, not  at all. In fact, it was a sort of friendly assault and she quickly agreed to come and have a coffee with me in a café next door to the shoe shop.   I could tell, over the cappuccino, from the spark in her eyes that I was in grave danger of being seduced by someone from the management class.    The image of the whip and the matron’s cap flashed across my mind and I made my excuses and left.

It was shortly after that I received a somewhat concerned note from the Union treasurer, John Bull who was querying an expenses claim for a years run of  “Readers wives you’d like to shag”    I spoke to him on the phone and assured him it was all above board and that the purchase had helped us win justice for a victimised shop steward.   To be honest, he was a bit ‘iffy about it and to this day I am pretty sure he didn’t believe me.   But he paid up.