The BBC's "Plays for Today" were often written from a left-wing viewpoint, and strikes and industrial disputes were a regular theme. Like "Leeds United!" from a couple of years later, "Stocker's Copper" is set around a piece of real-life working-class history, although in this case further back in the past. The strike featured in "Leeds United!" had taken place as recently as 1970, whereas "Stocker's Copper" is set in Cornwall during the 1913 strike by china clay workers.
The scriptwriter Tom Clarke has taken a few liberties with history. In the film the strikers are demanding recognition for their union and a pay rise from 12 to 25 shillings a week, a demand which would suggest that the men have little understanding of economics; I doubt if any employers could have afforded to pay their workers an increase of more than 100% at a time when the country was in negative inflation, meaning that prices were actually falling. In reality, the union's claim was for a more reasonable 25% from 20 to 25 shillings a week. The film also implies that the strike ended in defeat for the workers; although they returned to work before an agreement had been reached, their employers did in fact concede the claimed pay rise, and more, the following year.
Because the small Cornish force had little experience of policing strikes, specially trained police officers were sent to the county to keep order, mostly from South Wales which had a long history of (sometimes violent) industrial disputes. The story centres on the relationship which develops between Manuel Stocker, one of the strikers, and Herbert Griffith, one of the policemen. (How Manuel acquired his Spanish-sounding Christian name is never explained). The authorities had adopted the practice of billeting the "coppers"- British slang for policemen- police in local homes, including the homes of men who were on strike, and Manuel returns from the picket line to find that Herbert has been billeted with his family.
This sounds like a recipe for conflict, but Manuel does not object because he badly needs the money the government pay householders who have a policeman billeted with them. Moreover, at this stage the strike does not appear to have given rise to too much bad feeling and Herbert, himself a former steel worker, has some sympathy with the strikers. He notes that the working people of Cornwall have much in common with those of South Wales, including a love of singing and of Rugby Union (a largely middle-class game in other parts of Britain). An unlikely friendship grows up between the two men, but when the strike turns violent as the workers try and stop the employers bringing in blackleg labour, Herbert has to decide where his loyalties lie.
Clarke's sympathies are clearly with the strikers, men doing a demanding job of for a less than generous wage, but he and the director Jack Gold do not make the mistake (as some writers and directors of television drama, both in the seventies and more recently, have done) of making a one-sided piece of agitprop. He is more interested in human relationships than he is in ideology, and the violence which breaks out between the police and the strikers is less explicit than it probably would be in a modern drama. Clarke also does not try to exaggerate the poverty of the workers. By the standards of working-class Britons in the 1910s the Stockers have quite a reasonable standard of living, and this is something which influences Herbert's attitude to the strike. Compared to the blackened, grimy squalor of the South Wales mining valleys in which he grew up, life in the Cornish countryside seems idyllic.
There are two fine performances from Bryan Marshall as Manuel and Gareth Thomas, the future hero of "Blake's Seven", as Herbert, two young men with much in common and yet who find themselves on opposite sides in an increasingly acrimonious dispute. There is another good contribution from Malcolm Tierney (previously best known to me as Charlie Gimbert from "Lovejoy") as a charismatic Methodist clergyman (based on a real person) who supports the strikers' cause.
"Stocker's Copper" has not been seen on television since 1982 and has not been released on DVD. I suppose, however, that it has done better than many "Plays for Today" which have never been repeated since their first broadcast and some of which have become "lost films" due to the BBC's short-sighted policy of wiping videotapes in order to reuse them. Britain has a fine heritage of television drama, but for some reason we have neglected it and have never accorded it the same status as made-for-cinema feature films. There are, however, many such dramas which would benefit from wider exposure. This film is one of them. 8/10
