The Rank and File

The Rank and File is a 1971 filmed television play written by Jim Allen and directed by Kenneth Loach. It was shown on 20 May 1971 on BBC 1 as part of the Play for Today series. It is included in the Ken Loach at the BBC boxset released in 2011, although the recording is of unusually poor quality for a DVD release.

In 1970, an unofficial strike took place at the Pilkington Glass Works in St. Helens, Lancashire, initially after an error in wage packets but the strikers later demanded a wage rise to £25 per week. The cause was described in the New Statesman as ‘the cumbersome structure of different bonus and shift payments which meant that men doing similar jobs took home different and unpredictable pay packets’. Six thousand workers struck for two months. The BBC insisted that the name of the company be changed from "Pilkington" to "Wilkinson", and the location moved from St. Helens to the Staffordshire Potteries. However, the film begins with an on-screen caption that reads, "A film based principally on events that took place in Lancashire in the Spring of 1970".

The Trotskyist dramatist Jim Allen visited the strikers to show support and showed them the film The Big Flame, which he had written and Ken Loach had directed. Jim Allen has given an account of how he was subsequently persuaded to write a similar script about the strike at Pilkington.

This man became the inspiration for the character Charlie in the film.

The strike took place near the end of Harold Wilson's first government. The unofficial strikes and student protests in France in May 1968 were influential amongst the left-wing in the UK, and there was a subsequent increase in strikes taken outside of the union framework, most notably the miners' strike of October 1969. The union at Pilkington, the General and Municipal Worker’s Union, was strongly supportive of Wilson and did not support the strike launched by the glass workers in 1970.

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