In England’s second-largest city, Richard Albert “Dick” Etheridge was a legend in the trade union movement. There, Etheridge, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, sat for nearly thirty years as the works convenor —  the chief shop steward —  at Birmingham’s biggest auto plant, Austin Longbridge, from which twenty thousand workers churned out thousands upon thousands of the iconic Mini car.

The Longbridge plant had become a byword for industrial militancy by the time Etheridge stood down as its convenor in 1975. The plant is often the first place that comes to mind when Britons of a certain age reminiscence about how “the unions ran the country” back in the 1970s. Built in 1906, it was the kind of place that racked up hundreds of walkouts, sit-downs, and strikes, year after year, as workers and bosses fought out disagreements great and small. The union wielded so much power that company bosses liked to joke that Etheridge’s successor, Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson, would “run the factory and use the managers as consultants.”