A new British film tells how a group of striking women were instrumental in furthering the campaign for equal pay. Steve Pratt talks to the film-makers determined to bring the forgotten story to a wide audience.

CALENDAR Girls director Nigel Cole wasn’t interested in delivering a history lesson or another bleak lament about British working class life. Quite the opposite. “I wanted to make a film that finally, after 42 years, celebrates something great that happened,”

he says.

Made In Dagenham is a reminder of the largely-forgotten story of how 187 machinists at the Ford plant went on strike in 1968 and were instrumental in the campaign for equal pay for women.

When Labour minister Barbara Castle took up their cause, it led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

Today, there is still inequality but that militant action by those Essex women was an important first step in getting legislation.

A radio programme that producer Stephen Woolley heard sparked the idea for the film.

The show reunited women strikers from Dagenham to talk about their fight with management.

“It was really funny,” he says. “I just loved the voices. I come from a part of London not far from Dagenham and it reminded me of my aunts and nan. I suppose that humour pulls them through. I’d forgotten how funny and humorous people could be in these terrible working conditions and faced with this inequality of pay.

“Instead of lying down and doing nothing about it, they said okay, we’re not going to work for a while. I didn’t know they’d done it. I thought I knew all about the Sixties through the films I’ve done – Scandal, Stoned, Backbeat.

I thought, ‘How come I don’t know about this?’.”

He played a recording of the show to fellow producer Elizabeth Carlsen to discover she knew little about the subject as well. “Who would have thought that a group of uneducated – in the traditional sense – women who left school very early and went straight to work in a factory were instrumental in the campaign for equal pay,” she says.

“They weren’t political animals, they weren’t radical students, they didn’t have radical professors getting them to read Marx or Hegel.

They were seamstresses who considered them selves to be skilled, more skilled than the floorsweepers, and felt they weren’t being treated fairly.”

William Ivory was commissioned to write a script and Cole, who made Calendar Girls, signed to direct. Sally Hawkins, from Mike Leigh’s film Happy-Go-Lucky, plays Rita, the worker who becomes the strikers’ leader in the fight for equality after the machinists, producing seat covers for cars, are regraded as unskilled.

Miranda Richardson co-stars as Labour politician Barbara Castle, who took up the women’s cause and helped create the Equal Pay Act that, in theory, put women on a par with men.

Cole thought the irreverent fun the women had in telling their story on the radio set the tone for the picture. “It unlocked the whole idea of how you could make a film about the creation of the Equal Pay Act 1970 – which doesn’t sound very cinematic – and bring it to a big audience, not make it a little niche film,” he says.

“I wouldn’t have been interested in preaching to the converted, making the kind of film that only spoke to those interested in the history of the trades unions or had an axe to grind about the politics of the time.

“I wanted to make a film that shouted very loudly to the world: look at these women and look at the brilliant thing they did. It all came from hearing the voices, the laughter in the studio.”

FOUR of the original strikers, now in their 80s, helped the film-makers with their research.

Cole points out that many of their children and grandchildren didn’t know the story and what they’d achieved. “Their daughters were coming out of the screening saying, ‘Did you really do that?’, and they were so proud,” says Woolley.

“The odd thing was they didn’t leave the cinema.

The film finished, the credits rolled and they loved that Sandie Shaw did the end song because for them she’s the ultimate Dagenham girl who was plucked to superstardom from Ford Dagenham where she worked.

“The lights went up and they started talking like they were at home. What did you think, did that really happen to you? After about 15 minutes I had to go and tell them they had to leave the cinema.”

Cole was intrigued that after they won their campaign and got guarantees from Barbara Castle that change would happen they returned to their normal lives and factory work.

“Perhaps in a modern era they’d all have reality shows or make an album. They didn’t do it to put themselves on the map, to make themselves famous or out of their own vanity,” he says.

“They simply did it because they were annoyed at how they were being paid and once they got that sorted out, they went back to their lives. That just shows how little vanity they had and how they were doing it for the cause, because it was right and not because they had tasted power.

“It’s a great tribute to them. The fact that the story has gone untold is partly due to the fact they’re women, and women tend to get written out of history, and partly because they haven’t sought fame or any kind of glory.

“I’m pleased to be part of the team that gives them their little moment of fame because they deserve it.”

■ Made In Dagenham (15) is in cinemas now.