Stand & Deliver: Frances Poet on dramatising the Greenock Lee Jeans Sit-In of 1981

For the next seven months, if Wallace was not shacking up in the factory, she was out on the road, drumming up support from trades unions and discovering her gift for a galvanising speech. Quite a leap from the mischievous youngster she had been on the day the occupation began.

“We thought it was funny,” she says today, looking out across the Clyde and welling up with the memory of those formative months. “You’re still at home with your parents and you were classed as a child. We were young and we went along with it. Then, as time went on, we realised there was more to it than that.”

This was 1981, in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, the big battles with workers in heavy industry still ahead. The sit-in by the predominantly female workforce became a cause celebre, not least because they so clearly had right on their side. The company had claimed the factory was not profitable: what it meant was that by shifting production to Northern Ireland, it could claim lucrative government subsidies.

This was an injustice and, with unemployment among women in Greenock standing at more than 13 per cent, the workers knew they had a lot to defend.

Wallace loved the opportunity to raise awareness of their fight. “I always liked an audience,” she says. “This would be halls chock-a-block with men. I enjoyed the buzz and the interest in what we were doing. As time went on, I became more militant. It was right for me to be doing what I was doing.”

Being young and spirited, Wallace loved the thrill of it all. On the first night, she came up with the solution to the lack of food. With a male colleague, she crawled through a skylight, across the roof and down a drainpipe and put in an order for 240 fish suppers.

“They needed a volunteer and I said I knew exactly how to do it because I’d watched the workmen using a wee door,” she says. “Myself and wee Hughie Malcolm both went down and that gave me a chance to tell my mum what was happening and why we weren’t home. She was going off her head because our tea was ready!”

Later, she and her friends smuggled a sunlamp into the factory. They had the time and they wanted to look nice – until one of them got sunburn. “When we meet up now, we have a good laugh about it,” she says.

You can see why this David-and-Goliath struggle would have appealed to playwright Frances Poet, who was told about the dispute by journalist Paul English. Here was a true story with a built-in victory: after a management buy-out, the workers were reinstated. It was a tale that could demonstrate the power of communal action in the face of corporate greed.

But the playwright had a problem. Working on Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In for Glasgow’s Tron and the National Theatre of Scotland, she realised the dramatic highlights were unevenly distributed. “There’s a lot that happens at the beginning,” says Poet. “They’ve barricaded the managers out, they spend the first long night in the factory and there’s all sorts of excitement. Then they settle in for seven months. Day to day, you’ve got people knitting, cooking, maintaining machinery.”

One of her solutions was to focus on life outwith the factory, including the campaigning work undertaken by Wallace, played by Chiara Sparkes in Jemima Levick’s production. “Maggie stepped up, matured and went out campaigning, starting with an SNP conference in Aberdeen,” says Poet. “These young women were seeing the world in a way they’d never seen it before. Maggie was leading an exciting, dynamic life.”

Another solution was to lace the story with period songs, including the rousing Adam and the Ants hit that lends the play its title. “It’s this glorious way to give us access to the period,” she says. “There were some real bangers in 1981 and they have a new-decade energy, a confident new sound that echoes the story of the young, predominantly female workforce finding their voice.”

Having talked to the women and drawn on the academic research of the University of Stirling’s Dr Andy Clark, who grew up in Greenock, she hopes the play will offer political inspiration. “The fact that this story feels so resonant 45 years on is because not enough has changed,” she says. “If there is a way of eking out more profit, even though it’s going to harm human beings and the environment, we go for the profit. We’re still living in that world. This story with its win allows us to think we can change things.”

Not that she is blind to the realities. The women’s victory is well worth celebrating but it was short lived: within two years, the management called in the receivers and the factory closed. And although most of the 140 workers still occupying were reinstated, two of them were not. Along with fellow campaigner Catherine Robertson, Wallace lost her job. “I’d done that much talking that they saw me as a threat,” she says. “They were feart in case I’d take on another sit-in.”

She also lost the privilege of being with her workmates, the people she had got to know so intensely over those months, a loss she is feeling all over again now the play is being staged. “I still feel it raw and emotional,” says Wallace. “It wasn’t about mouthing off, it was about what I believed in: fighting for your rights and not being bullied.”

Would she do it again? “Aye, I would do it in a heartbeat, I really would,” she says. “It was the making of me.”

Stand & Deliver: The Lee Jeans Sit-In is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from 24 April until 9 May and touring until 10 June. This feature was produced in association with the National Theatre of Scotland.

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