Mary Manning

We didn't know what was going on in South Africa.

At the time as well, there was a media blackout from South Africa, so there wasn't much news coming out.

We would have heard of Nelson Mandela, heard of Steve Biko, but that would have been probably as far as it went for most of us.

So when this letter came in, we were kind of, first of all, we had to try and figure out how to pronounce apartheid because we didn't know how to pronounce it even.

And literally we were trying to pronounce apartheid.

How do you say that?

Apartheid?

Unions in South Africa had asked for a global boycott of their goods to try and isolate South Africa at the time.

That was basically what the policy said, that we would not handle goods that came from South Africa.

We would boycott the South African goods.

And they told us we can't do that, which didn't go down very well.

It was kind of, it was more of an up yours to them, to be honest with you, because as I said, they wouldn't meet with us.

They wouldn't talk to us.

So we thought, OK, well, if you don't talk to us, we'll sort you out.

We told the management, look, we've had a policy from our union and we're going to follow this policy.

Once we told them that we had received this policy and we were going to follow it,

They started to bring us up to the office and threaten us with serious consequences of what they said.

They never actually said what they were going to do.

That's the way dones work.

You do as you're told or else.