FROM strike-breaker to striker, Gordon Pender has been on both sides of the firemen’s dispute in the past 25 years.
In the 1977 national walk-out he was a 20-year-old private in the Royal Corp of Transport mobilised to drive Green Goddesses in Chipping Ongar, Essex. Yesterday he was spending his second day on the picket line with Blue Watch outside Bellshill Fire Station in Lanarkshire.
Mr Pender, 45, has been a fireman for 21 years. The seeds of what was to become his career were sown in the dark days of that last strike. As a young soldier based in Colchester in 1977, he was brimming with enthusiasm when duty called. “When we first found out about it we were excited. It was a change