Campaigners are once again pressing for the names of the so-called metric martyrs to be cleared. The group were market traders who were prosecuted for selling fruit, vegetables and fish in pounds and ounces rather than in kilograms and grams, because doing so broke European Union law at the time. Decades on from those convictions, supporters argue the traders were punished for standing up to rules that many regarded as common-sense British traditions.
At the centre of the renewed effort is Neil Heron, who helped launch the metric martyrs campaign and who is also a patron of the British Weights and Measures Association. He took up the cause after his friend, the greengrocer Steve Thoburn, was prosecuted for selling bananas by the pound instead of the kilogram. Heron has been pushing for the convictions to be lifted ever since.
He traces the start of the saga to a single day in Thoburn's shop. By his account, around 26 years ago two trading standards officers and two police officers walked in and threatened the trader with arrest if he did not hand over his scales, because they weighed in imperial measures. That confrontation set off a battle that would draw national attention.
Heron says there were five original metric martyrs, and that four of them are still alive. Steve Thoburn has since died, but John Dove, Julian Harman, Colin Hunt and Janet Devers remain, with Devers the last to be prosecuted, in 2008. According to Heron, all of them still carry criminal convictions against their names, which is why the campaign is now seeking a posthumous pardon as well as the clearing of the others.
For Heron, the wider point was about how the rule came into force. He says a directive from Brussels was nodded through Parliament in 21 minutes with just 14 members of Parliament present, with little discussion and no real debate, and that it had never appeared in a party political manifesto. The change, he argues, was imposed rather than chosen, and people were never asked.
When the deadline arrived on January 1, 2000, it became a criminal offence to use imperial measures for trade. Heron, who was a fishmonger at the time, says trading standards came into his own shop and told him to change his scales or they would return to take them, even as customers were asking to be served in imperial. It was then, he recalls, that Thoburn rang him and asked for help getting his scales back.
Heron says he warned Thoburn the case would make him the most famous greengrocer in the world, and that within an hour satellite trucks had gathered behind the shop, turning the dispute into what he describes as the people versus the establishment. Underlying it all, he says, was a court case in Sunderland that, in the words of Judge Bruce Morgan, came down to who governs Britain. He notes the pretrial hearing began before a lay bench of three magistrates before a judge was brought in to replace them, with the council instructing a high-profile European lawyer to argue its side.