Long Road from Jarrow

by Stuart Maconie

  Just as it did when the marchers left Chesterfield, a foreign conflict rages and preoccupies the commentariat as I set out for Mansfield. The headlines I’d scanned on the newsstands of WH Smith all talked of the start of ‘the Battle of Mosul’ with Iraqi state forces hoping to soon retake the stronghold of the ISIS Islamic State army. Not long after, the same headlines would be largely repeated, this time referring to the Syrian government’s attempt to retake Aleppo from rebel and Islamic State troops. What was once Syria’s second city was now a ruined husk of shattered buildings and lives over which the West watched in impotence, largely. But there was also clamorous contradiction and confusion. As in 1936, emotional appeals and accusations could be heard on every side. Then, some on the left like Frank Graham, active in the Newcastle branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, went to fight in Spain having been scathing and dismissive of the purpose or efficacy of Jarrow’s ‘non-political march’.

  Intractable, impenetrable, bloody. Reading the various papers of different political stripes that morning in Chesterfield brought me to only one sure conclusion, namely that the Syrian conflict is one that makes reasonable people despair and leads one to regard with suspicion anyone who claims to know right from wrong. This war appears to be one between (at least) two sets of horribly bad guys with a great many innocent people caught between their competing murky ideologies. This is my very limited understanding of it of course, but at least I acknowledge that it is limited. This puts me ahead of some I felt, as I binned the papers and set off.

  There is little to say about the road from Chesterfield to Mansfield other than that the Jarrow marchers took it on 19 October 1936 and now so have I. The weather was foul as they crossed from north Derbyshire into Nottinghamshire, from agricultural land into the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Several soaked marchers became sick. This is D H Lawrence country, mining country, or at least it was. It was once a living if ravaged landscape, man intruding violently into the peace of nature, scarring it like pockmarks on a pretty face. Now that mining is gone, the land is slowly healing which is a kind of consolation. It is a green but not a pleasant land – dirty bedraggled cow parsley, unkempt hedges, tilled fields shaped and formed from slag heaps.

  As with Barnsley, as with Ferryhill, even though the pits are silent and flooded and the daily routines and processes of mining are a fading memory, something of mining’s hard and resilient culture still lives on. These towns and villages will never exude the same quiet contentment as a Cotswolds hamlet; the gentle hubbub of a Gloucestershire agricultural town or a Dorset port. It is not that those places haven’t known hard work or hardship, but it is a different kind of work. Mining villages and towns always carried themselves differently. In their heyday, they wore a sense of hard-won self-righteousness and shared a proud collectivity. Hundreds of feet below ground, camaraderie is not merely a pleasing bonus. It may be the difference between life and death. I spent an afternoon not long ago with a group of miners from the former Bold Colliery in St Helens as they returned to the site of their old pit, now a nature park. The sense of intimacy, even physical, between them was extraordinary and quite unabashed. One of them had run the stores where the men got changed at the start of shift and picked up their safety equipment. Thirty years on, he could still remember every one of his fellow miners’ pit number.

  As I walk on in Nottinghamshire, past a roundabout with an angry, prescient little placard proclaiming ‘Vote Leave, Sack Cameron’ and over the brow of the hill, I am met by a sudden, unexpected sight, like an image from an old black and white film or flickering newsreel: a chimney and winding gear stark and proud against scattering clouds. Pleasley Colliery would have belched, roared and clanked to high heaven when the Jarrow marchers passed it in October 1936. Perhaps its winding gear and trucks would have reminded them of home.

  The colliery stands above the River Meden and sits on the Top Hard seam. The first lease to mine that seam was given to William Edward Nightingale, who married into a mining fortune and was father to the famous Victorian nursing pioneer, Florence Nightingale who is said to have ‘turned the first sod’ when the shafts of Pleasley were sunk. For over a hundred years it produced coal in enormous tonnage and supported the local economy of the village that grew up around it. That’s still here, a quiet place with neat rows of bungalows, languid cats in their windows and a pub on the river; a commuter village for Chesterfield and Mansfield I assume. Up the rise towards the country park, the houses thin out on the hillside. A woman walks her boisterous Labrador, and a man in baggy, multi-pocketed shorts leans awkwardly to mow his steeply sloping lawn.

  There are two clear reminders of Pleasley’s working past. The tall winding tower standing sentinel, and also the Pleasley Miners Welfare. The latter dominates the small village centre, shoulders set back on its own broad swathe of lawn. I go up the path, past the perspex shelters for the smokers, and try the door. Closed and quiet, but a few signs computer-printed on A4 sheets and taped to the window mention future concerts, a couple of talks and meetings or request members to ‘please respect others when leaving the club and do so quietly’. Once the Miners Welfare and the Miners Institute were at the very heart of the community. Paid for by deductions from the men’s wages, they combined library, dance hall, theatre, pub and university. Tredegar Workmen’s Hall in South Wales had an 800-seat cinema and hosted celebrity concerts. None of that today in Pleasley though. There is a wildlife quiz in the bar tonight, admission one pound, and I’d have been there had Mansfield not beckoned. I retreat back down the path and find a short cut behind the Welfare, through the car park and the scrubby woods to where the mine workings crown the little hill, bold and clear against the blue sky of the fine early afternoon.

  Whilst aware that I just did this very thing, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about ‘mining country’ as a homogenous whole, even in a small nation like England. There are subtle differences in culture and attitude between fields as seen during the two big gruelling strikes of the 1970s and 80s. It might be thought, for instance, that the miners of a small Kent coalfield, far from the industry’s hegemonic heartlands in the north, would be less radical and militant than those northern miners. In fact, they were amongst the most hardline. This was, in part, because some miners sacked during the General Strike could only get work in Kent, and thus a bitter radicalism was handed down father to son. Also, Kent pits like Shakespeare, Snowdown, Tilmanstone and Chislet had some of Britain’s harshest working conditions. Snowdown, deepest, hottest and most humid, was known as ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and regarded as the worst pit to work at in Britain.

  By contrast, the Nottinghamshire miners appeared the least intransigent and most biddable during the 1984 strike. Sociologists and Labour historians have offered as many explanations as there were pits for this. Nottinghamshire had big underground reserves of coal, making the men feel secure. They were well-paid and without major grievance. Nottinghamshire collieries, said the NUM’s David John Douglass, were often worked by miners displaced from Scotland and the north east in the 1960s. The lack of support when those mines had closed made them less concerned to stop closures of other pits in the 1980s. Nottinghamshire’s large Polish mining community resented Arthur Scargill’s support of the Communist government in Poland against the Solidarity union. Marxist historians like Alex Callinicos think that Nottinghamshire miners never had the case for striking adequately made to them by a complacent NUM and were alienated by the uncompromising aggression of the Yorkshire miners’ stance.

  I suppose I could have asked the men of Pleasley Colliery about all this since they were very much in evidence that lunchtime. But I thought better of it. Pleasley is no longer a working pit but former miners are keeping it alive as a mining museum on a nature reserve. But if that sounds twee or contrived, it is anything but. My feeling on arrival was of wandering into a working pit at change of shift. Apart from a brisk nod from a man on the gate in a sheepskin jacket, there was little in the way of welcome. No �
��Is this your first time at the Pleasley Colliery experience?’ or directions to the gift shop. Awkward maybe, but at least no one can accuse Pleasley of having gone soft.

  Hard work has carried on here since the pit closed in the early 1980s. Sludge has been bucketed out, engines restored, shale swept away, shafts reinforced. Only this time it has all been voluntary. The men who once worked seams here are now engaged in preserving it as a piece of industrial history for their grandkids in Mansfield and Bolsover. Unsure whether it’s acceptable to just wander around but doing it all the same, I take a few pictures looking up at the towering winding wheel, explore the cavernous engine house with its gleaming brass of indeterminate but virile function, all thrusting pistons and columns, and then venture into the west shaft and the workings of the pit. Three men in hard hats and dirt-streaked overalls are maintaining some kind of track and checking the glistening innards of wire along the passage walls. Noticing me ambling about, I get the now customary brisk nod and then am left with the same dilemma vis-à-vis introductions as I would be at the Finnish ambassador’s cocktail reception. Eventually we fall into desultory conversation. ‘Pleasley really closed as a working pit in 1983 but they kept it open as an escape hatch for Shireoaks Colliery, which were my first pit, and then of course that went too after the strike. We’re here keeping it going, showing folk what it were like.’ With that, he turns to his mate and they continue to prod at a junction box. The exchange wasn’t unfriendly, and they weren’t unhelpful, but I came away with the impression that I was keeping men from proper and more important work, which I probably was.

  ‘Café’ is far too refined and continental a term for the eating and drinking experience at Pleasley. The walls of the green corrugated-iron shed are lined with old signage from the pit, chiefly warnings and admonitions:

  TREATMENT ROOM. INCIDENT ROOM. CONTROL NOTICE. ANY PERSON FOUND CAUSING A NUISANCE IN THE PIT HEAD BATHS WILL BE STOPPED FROM USING THEM.

  Amongst the shift lists and the old promotional materials, framed under glass are fraying, cracked black and white pictures of men in helmets, shirtless, skin creased and grained with black, all with the dark-eyed Arabian glamour that surely contributed to the collier’s status as an aristocratic prince of the working class. About a dozen of them, older now in Lonsdale hoodies, Berghaus fleeces, zip-up cardies and kagoules, are crammed into the steaming kitchen where four volunteer ladies in pinnies pirouette between microwave, griddle and toaster, bringing forth mugs of dense whirling Birds instant and bacon and egg baps. They forget mine, but I might have done that too, distracted by the constant chat, teasing and reminiscence. Dennis seemed to be holding court that morning and I wish I could have broken into the inner rank of slurping courtiers to hear him. Happily, there’s an interview with him on YouTube, which for lovers of industrial history is as exotic and mesmerising as any whaler’s tale or explorer’s yarn. Dennis talks of the ‘bright, hard coal’ of the Waterloo seam hiding in the low water and, chillingly, of rationing drinking water when ‘entombed in 23 seam … that were difficult’. We should guard against romanticism though. At the time of the Jarrow march, mining was a foul, hard job that made young men old; stone dust setting like cement in the bronchia, or silica slicing the delicate tissues, or the gurgling hell of wet lung and the air heavy with methane which might ignite and bring the roof down on you, aflame.

  Escape hatches. Incident Rooms. Accident Reports. The phrases and the tone speak of a working world that was once my own family’s but is as alien to me now as it is to those grandkids in Mansfield. It is a world disappeared, a world apart from water coolers, hot desking and shredding. Not necessarily a better or more noble world, just one so ancient and obscure that it reminds you how much Britain has changed – and how quickly – from a country that welds and delves and builds to one that sells and advises and speculates. At the time of the Jarrow march, the national government under Baldwin were themselves puppy dog-devoted to the primacy of private enterprise and limited state interference in the economy. But that was very soon about to change, and change faster still after the convulsion of a world war. Two years after Jarrow, coal royalties would be nationalised. Immediately after the war, in a deeply symbolic act, the entire British coal industry would be taken into public ownership. Forty years after that, in what looks like belated revenge, it would be annihilated.

  The three miles down the main road into Mansfield pass quickly as I have one eye on the clock, or more accurately the phone. Earlier I’d picked up a tweet from Jodie, the development officer at Mansfield museum telling me they have a present and some tea and cake for me. ‘You’ll always find a warm welcome in Mansfield. We may not have much but we’ll share what we have. Come any time before 4.’ Jodie might not have known it but in this she echoed how Mansfield had behaved to the Jarrow men. Even the local branch of the Labour Party, perhaps ashamed of their colleagues in Chesterfield, defied the national leadership and turned out in force to greet them outside the town hall and thence to some downtime at the municipal baths and the parochial hall before giving them free cinema tickets.

  I arrive with a little time to spare and so make my own little tour of the town. As I arrive, yet another market day is ending in a clatter of tubular steel and laughter. Across the emptying square and arrowing its way through Mansfield is the town’s most visibly curious feature, or ‘notable landmark’ as the publicity blurb rather wanly describes it. This is a colossal brick railway viaduct that bisects Mansfield Berlin-wall style, although unlike that cheerless edifice this has 15 roomy arches under which carpet warehouses and kebab shops thrive, and where surely nighttime assignations occur over White Lightning and Blue WKD. Cutting up Leeming Street in the direction of the museum, I’m pulled up by the gorgeous window display of the Vinyl Lounge emporium; 12-inch albums of mod classics, Motown and psychedelic rock hung with the care of a gallery of Titians or Warhols. Inside, ‘Suspect Device’ by Stiff Little Fingers gives way to ‘My Smile Is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down’ by Carolyn Crawford. I can smell coffee. Naturally I enter.

  Vinyl albums, like coal, were deemed a product consigned to the ash heap of history, an archaic irrelevance. In much the same way that we were told we need never dirty our hands with nutty slack and firelighters again (or handle another printed page in the paperless office), experts enjoined us to welcome the bright ephemeral world of digital music. But not only are market forces cold and cruel, they are often simply wrong, for they reckon without love, obsession and sheer human oddness. No one ever fell in love with CDs – those horrid little plastic coasters spilling plastic teeth everywhere. No one bought minidiscs or compact cassettes outside of a few broadcast professionals who now keep them at the backs of drawers with the Chinagraph pencils. The market simply never saw the bearded hipster coming on his situp-and-beg bike, or the middle-aged mod with the mid-life crisis on the new Vespa, or the teenage girl wanting the new ‘old skool’ fashion accessory. All these groups and more have contributed to the much-vaunted vinyl revival, and all are good news for Richard of Mansfield.

  Richard looks a lot like his customers I’ll bet. A rugged and genial, smart, middle-aged guy with a good crop, salt and pepper sidies and crisp white Ben Sherman. He’d worked variously around the music industry in London before coming back to Mansfield and setting up here. He’s done a nice job. Moody lighting, red and black leather seating, racked vinyl, a display of rare Smiths and Bowie, a retro black and white pegboard advertising pancakes and maple syrup and espresso. ‘You don’t get this in HMV, do you?’ he says waving a proud hand, and in truth that is exactly why shops like Richard’s are thriving. They treat the customer less like a zombie consumer than an informed member of a stylish and discerning club, although without the terrifying elitism that blighted the northern soul shops of my early teenage years. Here, asking for the wrong version of Sliced Tomatoes could see you cast into the outer darkness of ‘uncool’ for months.

  ‘Mansfield’s a big northern soul town,’ says Richard, which I
could have guessed. Towns like Mansfield often are; formerly built on textiles, coal or engineering with hedonistic, intense, obsessive working-class sub-cultures centred around grafting, playing hard, looking good, dancing and understated machismo. I could have spent a lot of money on northern soul ‘sevens’ here, but in truth I’m not the vinyl fetishist that’s often supposed; my northern soul collection is now mainly zeros and ones on a hard drive the size of a pack of cards. In 1975, I could have bought a small flat with it on collectable vinyl. Also there’s the matter of my rucksack. Though ample of litreage, it is no DJ bag. I wish Richard well and carry on up to the museum as dusk comes gently on.

  As 80 years ago, the good people of Mansfield have turned out in force to meet me. Jodie and her team show me around ‘the Tin Tabernacle’, as the museum was once known. It now houses a terrific arcade exhibition called ‘Made In Macclesfield’ that reflects the manufacturing powerhouse the town once was. The exhibition concentrates on eight famous industries that built Mansfield’s reputation for manufacturing: Metal Box, Shoe Co, Mansfield Brewery, Barrs Soft Drinks and others in hosiery, precision engineering, mining and quarrying. There are artefacts, photos, film and audio featuring past and present employers of the town. Jodie is quick (understandably) to point out that modern Mansfield still has a manufacturing base, mainly light engineering and IT companies, but these are often ‘hidden’ in anonymous units on the outskirts of town. Made in Mansfield recalls the halcyon days of very visible commercial might when 40,000 people would have crowded these streets every morning and evening going and coming from work making shoes, speakers, metal boxes, textiles, and beer sold around the world. Even the sand from the quarry was prized for the bunkers of elite golf courses.