When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  Upstairs, the decorators were sheltering from a sea ‘fret’, a heavy drizzle that reduced visibility to the width of the street. Allan Parrish, a thin man of thirty-two with a wispy ginger beard and spectacles held together with Sellotape, had left school in 1970, trained as a lab technician, and worked at a comprehensive school for ten years. As a result of government cuts, teachers had taken over lab work and, after a year on the dole, he got a similar job with a sixth-form college in Middlesbrough. Science teaching was centralized, and once again the lab jobs went. That was three years before I met him, during which he had applied for ‘a couple of hundred jobs’ and been granted five or six interviews. Mr Parrish, unlike those downstairs, would have moved anywhere – he had tried London and Leeds. His father and grandfather had been miners, and what he found bitterly ironic was that his siblings, who had never trained and did manual jobs, were all better off than himself. Two nineteen-year-olds, Peter Sugden and Arthur Bannister, had had their names down for the pit, but it ceased recruiting a few months before they left school. They felt cheated of their heritage. Neither had worked since, apart from government schemes. ‘I’ve a pile of regrets that high,’ said one, indicating a couple of inches with his finger and thumb.

  ‘The difference,’ said Mr Chopping, ‘between the twenties and thirties and today is hope. Vandalism didn’t occur then as now; kids are disassociating themselves from a society that has failed them. Their parents grew up in stages, through school into a job. Now it comes to a halt at sixteen: everyone knows that YTS here is not a proper job. There’s no hope.’ Often I was struck by a local sense of fatalism about the bad times, as if they, like the weather, were beyond human control. Mr Chopping said: ‘You need an income to be politically active, a lift if you are going to a meeting, money for a drink afterwards. It’s easy to understand why people give up: they might write between thirty and two hundred applications without getting a reply. You can’t keep your phone up. You can’t go on spending three pounds a week on stamps. You stop getting up particularly early and concentrate on getting your cabbages in, so the days get shorter.’

  Outside in the rain a youth on another government scheme was gathering litter into a blue plastic bag from a seemingly endless supply on waste ground behind the bus stop. When he had finished the litter remained so abundant one could not tell that he had been. His futility was a pathetic microcosm of the region’s futility. Across the road from the Co-op, and past the gaunt miners’ welfare hall, a notice on an iron gate announces the ‘Easington Colly Parish Council Welfare Park’, a memorial to a tragedy that struck the pit and community a generation ago. Fifty yards from the gate, past another posse of ‘make-work’ men, scrabbling at the dead, grey grass in desultory fashion, was a bronze plaque.

  On the 29th May 1951 81 men died together in Easington Colliery following an explosion and in the rescue bid two men gave their lives. The trees here-about were planted. The memorial avenue was made and this tablet placed on a stone from the scene of the accident.

  TO HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THOSE

  WHO LOST THEIR LIVES.

  Let passers-by do likewise, get understanding and promote goodwill in all things.

  Roses still bloomed in drab December around this shrine, on which was scribbled in large letters ‘the Parky Stinks of Fuck Head’. From the brow of the hill beyond the memorial, I looked towards the sea, across an unlovely cluster of houses known as ‘East’, most of which were boarded up awaiting the outcome of a dispute between the ground landlords, the Church Commissioners and a housing trust for miners. Each was designed with a tiny yard, where washing turns grey in the smoke-filled air. The last tin bath wasn’t thrown out until 1968.

  Redundant men in the north contrast the poverty of their environment with the wealth that has been drawn from it and taken elsewhere. J.B. Priestley on his English Journey in 1933 remarked that there was ‘easily more comfort and luxury on one deck of the Mauretania’ than there had ever been in the drab Tyne towns where the shipbuilders lived. He speculated on all the fine things that had been conjured out of one Durham mine – ‘the country houses and town houses, the drawing rooms and dining rooms, the carriages and pairs, the trips to Paris, the silks and the jewels, the peaches and iced puddings, the cigars and old brandies’.

  Today the connection is less glaringly obvious, but the people of the Durham coalfield, tucked away in grimy villages where no stockbroker has ever visited, did help lay the foundation of Britain as a prosperous society. And some, like the eighty-three men commemorated in the parish park, gave a great deal more than just forty-five years of back-breaking toil one thousand feet below the sunlight. Every £100,000-a-year City whizz kid, as he switches off his computer terminal, climbs into his BMW and heads for dinner in a Chelsea restaurant, ought to say a little prayer of gratitude to the people of Durham and such regions and to those people’s forefathers. The miners’ legacy is back-to-back colliery houses, a closed Co-op store and the worst health in Britain. The brass went elsewhere and the muck remained behind. Would today’s Gstaad skiing, Concorde flips to New York, Porsches on sale in central London for £83,000, cashmere dresses and Italian boots, weekend cottages in Gloucestershire, fine-art auctions, booming wine sales have been possible without the generations of riveters, miners, steel men, platers, whose children are now spied upon for collecting lumps of coal from the beach?

  The new Conservatives, with their homilies on dietary ignorance and bikes, are as harsh in their attitudes as Dickens’s Gradgrinds and Bounderbys. Perhaps the compassion that went with the paternalism of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home was not fully appreciated at the time, but it is greatly missed now it has been replaced by hard-nosed Conservatism. Alan Cummings, the Easington NUM representative, said: ‘It’s the Tory philosophy that you should move to work. This area has built this country’s wealth. The government owes it to us to attract employment. Money has never been ploughed back here. We’re down to the bare bones, most of the flesh has gone.’ Northern Conservatives, with their roots in the soil and the community, know it. Sir Michael Straker, chairman of the Peterlee Development Corporation, is every inch a Conservative of the old school – Eton and Coldstream Guards. When we met he had been ‘farming’, and wore an elderly tweed jacket and grey trousers above brown shoes. From time to time he looked over his half-moon glasses as if to a better past somewhere in the middle distance. He had just learned of a friend’s son who was leaving the army to go, guess where? ‘That’s right. Into a merchant bank. It’s a tragedy. His father was a nuts and bolts man. Politicians,’ he said, ‘get it wrong. You’ve got to have a feeling for coal, and what coal has meant. It will last probably another decade. Neglect that at your peril.’ He spoke, in a way that no doubt sounds romantic nonsense to new Conservatives, of the companionship and loyalty created underground – ‘tunnelling, naked to the waist, sweating shoulder-to-shoulder. If one man fails, he lets the team down, possibly costing them their lives.’

  It is an irony that a community that has sworn for generations that its children would not go down the pit now will take to the streets in defence of those pits and the rights of their children to descend a hole in the ground. A miner in the Colliery Arms at Murton, a few miles inland from Easington – one of those bleak mining pubs where the only cheer is in the heaped coal fires and the beer, and where women, by indelible custom, are rigorously segregated – said: ‘My dad used to threaten me with the pit if I didn’t work at school. Now I can’t even promise my kid that.’ Recruiting from school, which used to run at one hundred a year at Easington Colliery, stopped in 1983: older men are tempted out by redundancy payments, and the vacancies are filled by men from closed pits inland who are bussed to the colliery. Some travel twenty-five miles, unheard of commuting distances in such an area. Alan Cummings, of the NUM, said: ‘In the sixties there was always a job in mining for young people – you left school on Friday and started at the pit on Monday. We’ve always said the next generation won’t go down, but it’s in
people’s blood, like deep-sea fishing. It’s a stark prospect now – from cradle to the grave on the state. You have to get married, raise a family and try to live on that kind of income. It’s frightening.’ In 1947 there were 201 collieries in Durham; by 1986 there were only six. ‘We have our backs to the sea, there’s nowhere else to go,’ said one miner. (The coalfaces at Easington stretch seven miles under the sea. ‘Five more miles and we’ll be able to serve duty-free and declare UDI,’ said one miner.) I had visited a miner’s house in a Yorkshire village a year before. A large lout of a lad was slumped in front of a vast television, roasting his bare feet before the fire. His 42-year-old father, redundant through injury, was bemoaning his son’s lack of prospects: the only available work was stacking boxes in a supermarket and, heaven forbid, cutting cheeses. The father screwed up his face: ‘That’s not reet for a lad; that’s not man’s work.’ It was more manly, it seemed, for the still-growing youth to vegetate at home until no one would want him even for cutting cheeses.

  The engineering trainees who were to go to Slough were enormously excited by their prospects, particularly of leaving home and spreading their wings. No lack of ‘on yer bike’ spirit there. But many northerners still look upon the south as morally polluted, and, as it was caricatured by Orwell, as ‘one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards’. Those of us who live south of the Trent are not all rentiers, but there is no doubt that the majority of us – even if we are not making millions by whistling Eurobonds round the world – produce none of life’s necessities, nothing as tangible as a chair you can sit in, coal you can burn, a car you can drive, a steel beam with which you can open up the ground floor of your bijou Victorian cottage. ‘Real’ men and ‘real’ work in those senses exist almost exclusively in the north. With that gritty reality go other ‘northern’ qualities: friendliness and bluntness. Within a few hours of arriving in Durham, I was not only made welcome, but had also been asked my age, wage and what I had paid for an indifferent second-hand car. For fear of being thought soft or ‘Nash’, I lied about the latter. A northern bishop, who had had the misfortune, as he saw it, earlier in his career to be assigned to a London parish, told me that his spirit always lifted when he arrived at King’s Cross on his way home, and he found himself surrounded once more by Yorkshiremen. A conversation with a total stranger, he said, can, by the time you’ve finished, leave you feeling you are related. Even though he now wore a bishop’s purple, northerners were not intimidated by him. I scarcely met anyone in Durham who had not stories, recounted with horror, of friends or relatives who had gone south, and, after many years, still scarcely knew their next-door neighbours. One miner said: ‘I’ve got a sixteen-year-old son. I would chain him by the ankles and nail him to the floor before I’d let him go south. Not into that exploitation. Lads who go to London for jobs fall into vice and everything else – homosexuality and rentaboy. A boy down there would become a servant to the people with money and high qualifications.’

  Much of what northerners say about themselves as people with different qualities from southerners is true. I moved to the West Riding when I left university and was rapidly made to feel at home by almost everyone, spending one Christmas when I couldn’t get to my parents’ in a miner’s terraced house. I could never imagine a young man going in the opposite direction to start his working life as being anything but very lonely, at least for some time. The north is no longer as ugly as it was when Orwell castigated it, or even as it was twenty-odd years ago when I used to write stories about roofs collapsing under the weight of industrial pollution; but that is because most of the industry has gone and taken the ugliness with it. The Don Valley between Sheffield and Rotherham, which once contained more smoke than Hades, is a desert, like Hiroshima after the firestorm had subsided and the mushroom cloud had drifted away. Looking around the wasted area, I needed the map to tell me I was in the place I once knew with its rows of terraced housing, its fuming chimneys, red furnaces lighting up the night and its cacophony of industrial noises.

  But there is still a northern quality, evident in the chirpiness of the people and the dour landscape. On a wet Sunday night, at an hour when all sensible people were abed, I stopped for petrol somewhere near Scotch Corner on the A1. A lorry driver from Manchester was bantering with the cashier – it was unoriginal stuff: ‘What time did you come on, luv?’ ‘One o’clock.’ ‘It’s time for me to take you away.’ ‘How much are twenty fags? … I want to smoke them, not frame them.’ It lifted the spirit; someone was trying, giving it a go, and his good humour stayed with me as I drove on north. By the morning a ferocious wind was blowing; it rattled at the hotel windows, trying to worry them from their hinges. Outside a black clump of pines rolled with the wind in the morning darkness. Beowulf and the monster Grendel might have been out there somewhere, fighting their legendary battles for mastery of bog and moor. On the way to breakfast, I picked up a local weekly newspaper from the hotel hall to be met with the headline: ‘SO WHAT IS THE MYSTERY BEAST? – “Something’s out there,” says PC.’ The story began: ‘A mystery beast lurking in east Durham could be of an unknown breed which has lived undiscovered in Britain for thousands of years … this is not just a myth, according to the policeman who is on its trail.’ I could not visualize such a splash story in a Sussex weekly. The north is another country. History is alive; the past is a companion in every conversation, and the thirties – generally seen as ‘good’ times, despite the Depression – are as vivid in older people’s minds as if they had happened yesterday. ‘There was not so much stress in those days. We accepted things on an even keel,’ said one retired miner.

  One night I met the Revd Tony Hodgson, vicar of Easington Colliery, who during the miners’ strike had become virtually an honorary miner. Born in Leicester, he had committed his life to the north-east after studying at Durham University. He is a vast man, his midriff sprouting out between a shabby black pullover and his trousers: he likes his pint and, although he has already had one heart attack, smokes like a chimney. He is learned and eccentric, his name bringing a benign smile to the faces of those who know him. A university Conservative, he became a socialist through exposure to need and deprivation. In his first parish in a slum area of Gateshead in the early sixties he was called to the home of a blind man, who was trying to raise a child in a house by the River Tyne that was so damp there was mud rather than dust on the floor. ‘He wanted to top himself. My politics came out of my Christian belief. I was burying babies.’ Reflecting on the apparent ‘politicization’ of the Church of England, with its critical report on inner-city conditions and its outspoken prelates like David Sheppard of Liverpool and David Jenkins of Durham, Mr Hodgson argued that the church had, in modern times, been consistent in its social policies. Archbishop William Temple and others had been among the architects of the post-war ‘new deal’. It was, he said, the modern Conservative Party that had moved. ‘Maggie rolled back the carpet and rejected our values.’

  John Cummings, the leader of the council, whose constant companion is a little Jack Russell he had found abandoned and lousy, said: ‘We’ve got to get back to the old values – make good use of history. The Durham coalfield invented the “welfare state” before the war: it was paid for out of your wages. You had your doctor and your medicines free. No prescription charges then if you were ill. In the thirties everyone was the same – no TV, no fitted carpets, no jealousies, no break-ins. You left your door wide open because there was nowt to be pinched. We must reflect back on why it is important to have what we have now like the Health Service. Why we got rid of the Poor Law. History is important.’ A man called Joe, with a corn-crake voice that must have been useful if the pit telephone ever broke, spoke of the 1926 soup kitchens. Another ex-miner recalled ‘police station’ shoes, handed out to the indigent, but specially marked so that they couldn’t be pawned. Southern remoteness is raised time and again. One of the Slough-bound trainees suggested the north-south imbalance could be cured by moving the House of Commons to Sun
derland. Mr Cummings said: ‘We’re administered by proxy, by civil servants three hundred miles away. If a minister comes up, it’s for all of six hours.’

  Northerners are deeply frustrated by the control exercised over their lives and businesses by bureaucrats and financiers whose experiences and ways of life appear wholly alien. Such people are not even provincial satraps or colonial governors, who at least lived in the territories they ran. A group of miners told me how they had driven through the Thames Valley, Sussex and Kent during the miners’ strike. Rubber-necking at the large houses along the banks of the Thames, they felt in another world, as far from their steep streets and red-brick back-to-backs as if they had been transported to the set of ‘Dynasty’ or ‘Dallas’. ‘You cannot compare the wealth: we’re not living, man,’ said one in awe. Another had a friend who lived in Taplow, near both the Thames and ‘where Terry Wogan lives’. (Television stars, so close to everyone’s lives and yet so far, are now the definitive success symbols.) This friend held midnight barbecues, which people attended dressed in shorts. No Roman orgy could have seemed more sybaritic or exotic.

  People who led such different lives had to be at best ignorant of, at worst indifferent and callous towards, the industrial north. F.F. Ridley, Professor of Politics at Liverpool University, put the northern perspective in a Guardian article: