The divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’, said Mr Whitworth, was much greater in the north – a view that would surprise the Durham miners who contended that class distinctions chiefly existed south of the Trent and that southern employers were more likely than northern ones to exploit their workers. The Oldham working class, according to Mr Whitworth, are stuck away on their big council estates. As a man in work, he was a freak where he lived. He estimated that 80 per cent of the estate were unemployed – ‘they looked at you as if you were a monster when you came home.’ Vandalism, burglary, foul language on the street, even glue-sniffing were a constant menace: the Whitworths didn’t allow their children out to play. One set of neighbours, he said, summed up the estate: ‘the man in his late twenties had been out of work for six or seven years. He had no intention of working; three months was the longest he had ever held a job. He sat on his backside and did nowt. He told me they had more children to get more money. They had four and one on the way when we left. They had a seventy-foot back garden. They threw their bottles out there. You’d hear them shout to the kids: “Don’t play in that back garden, there’s broken glass out there.” The only people who bothered with gardens were those in work.’
Before Mr Whitworth took the Slough job, he had considered emigrating to Canada, but his wife didn’t want to go that far from home. ‘When I see the Mounties on television, I still get a little touch here,’ he said, tapping his chest. It was for the Whitworth family that Matt Sobol pressurized a council flat out of Slough Council. Until Mr Whitworth gets to know a long-term Sloughite properly, he is cagey about this stroke of good fortune. ‘They don’t take kindly. The first question is “How did you get it? My brother’s been on the list six years”.’ The flat was in poor condition, but Mr Whitworth has been improving it. In late 1986, he was earning, with overtime, £15,000 a year, and planning to buy the flat, which – with the discount to sitting tenants and the years of ‘credit’ he had accumulated on his council home in Oldham – he would be getting for little more than half its market value. Had he owned his own house in Oldham, he could never have afforded to come south. In his case property-owning would, ironically, have been a bar to mobility.
His wife was learning word-processing skills at Slough College: a local agency told her she could have her pick of fifty jobs to suit whatever hours she wished to work. ‘Fifty! The Oldham Chronicle wouldn’t have had fifty across every category of employment,’ said Mr Whitworth. He was intending to vote Conservative: ‘85 per cent of people are in work, and a government has got to look after them. It’s no good biting the hand that feeds you. Labour would be restrictive on people.’ (He told me that in November 1986, and from that moment I was convinced Mrs Thatcher would win the impending 1987 election comfortably.)
We had been having this conversation in a barren roadhouse where the waitresses wore Beefeater dresses which, far from creating the cheerful effect presumably desired by the management, accentuated their sullen attitudes. When I ordered food, one waitress, with a pinched face and peroxide hair, looked furtively at her watch, clearly hoping I was too late. There was not an ounce of generosity in her whole frame. The drinkers looked morose or lonely, men who’d spent too much of their unfulfilled lives in such bars: one in an unclean, shapeless jacket and trousers was vaguely in control of a mongrel that scavenged round the jukeboxes and fruit machines for scraps. The decor was oak beams and counterfeit loaves of bread gathering dust behind the food counter. Why do we British tolerate such cheerless places? On the way back to Production Machines, in a steady downpour that washed away what colour there was on the back roads of the industrial estate, Mr Whitworth suddenly burst out: ‘Look at all these people at work.’ It was a spontaneous cry from the refugee from the Oldham council estate – a man who has lived in both halves of divided Britain, revealing a fundamental happiness at being in work, having a home he was about to buy, and being amongst other citizens equally gainfully employe – that any number of depressing bars or wet days couldn’t suppress.
Mr Whitworth, with his council flat, is a lucky man in the context of the ‘on yer bike’ debate. Many others, just as well motivated, have been driven back north to unemployment by their failure to find anywhere to live. In late 1986, there were an estimated 250,000 unfilled jobs in the south-east, as a direct result of the housing shortage. British Rail alone had seven thousand vacancies, which makes more explicable, if no more tolerable, those persistently cancelled commuter trains. A Conservative MP initiated a job-link scheme between Cleveland in the north-east and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, but after a few months only 24 of the original 100 participants remained in the south. One who went back to the dole had found a £140 a week job as a caretaker. He left his wife and two small children in the north, lived in lodgings, and spent every evening for seven months searching for a house he could afford. His own house on Teesside was worth £15,000 and anything large enough for his family in Buckinghamshire started at £35,000. A fifty-year-old electrician persevered for a year, hoping for a council house.
Employers have tried bringing workers from Birmingham and south Wales into the Thames Valley on Sunday nights, putting them up in local digs, and shipping them home again after work on Fridays. Such schemes, born of desperation, seldom survive long, as the transported workers tire of the weekly commute, and are always looking for jobs nearer home. Other would-be migrants simply can’t get jobs despite their eagerness – although there are vacancies for skilled men, there are not enough semi-skilled jobs to go round. A Maidstone garage received one thousand inquiries from the north-east for twelve vacancies after its managing director had written a letter to a Geordie paper complaining that he could not fill the jobs with Kent labour: he had to carry out the interviews at a secret location for fear of starting a minor riot. (This company solved the accommodation problem by buying property to let to its northern workers.) A Sussex hotel manager wrote a letter to a national newspaper reporting that, despite a six-month advertising campaign, she had been unable to fill ten jobs. She was instantly swamped with four hundred applications, and three young Liverpudlians hitched nearly three hundred miles in the speculative hope they could land jobs. The ten Peterlee trainees, housed in a YMCA hostel and protected by a ‘moral tutor’, were cosseted by sponsors who naturally wished the experiment to succeed. The lone job-seeker must do without such organized support. Damien Wolmar, a Slough careers officer, suggested there should be tuition in the schools’ careers programme on coping on one’s own. ‘On yer bike’ assumes all sorts of skills to survive away from family and community which few teenagers have.
Despite the transatlantic parallels favoured by Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues, the British context is totally different from the American. While I was reporting from Washington DC in the early eighties, a devastating recession swept the north-eastern ‘rust belt’ in the United States. Ohio steelworks shut down, throwing up to ten thousand out of work in one blow; redundancy figures of an order of which we have, fortunately, no experience. Most of those who lost their jobs faced ruin unless they rapidly shifted for themselves: their unemployment pay expired after six months, welfare payments only started when they were virtually destitute. So they packed their belongings into camper vans and headed south and west in the tracks of generations of pioneers. Often they stopped at the first town that offered a job. The smart ones spotted a need in their new communities and started catering for it: soon they might be employing one or two others. In four years, as six million jobs were wiped out by recession, nine million new ones were created. It was a staggering achievement, which on a smaller scale we have managed in the past. The Scottish ‘Mac’ or ‘Mc’ is the most common prefix in the London telephone directory; tens of thousands of northerners and Welsh came to the south-east and the Midlands between the wars. Midlands towns like Coventry grew on labour from elsewhere. But such migrations will never again be emulated in our cramped and cold islands: slashing the dole, American-style, would simply convert the unfortu
nate into the destitute. Even in the States, as times began to get harder in ‘sunbelt’ states like Texas, there were limits to opportunity and tolerance: local communities attacked camper-van migrants, much as their grandfathers had turned on the Okies who struggled west from the dust bowl of the Great Depression years.
In Britain it is easier for the middle than for the working classes to migrate. Their removal is often subsidized by employers, and they are more likely to have worthwhile property to sell. But even they end up with gigantic mortgages and living in houses far inferior to the ones they left. A Newcastle academic, occupying a spacious home, laughed when he told me how he invariably had to sleep on a sofa when visiting colleagues who had taken posts in the south. It was rare for them to afford homes large enough to have spare rooms. Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, wrote in late 1986 that the rise in housing values in the south-east encouraged not the enterprise culture, but ‘parasitism’. ‘There is something very wrong with a country that rewards people lavishly for doing literally nothing but sit in a property, while depriving them of almost two thirds of their income when they start to do something useful.’ He concluded: ‘If the discrepancy in house prices grows, there really will be two nations in this country. The northern unemployed will continue to include skilled, middle-class people who could easily find a market for their abilities in the south, but who would not have the capital to set up house there … the gap between London and Liverpool could all too easily resemble that between Milan and Naples in the old days.’
The gap is surely already that wide, which should be sobering news for people on both sides of the divide. Those who smugly boast of the continuously rising value of their London homes forget that it is a worthless value unless they intend to make themselves homeless by selling and blowing the cash on holidays; that if they were to move north, they could never break back into the south-eastern property market; and that one day their children will need homes, which – on beginners’ salaries – they will no more be able to afford than will migrating northerners. When small houses in a working-class town like Slough cost what they do, the value of money has been distorted to a point that threatens economic stability. Professor Stone calculated that in two years a man could make more profit on buying and selling a large middle-class house in Oxfordshire than a doctor could earn in eight years.
A Slough training officer told me that he had come south from Manchester because he felt that he owed it to his children to launch them on the world in an economically buoyant environment. He said: ‘I was comfortable: I could have stayed where I was. But friends said, “You’ve had your go. Your son deserves his now.” He’s nineteen, and the comparison with opportunities in the north is so great that I sometimes feel it is immoral. He thinks he can change his job at any time. In many ways there are too many opportunities.’ This man’s mortgage payments had rocketed from £27 a month to over £300, and he was punch-drunk at the altered value of money, laughing slightly manically at the figures. Like several recent arrivals to the south-east, he said he was overwhelmed by the pace of life. He had just been back north to visit friends and found the gentle tempo unnerving. ‘We were all sat down and relaxing, and kept on talking. At six o’clock my friend said we’d better get changed because we were having a party. We sat a whole day, and didn’t do anything.’ When his family came south, his wife had had to change her car for a more powerful one, so that she could break into rush-hour traffic at the bottom of their road. That appeared to be the ultimate distinction between north and south: if even the cars have to be slicker and faster, there must be two Britains!
Others move south for the sake of their children. A Northumberland vicar left his living in the Tyne Valley after his family had taken a battering in the north. One 22-year-old son was made redundant from what had appeared to be a secure laboratory job and hadn’t worked for two years, and two daughters failed to get employment at the end of YTS programmes. They had been working part-time in Woolworth’s. The vicar moved to a tied house, for which he was thankful, comparing his own situation with those ‘whose husbands and fathers have got to go down south for work, and then find they can’t afford the property.’ The Church of England was finding difficulty in persuading clergy to go in the opposite direction, mainly because wives with jobs feared they would never be able to replace them in the north.
The obvious economic lesson to be drawn from Slough is that success breeds success. Much as it makes more sense to open an antiques shop next to a row of already thriving rivals than in a street full of grocery stores, so it makes sense to start a manufacturing business in an environment like the Slough industrial estate. It oxygenates people to be in the midst of economic activity. Mr Wolmar, the careers officer, had recently exchanged a four-bedroomed detached house overlooking Dartmoor for a three-bedroomed semi above the railway line in Slough. ‘In the south-west,’ he said, ‘you know you’re not going to do any more with your life after thirty-five. Here the character is “go, go, go,” and you feel the spirit of success. It’s cramped, living on top of one another, not nearly as nice as Dartmoor, but we wanted to move to an area orientated towards achievement. It is more stimulating to be here and to be part of the success that other people are creating.’ As he spoke, I thought of the Durham miners, who sold out their jobs in their early forties and passed the rest of their lives pottering between allotment and pub.
Slough’s best known manufacturer is Mars. I was told that the sweet, chocolate smell of success frequently pervaded the town’s air, though I never detected it myself. Mars is an authentic product for the proletarian town, the favourite chocolate bar of the British people, manufactured daily by the millions. (More chocolate is produced in Slough than in any other European town.) It would have been out of character for Slough to produce a confection even as loosely associated with frivolity or aristocratic pleasures as an after-dinner mint. Today, with the ‘single status’ workforces of Japanese companies in Britain, industrial democracy does not seem such a novel idea, but Forrest Mars, a Yale-educated American, pioneered the status-free factory in Slough in 1932, when many British workers were still touching their caps to the bosses. He was then twenty-eight, the son of Frank Mars, who had founded the original business in Chicago, and who sent his son forth with the recipe for what was known in the United States as ‘Milky Way’ to seek his fortune outside America. Forrest first looked at continental Europe, but was frightened away by the impending rise of fascism.
A visitor entering the Mars factory passes a big clocking-on desk where all 2,400 employees, including the managing director, must punch a card; every employee is on first-name terms with every other employee – again including the managing director; there are no reserved parking spaces for senior staff; in a vast open-plan office even the directors sit out on the floor at desks indistinguishable from those of secretaries; there is naturally only one cafeteria, in which everyone helps himself and then clears away his own place. When I was there, a committee was investigating whether there were any previously undetected differentials, apart from pay, that could be eradicated. I suspect they had their work cut out.
There are no unions, but even a local union organizer, who had been complaining to me that Thatcherism had unleashed a ruthless attitude amongst employers, found no fault with this company. His own wife had been kept on full pay by Mars throughout a serious illness, and had been encouraged to take her time before returning to work. Pay rises and bonuses are triggered by a formula which everyone understands: pension and insurance are non-contributory. Workers even get a bonus for clocking-on on time. The factory is in continuous operation, yet in fifty-five years has never lost an hour’s production through an industrial dispute. Mars has always been good to Slough, in recent years replacing the mayoral mace when the town was ‘transplanted’ from Buckinghamshire to Berkshire, and rebuilding the Slough College lecture theatre. In 1987 Forrest Mars was still alive, living in Las Vegas, where he had occupied his retirement by
founding yet another candy manufacturing company.
Paternalism is part of the ethos of Slough and the industrial estate. Between the wars the employers joined forces to found a social centre and an occupational health scheme. Both thrive today, though the social centre is now run by the council. The catalyst for these amenities was the Slough Estate company, whose chairman is Sir Nigel Mobbs, grandson of Sir Noel Mobbs, one of the men who bought the vehicle depot after the First World War. Sir Nigel is a tall, bulky man, who, when I met him, was just back from a trip to America, where he must epitomize the upper-class Englishman. If Slough has a non-resident grandee, it is Sir Nigel: Marlborough and Christ Church, Oxford, married to a peer’s daughter, chairman or president at some stage of every institution with clout in town, whose leisure time is spent riding, hunting, travelling, skiing. He wore a check suit, and at his feet lay a large rectangular American attorney’s briefcase. He was well-organized, kept his own files – he found me an eight-year-old article in thirty seconds flat – and courteous. We drank coffee made in one of those ubiquitous machines that have liberated secretaries in even chairmen’s offices at the cost of producing a sour, grey sludge: democracy and automation have combined to produce a close to undrinkable liquid. Sir Nigel had known Slough professionally for twenty-five years, and, through his family, had an institutional memory of its development. The complaint that house prices are too high goes back, he said, at least to the sixties, when managers coming to the town from the north were shocked by what they had to pay for homes. There have also always been skill shortages, though both prices and shortages are more extreme now than they have ever been.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 11
