Harry Bygate, who came to Aberdeen to organize the National Union of Seamen in 1974, is another of the old school. His name was scrawled in homely fashion in Biro on a block of wood at the front of his desk. Through the good years he had played to the old rules, and had built up membership on the supply vessels and rigs, and established closed shops. In 1987 his members were either redundant or accepting massive pay cuts. Contractors were bidding the market down. They obtained a list of names and addresses from the company they had undercut, and then offered the same men their jobs back at 20 to 30 per cent lower wages. ‘They all tell you the same story – they’ve dropped £100 a week,’ Mr Bygate said gloomily. Jimmy, a sailor made redundant from anchor-handling tugs, had been paid £1,400 a month for two weeks on and two weeks off, with thirty-six days’ holiday, up to six months’ sick pay guaranteed, and private health insurance. The last offer he had was for £400 for two weeks on, with nothing for the two weeks off. He had no children, lived in a council house and his wife worked, so he told the agency to ‘stuff’ their job. Other men with commitments were doing the same job for half the money. It was, he said, ‘raw greed’ by the operators.
Two further victims of the shake-out sat in the offices of the Professional Divers’ Association, and told stories of even greater financial falls. One, a Geordie, had dropped from £35,000 a year to £10,000: he was meeting his commitments because his wife was working. The other had suffered a compression-related injury – a ‘bubble on the brain’ – that had caused him to walk off the end of the rig, and he could never dive again. He had been paid £35,000 a year for twelve years. Divers, they told me, had always been regarded as difficult customers – ‘awkward sods, expensive and unpredictable.’ Now the boot was on the other foot. ‘Offshore the diving superintendent is god. If you show him any disloyalty, you’ve lost your job. If he said “jump!” you were supposed to say “How high, Sir?”’ said one. Many divers, he added, came out of the services, and had a ‘backward approach’ to trade unions. ‘We’re only aristocrats now if we’re rescuing people, otherwise you must be joking,’ said the other.
Two or three freshly qualified divers ring the association each week looking for work. The divers complained that the men were being lured to the training schools on false pretences. ‘Training schools coerce people who have redundancy payments burning holes in their pockets. It could cost £6,500 for a gas diving course,’ said one. ‘They’re told that there’s oodles of work in the Middle East or America, but the recession is worldwide. Qualified men with experience get whatever work is going here.’ They believed that the profit from the North Sea had been squandered. ‘We’ve been flogging our guts away to support people on the dole,’ said one, adding hastily that he was criticizing the government, not the unemployed. ‘The money should have been used to put more people to work,’ he said. Like Professor Kemp, they also thought that Britain should have been more nationalistic. ‘All possible work should have gone to our people,’ said one.
Aberdeen’s recession hit the local service industries hard. Oil companies used to take whole floors of hotels on the off-chance someone might need a room. Men like divers were put up overnight on their way to and from the oil fields: taxis were taken as a matter of course. A partner in a men’s clothing business told a story that illustrated the change. He saw in the street a man who had already bought eight suits from him in the first ten months of 1986. He racked his brains to remember whether there were any new styles in stock, expecting that to be his customer’s first question. Instead the man greeted him: ‘Hello Mr D, you haven’t got any jobs, have you?’ This man had been eleven years with one company, and until the month before had been earning £2,100 a month. In the boom days the chief problem for the clothing stores was how to hold on to even the dimmest staff. ‘Mr D’ remembered an eighteen-year-old getting a job offshore – ‘he was no Einstein, the kind of guy if you said “hello”, he’d be stuck for an answer’ – who came back at the end of his first fortnight at sea with £150 in his pocket, which he showed to the other assistants, who became very despondent about their own comparatively meagre wages. Later the boss heard that the young man had fallen from a rig and been taken to hospital with hypothermia. ‘I cashed that in with the other lads as quick as I could,’ he said. ‘They weren’t so disgruntled then.’ The income from Mr D’s shops had fallen by 25 per cent – from an annual turnover of £1.3 million to £1.0 million – and they had had to lay off ten of their twenty-eight staff. ‘For the first time in our business lives we have moved back. When everyone’s doing badly, you’ve got to sit it out. There’s no point even in advertising,’ he said philosophically.
One of Aberdeen’s most discussed losers was publican Bob Paige. He also was philosophical: ‘I’m skint,’ he said simply, ‘but the easiest thing would be to say the world’s been unfair to me. Yes, one enterprise went wrong, but I have done some good things in my time.’ Mr Paige bought a ‘spit and sawdust’ city-centre pub, tarted it up, concentrating on good quality food and wine, threw out the pool table, barred the old regulars and the kids he darkly suspected of drug-taking. Within a few months he was out of business with his £100,000 house on the market to pay off his debts. He had had a good track record, running a successful ‘English-style’ bar by the harbour, where he sold real ale in premises that had once been used for professional purposes by the town’s whores. The boom ended exactly as his refurbished pub, Babbie Law’s, opened. He said: ‘Oil companies knocked all the expense accounts on the head and opened cheap canteens,’ and the restaurant side of the business, on which he had pinned his hopes, collapsed. He admitted to miscalculations, but blamed the recession for his woes: other pubs had since gone bust, and he was convinced the ‘trickle would become a flood’. His former customers argued that he killed Babbie Law’s stone-dead with his changes.
Aberdeen Harbour celebrated its 850th anniversary in 1986; fish has been landed and sold in the town since medieval days. With the loss of fishing grounds like the Icelandic waters, the overfishing of those that remained, and high landing charges in Aberdeen (covered by the national dock labour scheme unlike Peterhead to the north, where charges were considerably lower), the industry had declined through the oil years. The large trawlers had been converted for use as standby rescue vessels, and many of the crews went to work in oil. Two thirds of Aberdeen’s fish market lay idle most mornings. Tommy Symmer, who had been showing people round the fish dock for seventeen years, looked through his rheumy eyes across the open water to the far side of the Albert Basin and said: ‘One time you could have walked from bank to bank on fishing boats, no bother, no bother.’ When I arrived shortly after dawn, there was one last boat, the Hélène from Peterhead, unloading. It had been a good morning, half a dozen others had been and gone. The previous day there had been just two boats.
Aberdeen’s fish-handling techniques hadn’t been affected by the industry’s proximity to modern oil technology. The hundredweight boxes were winched ashore, and hauled a few yards on ancient metal trolleys to be spread out on the market floor. Solid men with big bellies and red faces, wearing yellow oilskin trousers and Wellington boots, strode across the boxes, prodding and poking, turning out haddock and cod with wide-awake, baleful black eyes, sole (fetching on that day £200 a box), the high-value turbot and halibut, giant skate and plaice with livid red spots. The only signs of the twentieth century were the walkie-talkies and the portable phones with which dealers kept in touch with prices from other markets. When the dealing was over, men with long metal hooks dragged the boxes across the floor towards the loading bays. There was not a forklift truck in sight.
The profit in fishing boats was returning. Boats were grossing over one million pounds a year – in 1986 one boat had achieved this by August. Oil exploration had first disturbed the fish, but now the cod were growing fat on T-bone steaks and black-eyed peas thrown from the platforms, said Mr Symmer. A notice in the market proclaimed: ‘There’s nothing new under the sun, but there’s plenty
new under the sea.’
The good years had proved short-lived for Aberdeen and the nation. Did we really, like a Third World country, have to allow others to pinch many of the lasting benefits of British oil from under our noses? When I left, there was only a scattering of oilmen at the airport, where once there had been dozens; the cocktail lounge in the terminal closed at 6.30 p.m. just as passengers for the last London flight were beginning to assemble; the airport shop sold tawdry, predictable Scottish souvenirs; the plane, once again, was only half-full.
Chapter 8
The ‘New Jerusalem’
No one would stumble upon the new town of Skelmersdale by accident. It is a remote Bantustan; 42,000 people – most of them uprooted Scousers – dumped on the Lancashire plain between the Pennines and the Irish Sea. The town’s isolation was ensured by planners who fractured the ancient road that linked the market town of Ormskirk in the west with Wigan to the east. The traveller is compelled on to a looping ring road which leads – via innumerable roundabouts – from the rich, black farmland of west Lancashire, with its dark stone walls, smell of Brussels sprouts, and occasional scarecrow, to the red-brick ribbon that marks the outskirts of Wigan. The bypass is set in generous open space, so little can be seen of the town apart from factory roofs and the fringe of housing estates.
To get that near requires local purpose and knowledge. Thousands drive by Skelmersdale each hour, pounding north and south along the M6, intent on the Lake District or Scotland perhaps, or counting off the miles to Birmingham. Those travelling east and west pass over the ‘town’ boundary on the M58, an almost deserted motorway that disgorges vehicles north of Bootle’s docks, close to the Grand National course. A clergyman told me he had only once seen all three lanes occupied by traffic, a bleak comment on economic activity at the margins of the motorway. Passing motorists may notice the unusual Lancashire names – ‘Pimbo’, ‘Up Holland’ and ‘Skelmersdale’ itself – sturdy village names, telling of generations of yeoman farmers. Stop for a pub lunch in Parbold or Scarisbrick and your companions will be large, square-faced, curly haired men in brown overalls, who will depart in new BMWs. The dark peat they farm is among the finest, and most profitable, agricultural land in England.
If the sun is shining as you return past Skelmersdale towards the M6, your attention might be caught by an improbable, almost Levantine sight – four-storey blocks of flats, white against the low hills. Locals, with heavy irony, dubbed those flats ‘New Jerusalem’. Twenty years ago, in the mid-sixties, Skelmersdale was indeed to have been the New Jerusalem. The ‘homes fit for heroes’, pledged since Armistice Day 1918, were at last to be built: the slums of Liverpool fifteen miles to the south were to be razed; model factories would arise in the green fields; children would breathe truly fresh air for the first time and attend schools made of steel and glass set in wide playing fields. Freed from the exploitive past, the citizens of Skelmersdale were to become the new Britons. The second wave of post-war new towns was to be the apogee of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the technological revolution’. Skelmersdale was only a brisk crow’s flight from Wilson’s own constituency of Huyton; and it would have been a fitting tribute to the spirit of 1966, when the first new house was occupied, to have named the new town ‘Wilsonia’. (A play performed locally in 1978, Love and Kisses from Kirby, caught the Zeitgeist: in it ‘new town’ tenants were made to remove their shoes when they inspected their homes-to-be.)
With hindsight, 1966 was a fulcrum year between the expectations of post-war Britain and the realities of the late twentieth century. England won the football World Cup. Wilson’s government was handsomely re-elected, giving its supporters hope that the country was about to make a final surge towards prosperity, better education, better health, better housing for all. Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ boom had prepared the way, but now the people, freed of Supermac’s Old Etonian cabal and his seedy Edwardianism, would, as in 1945, again truly be the masters. A few miles from where the foundations were being laid for a neo-Napoleonic road system for Skelmersdale, the Beatles had been asserting the new egalitarian age: the class system, it seemed, was finally tottering from the British stage. Led by a grammar-school boy with a Yorkshire accent, a reassuring pipe clasped between his teeth, and a Gannex mac on his back, a meritocratic nation of pop stars and footballers, fashion designers and iconoclastic media folk like David Frost, was ready for the future. Colour television was only a year away.
I had been within a few hundred yards of Skelmersdale many times during the years of its building. My mother-in-law lived a short distance away, and my family would drive past ‘Skem’ – as it is invariably known locally – speculating about life in this invisible, unvisited town. Lancashire folk, even in the optimistic years, steered well clear and pitied the six thousand inhabitants of the former mining village of Skelmersdale who were trapped within the new town. But those were the good years; employment was abundant, and people had gardens and decent schools for their children for the first time; the town’s football team won the Amateur Cup. However, even then, to judge from local papers, Skem’s citizens kept Ormskirk magistrates busy, and by the mid-seventies the bad news was more fundamental. The industries on which this brave new world was to be founded were collapsing like tents in a gale. Thorn, the makers of colour television tubes, departed (it must be the ultimate industrial disgrace that a nation of telly addicts cannot manufacture the sets that enslave it); Courtaulds closed the most advanced spinning shed in the world. Thousands were thrown out of work, while thousands more arrived to seek a new beginning. Within ten years ‘Wilsonia’ had become ‘Doletown’.
The policies that had pitched 35,000 semi-skilled Scousers amongst people they derisively called ‘woolly-backs’ were hurriedly thrown into reverse. The target population for Skem was slashed from 80,000 to 60,000: Liverpool realized that losing 20,000 of its youngest, fittest citizens each year, as it then was, to Skem and other new towns, was a recipe for disaster, and began to rehabilitate the city centre and encourage people to stay. Skem’s hospital was cancelled, the population would now be too small to justify a Marks & Spencer store – a touchstone amenity in the minds of many residents; the road system mocked the low ratio of car owners. Twenty years after Skem’s foundation, the town was a totem for Britain’s lost illusions. It was more impoverished, more socially disturbed, more hopeless than Wigan, George Orwell’s symbol of political and economic failure of fifty years earlier. By 1987 the metaphorical road to Wigan Pier snaked out of Wigan across the M6, through the village of Orrell, dog-legged past Up Holland, and ended six miles further on in a battered row of shops in Digmoor, Skelmersdale’s most squalid estate.
Mine was the only car in the parking area for those shops, behind which litter and refuse piled up, giving the appearance of a shoreline on which a rubbish barge had been wrecked. Much of Skem is like that. Tons of waste must be dropped daily: the casual coke and beer cans, the fish’n’chip papers, the plastic bags, the more purposefully dumped black dustbin bags, their contents spilling kitchen waste through gashes made by dogs. The animals are kept in their thousands to guard homes against the house-breakers who haunt Skem. Each morning the dogs are turned loose to foul every path and walkway: my introduction to the town had been a huge dog turd slowly dissolving in the rain on the bottom step of a chipped and scabietic stairway up which shoppers passed. A small boy asked if he could ‘mind’ my car: feeling intimidated, and visualizing a mighty scratch if I said ‘No’, I agreed, and he was suddenly idiotically pleased. ‘Oh, I love minding cars, mister,’ he said grinning. I decided to give him 50p rather than the 30p I first had in mind, and was genuinely disappointed not to find him at his post when I returned. The worst that happened to my car was that someone pinched an American football ‘Superbowl’ bumper sticker, fresh from New York. ‘You were lucky,’ said a Lancashire citizen later, ‘that they didn’t take your wheels.’
Bulldozers had just demolished a second row of Digmoor s
hops, and two other small boys were biking furiously in the dirt. I was going to the offices of ‘Low Profile’, a drug counselling centre, staffed – when I called – by a pair of indomitable women. Both were Scousers who had come from Liverpool when times were still vaguely good. The older woman, Margaret Scullion, was an indefatigable ‘doer’ – she chaired the community centre committee, ran a weekly disco for teenagers (for whom there is virtually no provision in the town), spent each afternoon at Low Profile, and was as poor as a church mouse. Her companion, Lee Evans, had come to Skem twenty years before at the age of eleven; she lived alone and had been out of work for ten years, although she was soon to draw a wage for her Low Profile work. Both women smoked continuously, creating a smog in the small room. They drew deeply on their cigarettes, forcing the noxious fumes into their lungs and bloodstreams, as hooked as any drug addict likely to walk through their door. Both women wrote songs about Skem’s plight, one of which – ‘Worra Life’ – Lee sang through the smoke in a tuneful, folksy, mournful way. In part it went:
Don’t complain, smile in pain,
Everyone must play de game;
Life means copin’ wid da little bit more.
Lost ye file, sarky smile,
Got no Giro for a while,
Can’t borrow money ’cos everybody’s poor …
Mrs Scullion’s forty-year-old son had been out of work for ten years; one daughter was seeking to emigrate; a second, unmarried, was bringing up two children on a little more than thirty pounds a week. Once, Mrs Scullion said, Digmoor had Gas and Electricity Board showrooms, a catalogue shop, shoe shop and restaurant. The area was now poverty-stricken. She said: ‘Some families, by the time they come up to their “money day”, they’re a bit hungry. We’re on our knees. People have lost hope; they’re just hanging on to each other. I’ve got eight grandchildren, and I couldn’t give one of them a Christmas present. We’re in a lost community. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m glad I’m coming to the end of my life, and am not at the beginning of it.’ She added that people in Skem appeared defeated: they don’t want to cause trouble in case their money is affected. ‘Seem to have lost their spirit. In Liverpool a whole street would stand together and fight, not in Skem.’ Nostalgia for the gutsy atmosphere of Liverpool is common in Skem, but most remember the bad things also, and few desire to go back.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 26
