When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  If one overlooked the 2.0 per cent stuck to the bottom, the measurable affluence of the British people was increasing. In 1987 it took a man on the average industrial wage a mere 6.2 minutes of work to earn the price of a loaf of bread compared with 7.4 minutes five years earlier. We were catching up with the French and even the Germans, though our incomes were still massively below those of Americans. But there was a paradox to this wealth. As increasing numbers afforded video recorders and Greek holidays, so increasing numbers could not afford a decent first home, and thousands more were crammed into rotting ‘B & B’ hotels, their children growing up with the deprivations of rootlessness more common to Third World cities.

  Were even those who were undeniably better off spending their money more wisely? Were we raising our sights? Was it becoming a greater pleasure to live in Britain than in, say, France or Italy? Had the British people’s aspirations increased in line with their incomes? Did more money mean wholemeal bread and lean meat, or did it mean more white bread and sausages? Breathless reporters, usually of right-wing persuasion, scurried to such temples of contemporary affluence as the MetroCentre at Gateshead, where the supposedly impoverished citizens of the north-east spent money like Americans on a binge in Las Vegas. They filed awestruck dispatches. Of course, they had not seen the people who could not afford to be there, nor, I suspect, did they stop long enough to examine what the money was actually being spent on. We aspire low: seeking the mediocre, we are so easily sold tat. Crucially, were we better off in those aspects of life that could not be measured by market forces? Were we becoming more or less the law-abiding, tolerant and peaceful society that Sir Geoffrey Howe hankered after in his epistle to his electors?

  The superficial evidence was not encouraging. Towards the end of 1987 the Daily Mail surveyed young people and found that their attitudes were both punitive and selfish. Child molesters’ cell doors should be left open so that other prisoners could ‘kick hell out of ’em. That’d learn ’em,’ said a fifteen-year-old Yorkshire girl. A fourteen-year-old Glaswegian, asked about famine relief in Africa, said: ‘A lot of it is their own fault. If we don’t interfere, it’ll be a good way of cutting the population.’ The French and Belgian police were admired because ‘they go straight in with truncheons and don’t mess around.’ The Mail’s writer commented that if these attitudes held up into adult life we ‘can expect a Britain many of whose citizens have precious little time for liberal, free-spending sentiments’. The series made bleak reading. However, my many conversations with adults had left me more optimistic. The majority of Britons remain more decent and altruistic than the survey would suggest. They believe there is a better way – a potential marriage between market economics and social responsibility; they reject the argument that freedom inescapably means destitution for those at the bottom. The tragedy of the 1987 general election was that this yearning was not translated into political action. The absence of leadership for these widely shared aspirations has left many millions resigned to settling for second- or even third-best. Our education, our housing, our nutrition, our health, our safety are neither what they could be nor what they ought to be. If this lament falls under the eye of a Sunday Times leader-writer, will he or she please note that my plea is for something better, a raising of expectations, not a leveling down? We did need economic realism and more self-discipline; Thatcher gave them. We need now to ensure the preservation of such qualities as tolerance, mutual respect, the championing of reason over might, the concern for the less fortunate and the observance of the law, which together have made Britain a country worth living in. It sounds corny perhaps in these triumphal times, but a nation is a family; beyond the responsibility to ourselves we have a responsibility to others less fortunate. If not the mother, Thatcher is at least the house-mother of our family, elected not simply to chide and discipline but also to care and aid. The real danger of unbridled Thatcherism, as I report in this book, is that its legacy may prove to be a harshly divided society, with detrimental consequences that in the end destroy even the most positive benefits of her long period in government.

  ‌Appendix, 2010

  ‌‘The Past We Inherit/The Future We Build’

  In 2010, in order to write a piece for the programme that introduced The Miners’ Hymns, a film and musical event staged in Durham Cathedral by the arts organisation Forma, I went back to Easington, the focus of the second chapter of this book. The pit by then was long closed and the village – though cleaner and healthier – still struggled to find new direction.

  On a hilltop above the former site of Easington Colliery stands a pit cage, a stark monument to a vanished life – 83 years of mining coal. Nearby, the words of a Bevin Boy (drafted as extra manpower into the pits during the war) are inscribed on a plaque: ‘I was now a man, for a man is not really a man in Durham until he has been down the pit.’ It was an affirmation of miners’ pride, a job unique in the sacrifices, strength and courage it required of those who plunged below ground to hew the fuel that made Britain a world power and saw the nation through two world wars. It was mid-summer: the sun shone, and the evening light would go on for hours. A carpet of wild flowers lay at my feet; ponies cropped the next field; the nearby North Sea – dotted with white sails – sparkled; men with dogs walked the hillside. I had to pinch myself. Was this where, on a raw December day in 1987, I had watched mesmerized as frozen men scrabbled for coal from the colliery waste tipped into the sea from a giant aerial conveyor belt.

  I returned to the bridge under the railway line where, all those years ago beside a steel gate (erected to stop sea coal ‘warriors’ taking lorries onto the beach), I had talked to miners. The gate has gone, but onetime miners still walk their dogs: they are older now, gentler, resigned – many have not worked since the pit closed (along with most other deep mines) in the early 1990s – in a mood to reflect with some regret and much nostalgia, especially for the vanished ‘banter’ and ‘crack’. ‘If the pit hadn’t closed, I would never have left; if it re-opened tomorrow, I wouldn’t go back down,’ said one. There are ex-pitmen who argue that mines like Easington could be brought back; the clock that stopped after the miners’ strike could be restarted; and that what some recall almost as days of wine and roses could return. But I suspect that man, with his terrier on a lead, spoke for most ex-miners. The men resent bitterly what they regard as official hypocrisy. Their battles in the eighties and nineties, they say, were to keep the pits open. Now that the collieries are closed and there is no work, those who live in ex-pit communities are often branded as scroungers and workshy. It isn’t fair, they say, and it is hard to disagree.

  Like most mining villages, Easington Colliery (‘Colliery’ is part of the village name) was designed as a one-industry community. Settlements were built where coal was discovered; their sole raison d’être was to house pitmen. Homes were poor; schooling inadequate for any purpose other than turning out miners – once the pit took on 100 boys (leave school Friday, start Monday) every year. In the words of one ex-miner: ‘If you were not colour blind and could read the safety notice, you were in.’ Out-of-sight and mind – until and unless miners took action that threatened fuel supplies – pit villages were the most self-contained (and isolated) in Britain. J.B. Priestley in his 1933 book English Journey wrote: ‘Who knows East Durham? The answer is – nobody but the people who have to live and work there … It is, you see, a coal-mining district.’ Over 50 years later, at the time of my last visit after the miners’ strike, those words might well have been freshly minted.

  I felt then that I had travelled to another country. Easington is the end of the road: travel further and you end up in the sea – the coal seams stretched eight miles beneath the water. Then I saw Easington in black and white: now its colour is much like that of any other part of Britain. Priestley’s isolation has gone, hastened away by new roads and better bus routes, more (if fewer than elsewhere) cars, many top marque and new. Seaside Lane (the ironic name of the main village street that climbs away
from the sea) bustled with young mothers, bare-shouldered in summer dresses, men in shorts (one ex-miner I visited wore a pink T-shirt and white shorts: another told me, with a sardonic smile, that he now grows garlic and peppers on his allotment). And yet, and yet … half the shops are shuttered and desolate – the one bank, people said, pulled out as soon as the colliery closed and the Post Office has gone; a notorious area of the village has been abandoned to junkies and problem families (I was told that you can tell when drugs arrive: dealers hoist trainers by their laces across the phone wires); statistics relating to health, employment and education remain appalling.

  Millions have been invested in regeneration, but 17 years after the pit closure much of Easington’s legacy persists. ‘The ex-coal fields are the most deprived communities, bar none,’ said a former miner. The culture runs deep: pitmen (the Durham term of choice) and their families depended on the mine: miners went to the colliery medical room rather than a doctor. Tony Forster, a regeneration manager with Durham County Council, said: ‘Social regeneration lags ten years behind physical regeneration.’

  This has consequences. The solidarity and the community structures (themselves highly enviable qualities) created by pits were found nowhere else except perhaps the military (I have often been struck by similarities between pit communities and regiments); where life itself depends on the man next to you, it is all for one and one for all; people wait for a lead from others – time and again I was told of the lack of self-confidence in Easington; a few (often the brightest) kick over the traces.

  John Surtees who worked underground in the 1970s spoke of his first day in the pit baths: ‘I found this great big hairy thing washing my back with a sponge: I thought I was going to be “rogered”; then the man passed me the sponge and indicated that I should wash his back.’ The penny dropped: Surtees had joined a family. Dave Douglass left school at 14 – he hated it and would have left at 12 if he could: yet he has since become a graduate – and he saw miners as the shock troops in the historic war against capitalist exploitation. Douglass – self-described as a ‘revolutionary Marxist’ – said: ‘The ruling classes feared miners: they sensed the power in their hands.’ As a member of the National Union of Mineworkers, he had ‘the opportunity to challenge society through a powerful trade union. We fought for the right to a point of view. Mining meant having a sense of yourself, respected in communities that valued labour over all. Prosperity – or lack of it – was a collective achievement.’

  I met again Alan Cummings, who was NUM lodge secretary at Easington at the time of my last visit. Health and safety (derided elsewhere as politically correct, but vital down a mine) made him an activist. He had watched one grandfather wheeze to death, and seen ex-miners work their slow, steep, breathless way up Seaside Lane, pausing bench by bench. He remains unpaid lodge secretary, pursuing claims for men whose lungs were ravaged by years underground: he is, he said, an unofficial ‘parish priest’. ‘Their plight is close to my heart. As long as people need help and I have breath, I’ll do it.’ Like many who took part, Cummings retains vivid memories of the miners’ strike. Easington during the strike, he said almost wistfully, was like 1970s Belfast – under occupation.

  Douglass’s flat is a shrine of posters and photos to past conflicts – again, the analogy with regiments and their battle honours springs to mind. He lists proudly the disputes in which his grandfather and father took part and those in which he was involved – ’69, ’72, ’74, ’84–85 and finally ’92–93, the ultimate action when most of the collieries closed. ‘We lost badly,’ he said, ‘but “she” didn’t win.’ I wasn’t quite sure how he worked that out, but there was no doubting who ‘she’ was. Cummings and Douglass argue that pits like Easington were closed as acts of political spite rather than an economic judgement. We now import (increasing the deficit) what was lost when the mines closed. This may be true, but, in reality, the unmined coal will remain below the meadow that blankets Easington pit (cleared rapidly on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind strategy), and new philosophies are needed.

  Michael Fishwick, who works in Easington on grass-roots regeneration projects, comes like most people I met from mining stock. It is tempting, he argued, to excuse lack of local initiative on the grounds that the legacy of poor health and high unemployment gives no one a chance. ‘It is right to recognize the tradition, but we need a new narrative. It was not utopia before the pit closed’ That I can confirm. The village retains its band, one of the best in the region, but it is hard-going now that the colliery subsidies are gone. Two years ago it almost closed. It doubles as the band for the Rail Maritime and Transport union, which helps, but musicians must pay their way. The band still marches each year in the Durham Miners’ Gala. Teenagers have shrugged off the history – two I met had no concept of mining – without having found Fishwick’s new narrative. Jim McManners is head of an award-winning primary school at Cassop, a few miles from Easington. When the local pit still worked, he organized visits underground for staff and pupils; when it closed, he rescued what he could: helmets, lamps, pony halters, now on display at the school. ‘Places need a sense of how they evolved; but they also need a new focus,’ he said.

  Outsiders (even perhaps Priestley) stereotyped miners. They were, of course, as McManners stressed, as varied in temperament and ability as the rest of us. The challenge, now that the pits (in most places) have vanished, is to unleash that variety in their children and grandchildren. Generations of mining families said, out of one side of their mouths, that they hoped their sons would never go underground; out of the other side they argued that no one had the right (certainly not Margaret Thatcher) to take away their livelihoods. It remains an unresolved ambivalence.

  I went to a tea dance at the Social Welfare Centre (where some of the Billy Elliot film was shot and which boasts the ‘finest sprung dance floor in England’: and where an art class conjured thoughts of the ‘Pitmen Painters’). Half a dozen elderly couples, moving slowly to the music of yesteryear, glided round the floor. A miner’s widow said: ‘It was no bad thing that the pit closed.’ She listed lung diseases, injuries and deaths – Easington lost 83 men in a 1951 disaster. Her companion added: ‘I worried every day about my youngest who went down the pit.’ Dave Douglass wore a T-shirt bearing the legend: ‘The past we inherit/The future we build.’ Put simply, that is the challenge for Britain’s former coalfields.

  ‌‌Acknowledgements

  A large number of people not only helped me with this book, but also spared me a great deal of time. Most will recognize their contributions even when – usually by their own request – they and their quotations appear anonymously. The major pleasure of being a journalist is that the vast majority of people are not only prepared to talk to a wandering reporter, but are often generous with their hospitality and with their views. I have enjoyed enormously rediscovering Britain largely through the eyes and minds of the people I interviewed, and, although I have covered some of the world’s great happenings, I remain convinced there is nothing of such interest and compulsive fascination as the affairs that touch our daily lives and shape the country we live in. I thank, therefore, everyone with whom I spoke for their stimulating assistance and good company.

  I would like also to thank the Observer, my benign employer for many years past. If the paper had not sent me to the United States, I could not have returned, and there would, therefore, have been no book. I am grateful to the editor Donald Trelford, for giving me the opportunity to go to Washington DC, and for allowing me the time to research and write the book when I came back.

  For their support twenty-five years ago, I would like to thank again Tony Lacey, my editor at Viking, who went far beyond the call of duty, and my then agent Gill Coleridge, at that time of Anthony Sheil Associates, for her encouragement, optimism and advice.

  For this new, rebranded edition, I would like to add up-to-date thanks to Alex Billington, the managing director of Tetragon, who responded with heart-warming speed and enthusiasm to the
idea of republishing this book about Britain under Margaret Thatcher. It is an adventure for both of us – particularly for me now entering the unknown territory of eBooks. Thanks to Alex’s team, including Bryan Karetnyk for his work on the text, and to Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini at Alma Books for their assistance. And finally my thanks to Catriona Gray, who took my photo for this edition. It is not her responsibility that the passing years have taken such an obvious toll.

  The cover photograph of Margaret Thatcher in the industrial wasteland, known as ‘The Walk in the Wilderness’ and taken in 1987 the year this book was first published, is by photographer Peter Reimann, Evening Gazette GMC (Gazette Media Company), Middlesbrough.

  ‌About the Author

  Robert Chesshyre is a freelance writer and journalist. He worked for the Observer for twenty years, and more recently has contributed to the Sunday Times Magazine and written full-time for the Telegraph Magazine. He has been named ‘Magazine Writer of the Year’ in the British Press Awards. He lives in south-west London with his wife, the journalist Christine Doyle.

  ‌Praise for the First Edition,

  The Return of a Native Reporter

  ‘The effect [of Chesshyre’s reporting] is deeply shocking … every Cabinet Minister should be forced to read this book. Superb.’