by Mark Thomas
Many of the great and the good have visited us. I remember being on car parking duty for Dennis Skinner and door warden for Ken Livingstone. The club has enemies as well as friends and we have always known this, but we persevere. From 1966 to 2016, it is interesting the things that have stayed the same in politics and also those that have changed. The club has seen them all and lived through the social upheaval of the last half century.
But above all we are a social club. A place of safety, of respect and heated but not violent debate. A place where people can be very different but walk away as friends and still fighting for the things they believe in.
There have been many characters over the years, some of them mentioned in Mark Thomas’ production today. Colin Marsh, legendary President of the club and known as Chairman Mao. Eddie Lee, who slept in the club and bankrolled us for a time as Secretary. Byron Cassar, the meanest Greek Club Steward west of Athens whose glare could chill a young socialist at twenty paces, and indeed our own current president, George Denton, who seems to have more ailments than a medical dictionary but still manages to be ever present, ever faithful.
There has been a history of struggle throughout, such as the construction workers’ dispute in the seventies and the miners’ strike in the eighties. The glory of the night in 1997 when Labour won a landslide election and the disillusion that followed with a socialist government that never was.
There have been environmental campaigns like Pugney’s Action Group, unknown outside Wakefield but important nonetheless to those who live here. Greater conflict over South African apartheid and gay rights. The combat operation to save Sandal nursery which spawned a generation of new activists and a seemingly endless drip, drip, drip of cuts to public services and those who provide them. For all these things the club was there!
So now in our fiftieth year where are we? Well, we stand alone as a city centre club – all the other social clubs worthy of the name, have gone.
But the values that drove our forefathers (and mothers) live on. From the campaign to confront fracking, to the fight for trade unionising fast food and retail outlets – we had a live link with the USA for the Bakers’ Union in April – and of course the inimitable influence of our Red Shed Players, pantomime king, Peter Hirst with Wakefield Trades Council and Mark Thomas trailblazing for us in this production.
Being a club promoting the philosophy of the left has never been easy and it probably will never be. There are so many characters who have brightened our lives and so many who are no longer with us. But that philosophy lives on.
In our fiftieth year we have made it a policy to promote the inclusion of young people, are looking at our accessibility to the disabled, continue to promote socialist education and preserve our history and our members, more than 500 of them, continue to support the fun, the fights and the freedoms we project. Not to mention excellent, well priced ale.
So what for the future? Times are now more uncertain than ever but we have a stable and committed committee who will continue to power the club onwards. We will celebrate our anniversary in September with a mixture of politics, comedy, music and just generally having a good time and, at the time of writing, we are looking forward to the hard work that this will cause.
The club committee over the years has played a varying role in the management of the club. The current set is more hands on than at any previous juncture, but all of us love it and believe in the cause. I believe all that served before us did so as well and thank them for their commitment. Members of the current committee deserve mentioning. There is our darling of the Saturday lunchtime crowd and Treasurer, Jan Samuel. ‘Big’ Steve Wiltshire, our Saturday night anchor-man. Vice President and technology whizz kid, Matty Hallas. Our resident electrician and handyman, Sam Eldridge. Glass washer par excellence, Vic Wilkins and our Tuesday dynamic ‘husband and wife’ duo, Phil and Carol Pinnell. ‘H’ Riley manages the transport with his yellow van, Paul Holmes and Ian Bain are committee regulars and keep us on our toes. We even have our own Wakefield Councillor on hand, Kevin Swift to fight our cause and steer us in the right direction. Everyone has a role and is valued for their involvement in the day-today management of the club.
Our stewardship of the club must be to perpetuate a unique institution and project the beliefs and energies of those that went before us into a new history.
Here is to the next fifty years, in our Red Shed.
Richard Council
Secretary
Wakefield Labour Club
2016
THE RED SHED
Onstage a set of red doors, four seats and a table either side of the stage towards the front.
Before audience comes in MT has talked to crowd in the bar as they wait and got six volunteers to come and sit on stage.2 Each one gets a red card, they give it to the usher when they go in. Usher shows them to seats near front so they can easily come onstage. They also will have been taken onstage before the show, shown the masks, where the chairs will go, and where to line up and put banner.
Also some party poppers are given out.
PROLOGUE
Welcome, in tonight’s performance I am being assisted by six members of the audience who I spoke to in the queue. Would they come on stage please?
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE: I need your help too with some songs, whistles, noises and shouts. At one point I’m going to divide the audience in two.
This side of the audience INDICATES you are the ‘rhubarb orchestra’ your job is to sound like the bar in the Red Shed and you go ‘rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb’.
LEADS HALF OF AUDIENCE IN PRACTICE – you can ad lib over the top a few ‘cheers’ ‘ey up’ ‘oi oi’, improvise but don’t go jazz.
This half INDICATES OTHER SIDE you are the ‘here we go’ choir.
LEADS OTHER HALF OF AUDIENCE IN PRACTICE
OK.
ADDRESSES SEATED VOLUNTEERS: Right, if you are all comfortable, let’s start.
In 1989 I did an interview with a journalist from the NME3 it was on comics to look out for in the future, I was listed alongside Bill Hicks, Eddie Izzard and Jo Brand, I know I have somewhat let the side down.
I know what the journalist wants, stories, who you are? Where are you from? What have you done? The first this, the first that. And I have those stories, I am made up of stories.
The first time I used who I am and where I am from was aged four. I went up to a police officer directing traffic at the junction of Northcote Road and Clapham Junction and said,
‘Excuse me Mr Policeman my name is Mark Clifford Thomas I live at 12 Kyrle Road and my telephone number is 228 1528 and I have lost my mum.’
My dad when he came to collect me says the cop is standing in the middle of the road, one arm around me, directing traffic with the other.
My mum says I was helping direct the traffic.
First part in school nativity play, Innkeeper.
My first band Queen, 1976, second band Dr Feelgood, third Siouxsie and the Banshees. Quite a learning curve.
First sex with a woman sixteen behind a cinema, second time in a multi-storey car park, third graveyard. Fairly traditional upbringing. Quite conservative.
First demo was CND demo in Morden.
First picket line Stockport Messenger dispute,4 Warrington. In the flame-lit road of an industrial estate where the police had baton charged the pickets I saw a Scot with a massive head wound and blood over his shirtless torso shouting at the police,
‘I wasnae a communist when I come here but I am now!’
First public performance in the Red Shed, Wakefield.
First stand-up gig 19855 White Lion, Putney – act on before me, Andy Johnson. His stage name was Cyril the Tortoise, he would impersonate tortoises for twenty minutes. A different age. And if he was booked to do thirty minutes, he would put a couple of tea strainers over his eyes and do a bee as a filler for ten.
I have got the stories.
But the journalist asks, ‘Where did you get your politics from?’
‘Miners’ strike, I was at college in Yorkshire and got involved.’
And then the words began to fly out …
… Miners I got to know arrested on trumped up charges, found guilty in kangaroo courts and convictions reversed on appeal but still lost their pensions …
… police riots at Orgreave.6 BBC found guilty of falsely reporting, Labour Party leadership, Neil Kinnock cutting the miners off at the knees …
… 140,000 miners on strike for a year, with no wages, union assets frozen in the courts, no dole, so include their families and half-a-million people were being fed in soup kitchens …
… and the cops – the London Met – waving their pay packets at people fed in soup kitchens …
The facts come spluttering out, half remembered, half formed, struggling to get to the surface in the white heat of molten memory.
And then I recall an incident, not yet a story as this is the first time it is remembered. At the end of the yearlong strike the miners marched back to work, through pit villages to the colliery.
I was invited to a march back, I do not remember the name of the village or the pit or the woman who asked me along. But I do remember we march uphill, somewhere in the distance is the National Union of Mineworkers’ banner, a band playing, half carnival half funeral, the village line the streets, clapping,
‘Well done, well done.’
And sometimes they shout individuals’ names,
‘Well done Ian, head up.’
We walk past a school, a Victorian looking school, with big eaves, steep roofs and the playground has iron bars and concrete humps that the iron is sunk into and the kids, aged somewhere between five and ten, are in the playground, standing on the concrete and holding onto the iron railings and they’re singing through the bars to the miners as they march back to work:
SINGS CHORUS FROM ‘SOLIDARITY FOREVER’
They are singing to their fathers, their uncles, their brothers, their community.
SINGS FIRST TWO LINES FROM ‘SOLIDARITY FOREVER’
I don’t know where they learnt this song, maybe they are copying older kids or maybe they have sung this song on rallies and events. But they seem to be singing into the face of defeat, singing into the future, to a better time, they sing a sliver of hope.
And once you have witnessed that, a door opens that can never be shut.
And I have told that story so many times since, I have forgotten how much of it is true. You get a story, give it a polish and bits of the truth fall off, one night you improvise out a line and it gets a good reaction, the next night it stays in the story and is suddenly ‘true’.
I love telling stories and don’t mind little fibs of expediency. I’ve told you two already. In the list of stories …
I was never an innkeeper. Joseph. Husband of the mother of Jesus.
Also I have never had sex in a graveyard. Never. Multi-storey car park, every level. Graveyard never.
So in this show I am going to try and find the village and the school and I am going to try and find the children to see how much of this story is true.
Because, and I say this quietly and with great reluctance, Michael Gove is right. If you say I said that outside this theatre and I will sue every one of you.
Gove is right,
‘People in this country have had enough of experts.’7
We don’t like facts getting in the way of our stories. If truth makes an appearance it is as a walk-on part, a cameo, then it is off.
But the stories we tell, the stories politicians tell, the stories communities tell don’t just declare who we are and where we are from but what our intentions are, what we are going to do. They shape our future, so my story had better be true.
By the way this is a show about the miners’ strike but there is no brass band music or kids discovering a penchant for ballet.
PART 1
It is celebration time in the Red Shed.
ORCHESTRATES HALF THE AUDIENCE TO MAKE RHUBARB8 NOISE AND THE OTHER HALF TO SING ‘HERE WE GO’, AT THE CRESCENDO PARTY POPPERS ARE FIRED FROM THE CROWD
NB – LET THE RHUBARB AND THE ‘CHEERS’ DEVELOP
It is the 8th April 2013, Margaret Thatcher has just died.
PICKS UP AN EDIROL 09 FROM TABLE
Now this is an Edirol 09 – it is a digital recorder – I bought mine in 2004 – it has history. It has travelled the entire length of the Israeli wall in the West Bank and recorded everyone I spoke to. It has been teargassed in Turkey and chased gang masters in El Salvador. It has also been left on a bus and left on a plane, and once used in anger against me when my children secretly recorded me singing, Elvis Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto’.
Now finally it comes home and heads to Yorkshire to the Red Shed to record my friends.
PLAYS EDIROL:
PETE: If something happens, whether a strike or Margaret Thatcher dies, or something happens like that, you would be able to go to down to the Shed and there will be like-minded people ready to do something about it.
This is Peter, one of my best chums, I met him when I was 18. This is Andy Gough, ex-president of the Red Shed.
PLAYS EDIROL:
ANDY: When Thatcher died you’d be surprised it were just like an old meeting, you automatically came here. I went for pint up town and I thought, I know where I need to be.
The Red Shed is in Wakefield, a town that lies between Leeds and Barnsley in Yorkshire.
First time I go into a pub in Barnsley there is a picture of Mohammed Ali torn from a newspaper on the wall and underneath a hand written note, ‘HE GETS PAID A MILLION QUID TO FIGHT, YOU GET BARRED.’
I arrive in Wakefield as an eighteen-year-old student from south London. To get the Red Shed in 1981, turn left out of Wakefield Westgate station and walk the High Road, there are nineteen pubs in the space of one mile – this is a party town and people have money to burn – go past Casanova’s nightclub, ‘No Jeans, No Trainers and mobile shower unit for Miss Wet T-Shirts competitions’. When there were complaints the club said,
‘Aye aye aye, there’s not discrimination here, we’ve got Mr Wet Y-Fronts.’
Shrink-wrapped offal in a wet cloth jiggling to the sounds of ‘Agadoo’.9
Go past the run of clubs and you reach the bus station, turn right and head through the market and there in Vicarage Street is the Red Shed. It is what it says it is – it is red, it is a shed. It is a wooden, single storey, forty-seven-foot long socialist shed fifty years old this September. Opposite the Tory club. Two storeys high, brick and shut. The Red Shed is an improbable survivor in the gale of globalization, bathed literally as we speak in the neon glow of a Debenhams’ sign on the side of the shopping centre.
These are the actual chairs from the club, they kindly lent them, so those stains you are sitting on, that’s genuine socialist arse sweat.
The doors, they would not lend me. We had to make our own.
WALKS BEHIND DOORS AND ENTERS THROUGH THEM
On the inside of the door is a hand written note, ‘Put Wood in t’hole’ – means shut the door.
In front of you is a noticeboard. Here INDICATES the bar. The club is forty-seven foot long and eighteen feet wide, the bar is eighteen feet by fourteen feet. Here INDICATES is the small committee room twelve feet and then the big committee room twenty-one feet.
The rooms are divided by folding wooden doors, so the club can be opened in any configuration.
On the walls ceramic plates commemorating strikes and struggles, over the bar a large glass case displaying trade union badges from across the world and a brass plaque commemorating Byron Cassar. Byron was a club steward, a Greek Stalinist, who had fought Nazis, the Generals in Greece and helped unionise the merchant seamen. He washed up in Wakefield and had a combination Greek/Yorkshire accent, you would often hear,
‘We must continue the struggle, uh eye.’
He held no elected official in respect and if a Labour councillor came to a meeting and tried to pay for a round of
drinks with a £20 note,
‘What do you think this is, Barclays fucking Bank!’
My first time in the Shed someone said be careful of Byron, he doesn’t like students, especially from the south.
‘Pint please.’
‘You are a student?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are here for the trade union meeting?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are the future!’
I have never been so terrified of the future.10
I am invited to attend a Red Shed committee meeting at the end of last year.
SITS AT TABLE WITH THREE AUDIENCE MEMBERS STAGE LEFT, ADDRESSES AUDIENCE MEMBER AT END OF ROW: You’re George, if you could lift your mask up, face the audience, thank you.
George is the club President he says,
‘Right then best of order. Minutes of last meeting approved? Carried. Main item club’s fiftieth anniversary year and celebration plans.’
ADDRESSES NEXT AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re Peter.
INDICATES TO AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER WITH MASK As you can see he has been in the wars in this picture. I wish I could say he did it in some noble fashion like fighting fascists but he dropped a bottle of beer and it bounced back and broke his nose.
Peter says,
‘I think we need to be energising all the new members who have joined as a result of Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader. We need to have a series of talks, political events and lectures that will get people into the Shed and get them active in local as well as national politics.’
ADDRESSES FINAL AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER: You’re David.
I say,
‘… and we should be working with the Bakers’ Union,11 there’s no mines, steel and textiles but there are plenty of people working in fast food and they have no union and zero hour contracts and poor pay, the Bakers’ Union is trying to unionise them and we should be supportive of that … And I also would like to do a show about the Shed.’
Everyone looks at me.
ADDRESS AUDIENCE VOLUNTEERS IN MASKS IF NEEDED: Look at me.
