Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Wheatley Hill was even more marginal. The greyhounds were unloaded from white vans by men who looked as though they drove white vans. Their charges had simpler and more robust names than is normal at fancier tracks: Seek & Destroy; Mad Dog; Black Mick; Black Lass; Walk of Shame; RU Trying; Could Be Hassle; Whacko; Slip; Cash Only; Snotty Nose; Twin. Nothing here was fancy, except for the mechanical hare, which was covered in pink, green and blue and looked like a dead parrot. The prize money was very unfancy: £15 for the winner in most races with a fiver for second.

  The logic that drove events at Wheatley Hill was somewhat confusing. The official race timetable was merely a basis for negotiation. The only two bookmakers present stood around chatting under signs saying ‘No Bets Taken Before Race’. I would have almost been willing to believe that at Wheatley Hill bets were only taken after the result, but I was assured this was a ban on bets being struck in the bar earlier in the evening.

  You had to be quick to get on at all. Neither bookmaker began to think about chalking the odds until the announcer said ‘Seconds to Go’, whereupon they would, very often, chalk up each of the six runners at 2 to 1, which would give them a theoretical profit margin of 100 per cent. But theory does not get anyone far at Wheatley Hill.

  Everyone knew everyone (except me). Everyone seemed to know what was going on in any particular race (except me). And there was always something going on. Money changed hands but there were no receipts: everyone was known by their name or nickname. Including me, by the end of the evening: I was ‘the Welsh author’, which was at least half-right.

  ‘It’s a very fair track, Wheatley Hill,’ said Tommy. ‘An excellent galloping track, I don’t care what anyone else says. But Askern’s the place …’

  ‘Ascot?’

  No, As-kern, near Doncaster. The Ascot of flapping. ‘You can get a proper bet on there. You can’t get fifteen hundred quid here if you go down on your knees. You get all the good dogs there. Mind you, lads like us, we want to race our dogs against Jack Russells really.’

  Tommy had a dog running in the fourth race. He pointed to it on the racecard: Bailey’s Bullet. It was running in the name of a Mr McCloud. I looked puzzled.

  ‘You don’t ever race under your own name,’ explained Tommy. ‘Not if you’ve got a reputation.’

  ‘But everyone knows it’s your dog.’

  ‘Course they do. If I had a man in an iron mask lead the dog round, they’d know it was mine.’

  I got the impression I should steer clear of Bailey’s Bullet. But it ran well, came close, finished third. He made a ‘that was a near thing’ face.

  ‘What would you have done if it had won?’

  ‘Been very upset,’ said Tommy. ‘I backed the winner.’

  I started talking to one of the bookmakers, Alan Dobbin. ‘You make money?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Everyone I’ve met makes money.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Track makes money?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Miraculous, isn’t it?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  I believe in the Holy Spirit,

  the holy catholic Church,

  the communion of saints,

  the forgiveness of sins,

  the resurrection of the body,

  and the life everlasting.

  I had not made money. I had started by obeying my betting rules, one of which is never to bet when I know absolutely nothing. But a man can only have so much self-control. Before the last race Tommy said that, on form, Cosy Toes couldn’t lose but that his dog Twin should definitely come second. There was nothing else to touch him.

  Cosy Toes was heavy odds-on, so the bookmakers chalked up prices without the favourite. Twin 5 to 4, so I could make money if he won or came second to Cosy Toes.

  Cosy Toes got beaten, Twin was nowhere at all. I was feeling mildly aggrieved but sportingly went to the kennels to give Twin a pat.

  ‘You said on form that was impossible,’ I whined.

  Tommy gave me a pitying look. ‘You don’t take any notice of form in flapping,’ he said.

  The pit in Wheatley Hill closed in 1968, a decade in which the number of mines in County Durham was halved. More went before and after the great confrontation of 1984: the wicked witch Margaret Thatcher pitted against the arrogant dolt Arthur Scargill. In 1993 Durham’s last, at Wearmouth, closed down and the new Sunderland football stadium was built on the site. A colony of shrimps, living in an underground lagoon, was rescued. The mine itself was not.

  Five years earlier, the last shipyard had closed in Sunderland, once the largest shipbuilding town in the world. The great steelworks in Consett had already gone; so had the Shildon Wagon Works, which built most of British Railways’ goods wagons. That’s now a museum.

  Since then the bigger cities and towns in the North-East have reinvented themselves, but in an evanescent kind of way. They assemble cars in Sunderland, but only as long as it suits the Japanese owners. Hartlepool has a marina and can now laugh at itself. When I first went there I was told, with deadly earnest, ‘Don’t mention the monkey.’ During the Napoleonic Wars, a monkey was found on the beach, presumably having escaped from a passing ship. However, it refused to explain its presence to the locals. So they hanged it as a French spy. Having been derided for years by opposing supporters as monkey-hangers, the football club employed a monkey mascot, under the name of H’Angus Monkey. The mascot then stood for election as mayor, got in, took off his monkey suit, reverted to his real name and was later re-elected.

  It is still hard to work out what most people do in these places. The heritage is fading into history, shaped by Gala-style nostalgia. But pit villages had a very strange attitude to their mines. Fathers with a smidgin of ambition wanted their sons to escape. Yet the mining life – its harshness, its traditions, its camaraderie – was at the core of their being. Now the relationship with the past is just as ambivalent. The county is cleaner and their lives are gentler. And yet. What’s Durham for? What are the people for?

  Tom Thubron’s father didn’t want his sons to go down the pit, and they didn’t. Tom, having gone into the shipyards and then the Merchant Navy, became ordained and ended up as Wheatley Hill’s vicar, not a normal career trajectory. Many of his contemporaries left school on the Friday and worked their first shift at the pit on the Monday. Not all the jobs were terrible – there was surface and ancillary work – but many were tough in a way that has become unimaginable. The adversity bred comradeship inside the pit and beyond, in the rituals of the coalfield: football, bowls, the clubs, leek growing, pigeon fancying. ‘There was a tradition of never missing a shift,’ says Tom Thubron. ‘You were honest and you never let your mates down. And miners were polite, civilised, respectful. That kind of tradition was in the genes.’ The pit boys married the prettiest girl they could find and in the fullness of time the girls grew into matriarchs, dominating the homes, belting the kids and providing their own kind of strength for the village.

  Since the pit closed, the population of Wheatley Hill has halved. The working men’s club and the ‘Conshie’ (the Constitutional Club, a lightly disguised Conservative Club, though it might never have seen a real Conservative) have both faded, especially since the smoking ban. The bowling green was terminally vandalised long ago. And the brass band packed up. Before electronic payouts, there was always quite a gathering at the post office first thing for the benefit payments. Many men are known to have been on the sick for years.

  ‘There are a lot of black people nowadays,’ someone whispered.

  Really? This was an immigration pattern I had failed to pick up.

  ‘The black economy. Drawing benefits and doing painting and decorating. That sort of thing.’

  Tom Thubron says Wheatley Hill’s decline began long before the pit closure. The Attlee government wanted to shift people into the new towns of Peterlee and Newton Aycliffe, and banned expansion in villages like Wheatley Hill, which were classed as Category D,
a term still used casually in Durham. By 1964, 121 of the county’s villages were placed on the planning equivalent of Death Row – new development was banned; property that became available was subject to compulsory purchase and demolition.

  In the end, hardly any of the condemned villages were actually executed; they were just left maimed. When the pit did close, there was nothing else. If the men found other work, it would be elsewhere: they would have to move completely or commute so far they would become tangential to the community. Or they would stay at home and rot: on the black, on the sick, on the dole.

  The women went out to work, in low-paid flexi-jobs, like supermarkets or care homes. So the old family life collapsed too: a more extreme version of what happened in households across Britain. There is not much left on Wheatley Hill’s Front Street but there are plenty of takeaways. As I drove past on the way to the dogs, the only people about were a group of women or maybe girls – their faces were so raddled it was hard to tell – drinking lager out of cans and swearing at each other.

  Wheatley Hill does not look dead. The Category D threat having been lifted, most of the houses are new, complete with plastic windows, faux-leaded lights, satellite dishes and conservatories. Tom Thubron says the place is far better than a few years back, when everything seemed to be dying. The old miners’ welfare hall has been converted into a community centre, Greenhills, where they offer lunches, belly dancing, ‘boxercise’ and over-50s fitness classes with tai chi and aerobics. But the centre is locked up in the evenings. ‘Hardly anyone goes out at night now,’ said Tom.

  There is still power produced in the village. There are half a dozen wind turbines scattered about, providing at least enough electricity to keep most of Wheatley Hill’s TV sets going. Their movement made me think irresistibly of the over-50s doing something aerobic.

  Durham is full of places with peculiar resonance. There is Chopwell – ‘Little Moscow’, complete with Marx Terrace and Lenin Terrace. There is Blackhall, where a ski lift contraption, the ‘aerial flight’, used to take the coal waste out to sea, which was handy in Get Carter when Michael Caine wanted to dispose of Ian Hendry. There is Bishop Auckland, where, until 2010, the successor to the prince-bishops lived in Auckland Castle (‘a flat within the castle’, the church’s PR people would insist defensively).

  It had never occurred to me that Bishop Auckland actually had anything to do with bishops because to me it meant football. In the days when I knew a lot about football teams and little about British hypocrisy, Bishop Auckland used to dominate the FA Amateur Cup, now long defunct but then a very big deal. That was why so many other of these Durham towns sounded familiar – Tow Law, Shildon, Consett, Ferryhill, Crook: they all had top-flight amateur clubs. And Crook was the operative word. ‘Of course it wasn’t amateur,’ said Mike Amos. ‘The notion was ludicrous. A lot of the players came up from Manchester twice a week and they didn’t do that because they liked the air. Everybody knew it was shamateur. There was a maximum wage in the professional game and you could do very well as an amateur.’

  Close by is Escomb, where an essentially unchanged Saxon church – tiny at ground level but nearly as high as a cathedral – has been in almost continuous use for worship since AD 670. That’s, what, forty-five, fifty generations? Trying to consider that concept is like contemplating the immanence of God. And then there is Jarrow, a town with a double place in English history. Here it was, in the eighth century, around the time the third generation was praying for salvation in Escomb Church, that the Venerable Bede produced dozens of remarkable works of scholarship, all without a laptop.

  For most of the twentieth century, Jarrow had a more powerful association. It was the symbol of the depression of the 1930s thanks to the Jarrow marchers, 207 of them, who tramped to London in October 1936 to protest against poverty and unemployment.

  Jarrow is on the south bank of the Tyne, and boomed with the shipbuilding industry. When that bust, it bust. Palmers yard, which employed the overwhelming majority of Jarrow men, collapsed in 1932. It was then sold to a consortium of shipyard owners whose aim was to reduce overcapacity and protect their own firms; they made very sure the yard did not reopen. The government was not sympathetic. ‘Jarrow must work out its salvation,’ said Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade. By 1935, unemployment in the town had reached 72.9 per cent. This number was rapidly reduced, but only by amalgamating the labour exchange with the one next door in Hebburn, whose yard was flourishing. Thus the next official figure, magically, was below 40 per cent.

  The march did not achieve anything concrete. Unemployment in Jarrow eased only with the outbreak of war. But it imprinted the image of hunger, poverty and suffering on the rest of the nation (most of which was doing quite nicely), where it remains to this day, forever associated with Jarrow. Bede has been elbowed aside, confined to a museum called Bede’s World.

  There is a bronze of the marchers in the centre of Jarrow, outside Morrisons. It is a handy spot to sit and have a smoke. Jarrow is not now obviously poverty-stricken: it is an easy commute across the Tyne to Newcastle, with three metro stations and a new road tunnel. But one did sense a certain poverty of expectation and aspiration.

  Bede probably had more books than the Jarrow public library. And the Morrisons car park reminded me, more than anywhere else in Britain, of Chunky, Mississippi, a small town I discovered one sultry morning when I was searching for the obesity capital of the United States, and which lived up to its name because everyone I saw weighed at least twenty stone. This is the modern manifestation of the 1930s: the poverty that leads not to malnutrition but to obesity. And depravity. On the gents’ toilets inside Morrisons there was a sign warning unaccompanied boys not to enter, for fear of funny men.

  I met the Mawsons, Bob and Joan, in the cemetery at Trimdon Grange. It was a name I knew because of a song, ‘The Trimdon Grange Explosion’, written by Tommy Armstrong, the Pitman Poet (1848–1920), and revived in 1969 by Alan Price:

  Let us not think of tomorrow,

  Lest we disappointed be;

  All our joys may turn to sorrow,

  As we all may daily see…

  It was not the first, last or worst pit disaster, but, in a small village, seventy-odd miners died on a February afternoon in 1882. The inquest failed to discover the precise cause. There is a sort of memorial in the village: a pit wheel dedicated on one side to the miners’ leader, Peter Lee, who gave his name to Peterlee, and the other to the victims.

  Joan Mawson told me that one of her relatives was among the dead: John Edmund or Edmunds. She thought he might have been her grandmother’s brother, but she was vague, the way people are about great-uncles, especially if they died long before they were born. Yet Joan had always lived in Trimdon Grange: she grew up across from the old slagheap that used to blow its contents on to the windowsills whenever the wind got up.

  Bob took me to see their neighbour, Les Rowell, who had been down the pits, some of the time on his hands and knees working a two-foot seam. Les had a more than normally thick Durham accent and was addicted to ‘pitmatic’, the miners’ equivalent of naval jackspeak. He talked enthusiastically for some minutes about hedgehogs, cows, bulls, gripes, goves, bath-gates, straps and pigheads, all of them apparently items of mine equipment.

  ‘It’s all gobbledegook to me,’ said Bob, twenty-five years at ICI.

  ‘Les, can you just tell me what it was like down there?’ I wailed.

  ‘Bloody dusty and bloody noisy.’

  I became intrigued by Joan’s Great-Uncle John. He was buried not in Trimdon Grange but, along with most of the others, in neighbouring Trimdon under what looks like a war memorial. The number of dead is astonishingly variable for such a disaster, where surely everyone must have been known: sixty-nine according to the inquest report; seventy-four according to the memorial. The Mawsons had some documents: one referred to ‘John Edmund, boy’; another said he was aged seventeen. The side of the memorial listing the youngest miners is crumbling: it�
��s impossible to tell whether his name had an S at the end or whether he was thirteen or eighteen. Definitely not seventeen or sixteen – you could tell from the shape of the numbers – but sixteen is clearly what it says on the nearby stone, which was moss-covered but readable.

  Tommy Armstrong concluded:

  Death will pay us all a visit;

  They have only gone before.

  We may meet the Trimdon victims

  Where explosions are no more.

  I thought of Bob Dylan: ‘Oh, my name it means nothing, my age it means less.’ In Durham Cathedral, I lit a candle for John Edmunds as well as for my own son.

  I had been to Trimdon before. In 1983 the Sedgefield Constituency Labour Party unexpectedly chose a quick-tongued and presentable young lawyer from London as their candidate for Parliament. As he made his reputation, the locals grew increasingly proud: of their boy, who was rising so quickly up the political ladder, and of themselves, for spotting him.

  When Tony Blair became party leader and then prime minister, the Trimdon Labour Club became his touchstone and his Durham HQ. At election time, the press would gather and drink the bar dry. Sometimes I was among them, including the last such occasion: the day of Blair’s resignation, as both PM and MP, in 2007.

  Shortly afterwards the club closed. Rumour was that it was only a back-door subsidy from London that had kept it going and, once Blair went, so did the subsidy. But it soon reopened: as the Green Bar, Lounge and Function Room. Trimdon had three other pubs, but none had a function room, so the Green could corner the wedding market. The manager, Lyn Walsh, took me down there and it all came back to me: I even remembered the banquette I had stood on to watch his resignation speech.