Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  It was no fun being on benefits. At the time, newspapers like the Daily Express liked to go on about ‘holidays on the dole’, urging the government to clobber the ‘loafers, shirkers, scroungers, fiddlers [and] cheats’. In reality, the British government was one of the least generous in Western Europe. If you were going to lose your job, you would be much better off in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris or Munich than in London. Far from being a holiday, life on the dole meant being bored, empty, cold, hungry, frightened, lonely, even suicidal. For a single person in 1982, collecting barely £1,300 a year in unemployment benefit, every penny was precious. In Coventry, Beatrix Campbell met a family of three who spent just £15 a week on food, having toast and porridge for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and sandwiches or beans on toast for their tea. Only at weekends did they have a cooked meal, and the mother had no shoes but wore two pairs of socks with her sandals in winter. In the same city, a redundant car fitter, living alone in his mid-forties, received £61.02 in benefits every two weeks. He spent £38.08 on rent and utilities, leaving him less than £23 for everything else. He was too poor to pay his television licence, had to choose between washing powder, soap and toothpaste, kept his central heating to 60 degrees in winter and only used hot water twice a week.

  Again and again, as she travelled around Britain, Campbell met people who lived on baked beans and biscuits, never switched their central heating on, never ate meat and struggled to afford clothes for their children. In Sunderland, almost one in five families on the run-down Southwick estate had had their gas cut off, rising to almost half of those with teenaged children. And as Campbell remarked, most unemployed families’ budgets were so tight that things other people took for granted – ‘a television licence, a holiday, a night out, trips to the swimming baths, roller skates, the Radio Times, a pound of plums’ – were simply unthinkable. Fresh fruit, new clothes, newspapers and magazines, books and records, cinema tickets, even bus tickets: for some families, these things were no longer staples. They were luxuries they could ill afford.17

  On 7 May 1981 two 19-year-old boys, Graeme Rathbone and Sean Grant, stole a car in Widnes. They drove it to the banks of the Mersey, attached a pipe to the exhaust and ran it through one of the windows, and then turned on the engine. In a note to their parents, they explained why they were killing themselves:

  What have we left to live for now there is no work for anyone? All teenagers have got to do is hang around street corners getting moved on by the police who think you’re up to something.

  The way this country is going no one will be able to get jobs. That’s why the young are turning to crime and violence. What is left?

  We’ve not got much to live for now. But whatever happens to us doesn’t matter. It’s the rest of you we feel sorry for. The earth is going to end with a very big bang.

  Sean had also left a card for his parents, containing £21 and the message ‘This is for mum, dad and the kids’. He was unemployed, having lost his job as a fork-lift truck driver three weeks earlier. Graeme had been out of work even longer, having lost his job in a storeroom in the autumn of 1980. His mother told the inquest that she sometimes found him crying in the kitchen. ‘He always used to say there was nothing left. He had no job and there was no future.’ The coroner thought the evidence was clear. Unless Mrs Thatcher’s government found an answer to mass unemployment, he said, ‘it looks to me as if we are going to get more cases like this where youngsters who have not got jobs feel the only way out is to take their own lives’.18

  In reality, the story of the two boys may have been a bit more complicated, since they had earlier been charged with criminal damage and were due to face the magistrates. The press, however, played up the unemployment angle for all it was worth, and with good reason. For if unemployment was the scourge of the age, then youth unemployment was its most virulent manifestation. In Cleveland, 6,500 teenagers were registered as unemployed in the summer of 1981, almost a third of them having left school in 1979 or 1980. The Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), established by the Callaghan government, was pitifully inadequate, with 700 applicants for every available place. Many teenagers were thrilled when they got on to the scheme, assuming that there would be a job at the end of it. But once they had completed their placements, four out of five went back on to the dole. One 18-year-old, Michael, thought that his stint at a local foundry had been a total waste of time. His take-home pay, he said, was £16, just £1 more than if he had been on supplementary benefit: ‘Would you work an extra 40 hours a week for £1?’

  In more prosperous Surrey, the prospects for unemployed school-leavers were little better. In Staines and Sunbury, there were almost 500 registered job seekers, most of them school-leavers, competing for just nine permanent jobs and seven YOP places. Paradoxically, the area’s affluence made life harder for those who missed out. ‘There is no tradition of unemployment here, and that makes it harder to come to terms with,’ Surrey’s careers officer explained. ‘There is not the same family support. Parents say: “you could get a job if you really tried.”’ A reporter talked to one boy, 16-year-old Derek, whose story proved the point. Having left school with few qualifications, Derek had applied for job after job with no success. His father, exasperated by what he saw as his son’s idleness, reacted by kicking him out. ‘You feel like blowing your brains out,’ Derek said. ‘They say kids don’t want to work, but that’s a joke.’19

  Even to most Conservatives, the ordeal of Britain’s school-leavers seemed genuinely shocking. In a long leader, The Times thought it would be ‘wholly understandable’ for young people to feel ‘rage’ when ministers lectured them about working harder or ‘pricing themselves out of work’. They were not feckless scroungers; they simply wanted ‘to work and marry and earn a decent living for their future families’. It was Mrs Thatcher who should try harder, guaranteeing all school-leavers a job, a place at college or a place on a training scheme. In fact, this is pretty much what the government did. By 1983 the YOP scheme had become the Youth Training Scheme (YTS), with school-leavers effectively guaranteed places with local businesses, further education colleges or training courses, initially for a year. The problem, though, was that youth unemployment did not peak until the spring of 1984, when more than 1.2 million people under the age of 25 were officially out of work. Even if the government had poured twice as many resources into the YTS project, it would not have been enough.20

  Yet for many writers who explored the impact of unemployment, the most compelling stories were those of older men who had lost their identities as breadwinners and providers. At a Sunderland community centre, the journalist Jeremy Seabrook saw the symptoms again and again: ‘the bruised look beneath sleepless eyes, the pallor of the skin … bitten nails, nervous gestures, the air of defeat’. ‘I never go out, never see any friends, only ever see a convener from another plant who sometimes calls me up,’ one Coventry machine-tools engineer said. ‘Sometimes I think my brain is dying. I get depressed – sometimes I shout and bawl. I’m not going mental, but I feel I might like to damage somebody.’ Another machinist, who had been out of work for two years, said that being unemployed felt ‘like you’ve committed a crime somewhere, but nobody tells you what you’ve done … Sometimes I think I’ll go barmy. Of course you get depressed, you convince yourself it’s you … You’re a waste of time as a human being.’21

  Beatrix Campbell thought that women, for all their tribulations, were better able to cope with unemployment because they could fall back on the traditional responsibilities of the housewife. But men were left without any obvious roles. Everywhere she went – Wigan, Sunderland, Coventry, Sheffield – she saw men sitting listlessly on ‘public benches once occupied by pensioners and mothers’, or self-consciously pushing buggies with small children, or cashing their giros ‘in the same numbers as women cashing child benefit and old people collecting their pensions’. ‘Men’s tragedy’, she wrote, ‘is that unemployment makes them feel unmanned.’

  Many men openly ad
mitted that they felt emasculated. If their wives were also out of work, they were totally dependent on benefits. Yet if their wives were working, they felt the natural order had been turned on its head. ‘All I hear is you are the breadwinner and we’ve got to be careful, we can’t have this or that because we can’t afford it,’ one Wigan man snapped at his wife. ‘If I wanted to go anywhere I had to scrounge from the wife. It was sickening,’ said a Coventry car worker in his early sixties. ‘The wife was the main one I had to depend on, which was disgraceful.’ As he admitted, he found it impossible to do anything at home: ‘I’m not the kind who does housework.’

  The Times tracked down three couples who had effectively swapped roles, with the wives acting as breadwinners while their husbands cooked and cleaned. But two of the men admitted that they hated it. ‘Housewives are not valued very highly in society,’ said John Tanner, a former community relations officer from Scunthorpe, ‘and at the moment I’m a housewife and I don’t really like it.’ As for Peter Smith, a former sales assistant from Poole, he woke every day with a headache and said he felt ‘degraded’. He tried to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’, and would often encourage his wife to cheer up. Then he would look at her face, ‘very miserable and white’, and all his anxieties flooded back.

  For many men, the idea of turning themselves into house-husbands was utterly unimaginable. Instead, they sank into a long torpor, not unlike Adrian Mole’s father, who ‘lies in bed until noon, then fries a mess in a pan, eats it, opens a can or bottle, then sits and watches After Noon Plus’. ‘No, I never do any shopping, or housework, or washing, or cleaning,’ one Coventry man, barely into his twenties, said glumly. ‘The wife does it all … I get up about dinner time and just literally hang about. Then I watch telly. I get absolutely and totally absorbed in “Emmerdale Farm”.’ He had thought about suicide: ‘I just generally have the feeling that I’m about to blow my brains out, thinking is this it?’ In Sunderland, another young man, married with three small children, struck a similarly heartbreaking theme. ‘My wife has known nothing but debt and poverty ever since we’ve been married,’ he told Jeremy Seabrook. ‘I just feel empty. I’m ashamed I can’t provide them with everything they need. What kind of a father is that? … Some days I feel like topping myself. I’m not kidding. If there’s no hope for me, what chance will they have? Life won’t be worth living. I feel like topping myself and taking them with me.’22

  Of all the stories of men struggling to come to terms with the shock of unemployment, one of the most affecting was that of Chrissie Todd, a Liverpool tarmac-layer, married with children. When we first meet him, in 1980, he is doing a job up in Middlesbrough. When we see him again, two years later, he has been out of work for months. Although he does a bit of building work on the quiet, he is desperate for a proper job. ‘I know I’m losing money asking you this,’ he says to the boss, ‘but I’d rather be legit on a lot less. I wanna be a working man again. I wanna come home at night with dirt on me hands and not have to hide it from anybody.’ The boss shakes his head. ‘This is the building game, this is Britain in 1982,’ he says. ‘It’s just not worth my while.’

  So Chrissie’s life spirals towards disaster. At home, his wife Angie is increasingly enraged by his failure to provide for their children. ‘What are they going to be doing in ten years time? Are they still going to be wearing hand-me-downs at eighteen and twenty?’ she yells. ‘What are we bringing them up for – and what is the point of livin’ our lives when – when y’get up in the mornin’ and it’s all downhill from then on?’ She begs him to ‘fight back’: ‘They’re knockin’ the shite and stuffin’ out of you, Chrissie Todd, and if you haven’t had enough, I have.’ But the endless defeats have destroyed his confidence. ‘What do you think it’s like for me?’ he shouts back. ‘A second-class citizen. A second-rate man. With no money … and no job … and no … no place!’23

  Chrissie’s story was not real, though it often felt like it. Played with heartrending warmth by Michael Angelis, he is one of the central characters in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, the best-known cultural depiction of the impact of unemployment. Originally shown on BBC2 in the autumn of 1982, it was such a hit that it was repeated within months on BBC1, attracting some 4 million viewers, and won a BAFTA award as the best series of the year. Yet although it is commonly seen as a blistering indictment of Thatcherism, its origins are a little more complicated. The series was inspired by Bleasdale’s one-off Play for Today, ‘The Black Stuff’, which went out on BBC1 in January 1980 but had been written and filmed two years earlier, when unemployment was Jim Callaghan’s problem. Indeed, Bleasdale first pitched the idea of an extended series to the BBC well before Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. But it took months for them to make up their minds, and there was another delay before it went out. By then, unemployment was clearly Mrs Thatcher’s problem, and inevitably the series is remembered as a damning verdict on her economic legacy.24

  In his original proposal, Bleasdale had told the BBC that Boys from the Blackstuff would be full of images of ‘urban decay, spiritual deprivation and death’ in order to suggest ‘the hollowness and sense of worthlessness that a lot of people feel when they’re on the Dole’. That makes it sound depressingly bleak, which it often is, but it is also remarkably funny. Bleasdale had no desire to produce a piece of agitprop, and while the series never underplays the suffering of its working-class characters, they are not saints but rounded human beings. And although Bleasdale captures the humiliation of claiming benefits, he never shows the bureaucrats as caricatured villains, as Ken Loach would have done. Indeed, he writes with considerable sympathy about the men and women on the other side of the counters, such as the head of the fraud section, Miss Sutcliffe, who is struggling to cope with her elderly mother’s dementia. Even the electrician who turns off unemployed families’ power is shown sympathetically. ‘I hate this job,’ he says sadly. ‘I don’t want to disconnect people … I’m not that sort of person.’25

  Above all, the series is remembered for Yosser Hughes, played by Bernard Hill with staring eyes, bristling moustache and thick Scouse accent. Violent, inarticulate, a man on the brink of total mental collapse, Yosser is one of the great fictional creations of the era, at once terrifyingly manic and touchingly pitiable. Wherever he goes, we hear the same refrain: ‘Gizza job, go on, gizzit, gizza go, go on, I could do that,’ most famously when he trails disconsolately after a man marking the touchlines on a children’s football pitch. ‘Look, here I am, a man,’ Yosser tells Miss Sutcliffe. ‘A man. A man. With no job. Looking for one.’ After attacking his estranged wife, he takes his children home, but cannot make fish fingers and toast without almost burning down his kitchen. Later, he sits alone in his overcoat in the desolation of his living room, nursing a black eye, surrounded by an empty tin of spam, two empty milk bottles, a tub of margarine and the remains of a sliced loaf. ‘Everything I’ve ever wanted, and all the things that I thought I had, they’ve all been taken away,’ he tells a policeman. Then he tries to drown himself. Characteristically, he fails.26

  If Britain in the 1980s had really been as self-centred as its critics claimed, Boys from the Blackstuff would never have struck such a chord. In fact, popular culture was suffused with images of unemployment. For obvious reasons – the record market catered predominantly for people under 25, who were most likely to be worried about unemployment – many of the best-known examples were songs, such as the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ (1981) or the Jam’s ‘Town Called Malice’ (1982). The Birmingham reggae band UB40 took their name from a dole claim form, ‘Unemployment Benefit Form 40’, which they reproduced on the cover of their first album, Signing Off (1980). Their single ‘One in Ten’, which peaked at number seven a year later, explicitly refers to the unemployment rate in the West Midlands. Yet UB40’s story is another reminder that history did not begin in May 1979, because they adopted their name months before Mrs Thatcher came to power. What she gave them was the perfect target: their song, ‘Mad
am Medusa’, for example, tells of the ‘lady with the marble smile’, who haunts ‘the sick, the poor, the old’ and revels in ‘hate and greed and lies’.27

  Television audiences in the early 1980s could hardly avoid the issue of unemployment. Channel 4’s self-consciously gritty soap opera Brookside, for example, placed the issue at centre stage. The opening episode, which went out on the channel’s first night in November 1982, shows Paul and Annabelle Collins moving into their new home in Brookside Close, Liverpool, having previously lived in the middle-class Wirral, after the fiercely conservative Paul has lost his job. Later episodes show him struggling with the humiliation of life on the dole, while next door young Damon Grant spends years looking for work after leaving school. And although Brookside was unusual in making so much of the disappointments of life on a brand-new estate, more established series did not ignore the issue. In Coronation Street, Bert Tilsley moves into the street in 1979, loses his job in a local foundry, spends years looking for work and is investigated by the DHSS for benefit fraud. Even Doctor Who touched on unemployment, if only obliquely. In Peter Davison’s splendid send-off, ‘The Caves of Androzani’ (1984), set on a distant alien world, the corrupt tycoon Morgus laments that ‘the stews of the city are full of such unemployed riff-raff’. ‘Most of them unemployed, Trau Morgus,’ the planet’s president observes, ‘because you have closed so many plants.’

  Back on earth, many people’s chief culprit was the woman in Number 10. ‘Mrs Three Million’, Labour’s employment spokesman, Eric Varley, called her – and that was one of the more printable epithets. ‘That woman! I detest her,’ said an unemployed woman in Wigan. ‘They’ve decimated our lot up here, the government. In the war we kept things going when the Germans tried to bomb our industry, but she’s sorted it out in a couple of years. It’s personal with me – I detest her.’28