When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (9 page)

It is an irony that a community that has sworn for generations that its children would not go down the pit now will take to the streets in defence of those pits and the rights of their children to descend a hole in the ground. A miner in the Colliery Arms at Murton, a few miles inland from Easington – one of those bleak mining pubs where the only cheer is in the heaped coal fires and the beer, and where women, by indelible custom, are rigorously segregated – said: ‘My dad used to threaten me with the pit if I didn't work at school. Now I can't even promise my kid that.' Recruiting from school, which used to run at one hundred a year at Easington Colliery, stopped in 1983: older men are tempted out by redundancy payments, and the vacancies are filled by men from closed pits inland who are bussed to the colliery. Some travel twenty-five miles, unheard of commuting distances in such an area. Alan Cummings, of the NUM, said: ‘In the sixties there was always a job in mining for young people – you left school on Friday and started at the pit on Monday. We've always said the next generation won't go down, but it's in people's blood, like deep-sea fishing. It's a stark prospect now – from cradle to the grave on the state. You have to get married, raise a family and try to live on that kind of income. It's frightening.' In 1947 there were 201 collieries in Durham; by 1986 there were only six. ‘We have our backs to the sea, there's nowhere else to go,' said one miner. (The coalfaces at Easington stretch seven miles under the sea. ‘Five more miles and we'll be able to serve duty-free and declare UDI,' said one miner.) I had visited a miner's house in a Yorkshire village a year before. A large lout of a lad was slumped in front of a vast television, roasting his bare feet before the fire. His 42-year-old father, redundant through injury, was bemoaning his son's lack of prospects: the only available work was stacking boxes in a supermarket and, heaven forbid, cutting cheeses. The father screwed up his face: ‘That's not reet for a lad; that's not man's work.' It was more manly, it seemed, for the still-growing youth to vegetate at home until no one would want him even for cutting cheeses.

The engineering trainees who were to go to Slough were enormously excited by their prospects, particularly of leaving home and spreading their wings. No lack of ‘on yer bike' spirit there. But many northerners still look upon the south as morally polluted, and, as it was caricatured by Orwell, as ‘one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards'. Those of us who live south of the Trent are not all
rentiers
, but there is no doubt that the majority of us – even if we are not making millions by whistling Eurobonds round the world – produce none of life's necessities, nothing as tangible as a chair you can sit in, coal you can burn, a car you can drive, a steel beam with which you can open up the ground floor of your bijou Victorian cottage. ‘Real' men and ‘real' work in those senses exist almost exclusively in the north. With that gritty reality go other ‘northern' qualities: friendliness and bluntness. Within a few hours of arriving in Durham, I was not only made welcome, but had also been asked my age, wage and what I had paid for an indifferent second-hand car. For fear of being thought soft or ‘Nash', I lied about the latter. A northern bishop, who had had the misfortune, as he saw it, earlier in his career to be assigned to a London parish, told me that his spirit always lifted when he arrived at King's Cross on his way home, and he found himself surrounded once more by Yorkshiremen. A conversation with a total stranger, he said, can, by the time you've finished, leave you feeling you are related. Even though he now wore a bishop's purple, northerners were not intimidated by him. I scarcely met anyone in Durham who had not stories, recounted with horror, of friends or relatives who had gone south, and, after many years, still scarcely knew their next-door neighbours. One miner said:
‘I'
ve got a sixteen-year-old son. I would chain him by the ankles and nail him to the floor before I'd let him go south. Not into that exploitation. Lads who go to London for jobs fall into vice and everything else – homosexuality and rentaboy. A boy down there would become a servant to the people with money and high qualifications.'

Much of what northerners say about themselves as people with different qualities from southerners is true. I moved to the West Riding when I left university and was rapidly made to feel at home by almost everyone, spending one Christmas when I couldn't get to my parents' in a miner's terraced house. I could never imagine a young man going in the opposite direction to start his working life as being anything but very lonely, at least for some time. The north is no longer as ugly as it was when Orwell castigated it, or even as it was twenty-odd years ago when I used to write stories about roofs collapsing under the weight of industrial pollution; but that is because most of the industry has gone and taken the ugliness with it. The Don Valley between Sheffield and Rotherham, which once contained more smoke than Hades, is a desert, like Hiroshima after the firestorm had subsided and the mushroom cloud had drifted away. Looking around the wasted area, I needed the map to tell me I was in the place I once knew with its rows of terraced housing, its fuming chimneys, red furnaces lighting up the night and its cacophony of industrial noises.

But there is still a northern quality, evident in the chirpiness of the people and the dour landscape. On a wet Sunday night, at an hour when all sensible people were abed, I stopped for petrol somewhere near Scotch Corner on the A1. A lorry driver from Manchester was bantering with the cashier – it was unoriginal stuff: ‘What time did you come on, luv?' ‘One o'clock.' ‘It's time for me to take you away.' ‘How much are twenty fags? … I want to smoke them, not frame them.' It lifted the spirit; someone was trying, giving it a go, and his good humour stayed with me as I drove on north. By the morning a ferocious wind was blowing; it rattled at the hotel windows, trying to worry them from their hinges. Outside a black clump of pines rolled with the wind in the morning darkness. Beowulf and the monster Grendel might have been out there somewhere, fighting their legendary battles for mastery of bog and moor. On the way to breakfast, I picked up a local weekly newspaper from the hotel hall to be met with the headline: ‘
SO WHAT IS THE MYSTERY BEAST
? – “Something's out there,” says PC.' The story began: ‘A mystery beast lurking in east Durham could be of an unknown breed which has lived undiscovered in Britain for thousands of years … this is not just a myth, according to the policeman who is on its trail.' I could not visualize such a splash story in a Sussex weekly. The north is another country. History is alive; the past is a companion in every conversation, and the thirties – generally seen as ‘good' times, despite the Depression – are as vivid in older people's minds as if they had happened yesterday. ‘There was not so much stress in those days. We accepted things on an even keel,' said one retired miner.

One night I met the Revd Tony Hodgson, vicar of Easington Colliery, who during the miners' strike had become virtually an honorary miner. Born in Leicester, he had committed his life to the north-east after studying at Durham University. He is a vast man, his midriff sprouting out between a shabby black pullover and his trousers: he likes his pint and, although he has already had one heart attack, smokes like a chimney. He is learned and eccentric, his name bringing a benign smile to the faces of those who know him. A university Conservative, he became a socialist through exposure to need and deprivation. In his first parish in a slum area of Gateshead in the early sixties he was called to the home of a blind man, who was trying to raise a child in a house by the River Tyne that was so damp there was mud rather than dust on the floor. ‘He wanted to top himself. My politics came out of my Christian belief. I was burying babies.' Reflecting on the apparent ‘politicization' of the Church of England, with its critical report on inner-city conditions and its outspoken prelates like David Sheppard of Liverpool and David Jenkins of Durham, Mr Hodgson argued that the church had, in modern times, been consistent in its social policies. Archbishop William Temple and others had been among the architects of the post-war ‘new deal'. It was, he said, the modern Conservative Party that had moved. ‘Maggie rolled back the carpet and rejected our values.'

John Cummings, the leader of the council, whose constant companion is a little Jack Russell he had found abandoned and lousy, said: ‘We've got to get back to the old values – make good use of history. The Durham coalfield invented the “welfare state” before the war: it was paid for out of your wages. You had your doctor and your medicines free. No prescription charges
then
if you were ill. In the thirties everyone was the same – no TV, no fitted carpets, no jealousies, no break-ins. You left your door wide open because there was nowt to be pinched. We must reflect back on why it is important to have what we have now like the Health Service. Why we got rid of the Poor Law. History is important.' A man called Joe, with a corn-crake voice that must have been useful if the pit telephone ever broke, spoke of the 1926 soup kitchens. Another ex-miner recalled ‘police station' shoes, handed out to the indigent, but specially marked so that they couldn't be pawned. Southern remoteness is raised time and again. One of the Slough-bound trainees suggested the north-south imbalance could be cured by moving the House of Commons to Sunderland. Mr Cummings said: ‘We're administered by proxy, by civil servants three hundred miles away. If a minister comes up, it's for all of six hours.'

Northerners are deeply frustrated by the control exercised over their lives and businesses by bureaucrats and financiers whose experiences and ways of life appear wholly alien. Such people are not even provincial satraps or colonial governors, who at least lived in the territories they ran. A group of miners told me how they had driven through the Thames Valley, Sussex and Kent during the miners' strike. Rubber-necking at the large houses along the banks of the Thames, they felt in another world, as far from their steep streets and red-brick back-to-backs as if they had been transported to the set of ‘Dynasty' or ‘Dallas'. ‘You cannot compare the wealth: we're not living, man,' said one in awe. Another had a friend who lived in Taplow, near both the Thames and ‘where Terry Wogan lives'. (Television stars, so close to everyone's lives and yet so far, are now the definitive success symbols.) This friend held midnight barbecues, which people attended dressed in shorts. No Roman orgy could have seemed more sybaritic or exotic.

People who led such different lives had to be at best ignorant of, at worst indifferent and callous towards, the industrial north. F.F. Ridley, Professor of Politics at Liverpool University, put the northern perspective in a
Guardian
article:

The government is London-based and shares with many southerners a peculiar view of the provinces. The north … is not only a different world, but inhabited by a troublesome people who cost it money and irritate it politically. There is something almost racist about this view: all the people … are tarred with the same brush, all are somehow responsible for the crisis and all can be left to stew in their own juice. We are supposed to be a United Kingdom. In such a kingdom, the troubles of one area should be the troubles of all, its welfare the responsibility of all. But we are not a united kingdom. We are deeply divided. Not by language as Belgium, not by religion and national identity as Northern Ireland, but by class … A nation cannot survive without a national government committed – and seen to be committed – to the security of all its citizens, their education, their social services, their jobs. It cannot survive with a government that appears foreign to large parts of the country.

When visitors, like the ‘six-hour' ministers, did make flying visits, Easington miners felt patronized. People I interviewed still complained years later of a national newspaper article that had painted Easington as all whippets, tatty second-hand shops and leeks. The writer, they claimed, had deceived them by wearing shabby clothes – an old mac and hat – and by talking to people who didn't realize they were being interviewed. ‘He should have gone the whole bloody way, and worn a pit helmet and carried a ferret under his arm,' said one. The Revd Tony Hodgson, who on such occasions is the village spokesman, had written a letter of complaint. Durham miners are aware of their own problems, but don't like them advertised by outsiders, which creates in them an ambivalent attitude. The Townsend report, with its swingeing indictment of the health and living conditions in the area, was welcomed in that it was evidence of the battle scars suffered through the years, proof there was something special about being a miner, travelling in a crouched run five miles daily to the coalface, shovelling coal over your shoulder, and breathing a fine black dust that ate at your lungs. But woe betide the outsider who suggested that Wheatley Hill or Horden or Wingate or Shotton were not fine places to live. ‘We have everything here,' a miner said to me, surveying Easington Colliery village with pride, ‘allotments – see there and there, and right there up on the hill – recreation, a close community.' At that moment, I felt, he wouldn't have swapped his colliery home for a Florida beach house.

The northern resentment at being run like an overseas colony by a complacent establishment of Sir Humphreys and Sir Roberts and by hard-faced politicians with braying didactic voices has been heightened by the decline in the past twenty-five years of the north's own regional importance. When I lived in the West Riding, Manchester just over the Pennines was still a subsidiary capital. The speed of communications, the drift of the ambitious to the south, the removal of some of London's powers to Brussels, Luxemburg and elsewhere, have eroded the north's limited independence. Banks, building societies, breweries, have been gobbled up into national conglomerates with headquarters in London. The north has been left with the branch offices and the branch factories, the first to be closed in recession. If you want a loan to start a business, the chances are the ultimate decision will be taken elsewhere by people who don't understand about manufacturing and who see their professional skill in terms of eliminating risk and maximizing profit. The coal owners, the steel masters, the shipbuilding magnates lived in the north: the colliery manager was a substitute village squire. It was a sign of the times, said John Cummings, leader of the council, that he had recently been invited to become president of a village cricket club: in the past such honorary leadership of the community had always been undertaken by the pit manager. British Coal might ‘belong' to the people, but its headquarters at Hobart House, London SW1, is a long way from Easington. The coal owners may have been hated – there was a notorious nineteenth-century Lord Londonderry, who was said to have raised rents on his Irish estates to drive his tenants off the land and into his British mines. ‘They buried the bastard face down,' said John Cummings, ‘so he couldn't scrabble his way out' – but they were known individuals. All the major northern cities have lost something of their dignity and independence, and it hurts.