When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  As the miner left, his collie finally liberated to joust against the wind, two more men appeared pushing a bikeload of coal. They were deeply wary. ‘How much do you get for it?’ ‘We wouldn’t know: we bunk it.’ One, an ex-miner with one gold earring, heaved the bike towards the shanty town of huts, and the other loosened up, though he said fiercely, ‘I don’t want my name in your book,’ as if there was some way I could divine his name from his sooty face. They would return to the beach, he said, for another bikeload: although it was so cold I could scarcely write a note, to them it was a ‘good day’. It depended on the wind. Sometimes there wasn’t a nut of coal on the beach; at other times you could get thirty bags in a day, no problem. Later a friend would bring a three-wheeler truck, and they would hawk the coal round a housing estate.

  Easington Colliery is where any film-maker who wants to capture the raw authenticity of a northern pit village should take his cameras. The air is pungent with the sooty fumes from a hundred coal fires. The pit itself, opened in 1910 when German freezing technology first enabled drilling through water-bearing limestone, lies between the black beach and the bottom of the steep main street, named Byron Street, and (further up the hill) Seaside Lane, a designation which mocks the concept of the seaside having anything to do with pleasure. The colliery spews its waste along an overhead conveyor, dumping it on to the margins of the sea. With every hundred tonnes of rock and stone are intermingled six tonnes of coal, trapped in the washing process which winnows the valuable black carbon from the rocky dross.

  When I first saw ‘Coals’, his bicycle was propped against a graffiti-stained bus shelter and he was sitting on the kerb, his back bowed with obvious fatigue against a wind that howled down the hill driving high clouds towards the slate-grey North Sea. He wore an orange wool hat and an elderly donkey jacket above jeans, which were black with damp coal dust, and muddy Wellington boots, and he gazed at the world asquint, half through and half over a pair of thick spectacles that rested partway down his nose. He was fifty-four and thick-set; his awkward, square body that of a man who had laboured hard but was nonetheless – perversely and unfairly – unhealthy, exhausted rather than fit. His skin was red and veined and flaky, and he showed at least two days’ growth of beard. His wife, he said, had left him many years ago, and he lived with a 26-year-old son who had been unemployed for nine years, all the young man’s ‘working’ life; their diet was bread and butter, fish’n’chips and strong northern beer. His resting bike was carefully stacked with four large plastic bags of coal, three blue and one bright orange, flattening its worn tyres nearly to the rim. Was I, he asked with deep suspicion, looking at my relatively couth attire of blue windcheater and grey flannels, from the ‘Nash’? If I were, he said, he was ‘finished’.

  Without having heard the term before, I could guess what he meant. The ‘Nash’ – short for National Insurance and otherwise known as the ‘dolies’ – are, I learned later, dreaded investigators from the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), who lie in wait for the likes of Coals, the men who eke out a meagre supplement to their state benefits by trawling the black beaches for nuggets of coal. If the dolies can prove this sea coal is being sold – it fetched then between two and three pounds a bag when sold door-to-door – they can stop those benefits (in Coals’ case fifty-six pounds a fortnight) and haul the beachcombers into court. A triumph for the hard-working taxpayer over the shiftless, workshy scrounger. Christmas was coming and the investigators, an official at a local unemployment centre told me, had been ‘having a bean feast down there on the beach’.

  ‘Coals’ – it was the only name he was prepared to give, though he did allow me to load his bike and his precious bags into the back of my estate car and drive at least close to his home – was nowhere near as organized as the other two men. He spoke about getting a van for £250, but I sensed it was a romantic notion indulged in to while away the agonizing hours of his daily haul. He could certainly have done with a vehicle. When I had discovered him, he was only one mile into a six-mile push to his home, much of it uphill. He had left at seven o’clock, well before light on a northern December morning, and, now that I had given him a lift, he would be able to make a second trip. He found companionship on the beach – ‘we bike lads stick together’ – and a community round the fire with which his home life obviously could not compete.

  He told me that, after working in the Hartlepool docks, he had become a miner in his forties. He quit after seeing his best friend killed ‘straight out’ by a rockfall ten yards away from him. He had tried farm labouring for a time, but reckoned he was exploited. The last I saw of him was his stumpy figure pushing his bike up yet another hill in the incongruous modern surroundings of Peterlee, a new town a few miles from Easington. The veracity of much of what he had to say was hard to judge. But what was undoubtedly true was that, in middle age and poor physical shape, he was desperate enough to undertake a Herculean task, seven days a week if the coal were there – sometimes twice daily, to make a weekly sum that would scarcely buy him a pair of trousers in a central London store. What was also true was that no industry would have been allowed to despoil the beaches of Sussex as the coal industry has been allowed to despoil these Durham beaches, and that if several hundred residents of Brighton were forced to spend twelve hours a day bent double in the surf, garnering what amounts to waste in order to make enough money to keep their families in decent rather than indecent poverty, the scandal would not be tolerated by either parliament or press. Those who equate unemployment with being workshy should try pushing one of those bikes up the rutted path from the beach, and those who shake their heads over the ‘black’ economy should try living on the dole and contemplate finding a job in an area where it is not unknown for seven hundred people to go after one vacancy.

  By chance, a few days after I returned from Durham, Mrs Thatcher made one of her rare, and clearly distasteful, forays north of the Trent. A year earlier, on a visit to Newcastle, she described northerners as ‘moaning minnies’. Like other spineless, disadvantaged groups in Britain, they had, according to the harsh tenets of new Conservatism, only themselves to blame for whatever misfortunes they might suffer. Responding on this occasion to a complaint from the Manchester Chamber of Commerce (presumably not a body comprised of Militant supporters) that the government was doing nothing to narrow the widening north-south gap – ‘We search in vain,’ said the Chamber’s president, ‘for some indication that the government is adapting its policies to take account of the problem’ – Mrs Thatcher described the divide as a ‘myth’. There were, she added, ‘areas of difficulty’ throughout the country. Which is true, but it so happens that a vast majority of those areas, where the difficulties are particularly profound, are north of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel.

  Newcastle University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) in 1985 produced a league table of 280 communities in Britain, judged by such yardsticks as the change in numbers employed over a ten-year period and by car ownership, which revealed that forty of the wealthiest fifty towns are in the south – those outside included Aberdeen, then still enjoying the oil boom, and such special towns as Harrogate in the Yorkshire Dales and Kendal in the Lake District. It also found that only five of the poorest fifty were south of the Midlands. The most prosperous town in the north-east was Hexham – at number ninety-eight on the scale! Consett, a few miles to the north of Easington, was at the bottom of the league, a poverty ranking confirmed a year later by a building-society survey of house prices. The people of this former steel town were, I was told, sick to death of the continuous trail of sociologists, journalists and European television teams that this unwanted distinction brought them. The Department of Employment’s own job census, published early in 1987, showed that 94 per cent of the jobs lost during the first seven years of the Thatcher government were in the north, Scotland, the Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland. In the same period the south-east had lost only 1 per cent of employ
ment, and East Anglia had actually gained 3 per cent. The census revealed a 28 per cent national drop in manufacturing and construction jobs between 1979 and 1986 – a loss of two million jobs – the brunt of which had been born in the regions. (Japan increased employment in those categories by 4·9 per cent over the same period.) More than two thirds of the new service jobs created during the Thatcher years were in the south-east.

  Devastating evidence of the harmful effects of the north-south gap was produced in the autumn of 1986 by Professor Peter Townsend of Bristol University. His report, on behalf of the Northern Regional Health Authority, made the overwhelming connection between the kind of social inequality suffered in such places as Easington, and life-threatening ill health. He published mortality figures – linked to joblessness, poor housing, low birth rates and overcrowding – which showed that 1,500 people a year die prematurely in the northern region from deprivation, and 13,800 suffer from permanent sickness or disability who would be healthy if they lived in more favoured areas of the country. Townsend compared the health records of the populations of 678 local government wards: six of the unhealthiest twenty-five were in the district of Easington, including the winner and/or loser, the village of Wheatley Hill, a community devastated by the closure of its pit. The report itself attracted a certain amount of attention, but was propelled into the national limelight by Edwina Currie, who had just been appointed a junior health minister by Mrs Thatcher (with whom she shares a birthday and much else). Mrs Currie pooh-poohed the connection between poverty and ill health, blaming the mortality figures on northern ignorance and a penchant for chips, booze and fags. ‘My family grew up in Liverpool, and they didn’t have two beans’— presumably she was speaking figuratively – ‘but as a result of good food, good family and good rest, they grew up fit and well. The problem very often for people is, I think, just ignorance.’

  I went to Easington to give a local habitation and a name to the nebulous concept of the north-south divide. Easington district council, fifteen miles south of Sunderland, includes most of Durham’s remaining coalfield in scattered villages along and near the North Sea coast, together with the new town of Peterlee, which was built after the war to provide better housing for miners and factory work for their wives. I chose it specifically because it was the home area of a group of ten school-leavers, all bright boys with O levels and CSEs, who were about to head south for two years to the Thames Valley town of Slough to train as engineers on the government’s Youth Training Scheme (YTS). No local employer was able to offer them both training and the high probability of a job thereafter, while in Slough firms were crying out for trainees, 90 per cent of whom secured permanent work when their time was up. I visited both Easington and Slough to see at first hand the mismatch between two communities, both of about 100,000 people, which illustrated much about Britain’s chronic economic imbalances. In Easington, the YTS ‘Job Link’ was a controversial scheme. ‘Bloody disgraceful,’ said John Cummings, a miner and leader of the council who was elected a few months later as Labour MP for a constituency once held most improbably by Manny Shinwell. He interpreted it as a victory for the hated Tebbitite ‘on yer bike’ philosophy. Jobs, say Labour stalwarts, should be brought to the people, not people to the jobs. (I was told of one trade unionist who argued that the offshore oil industry ought to be moved to the coast of Durham rather than local people being compelled to travel to Aberdeen!)

  The north-south divide had widened substantially while I was in America. Property price differences had accelerated crazily in the south, up to 20 per cent annually, while they remained static in the north, virtually cutting the country in half – ‘there’s an exclusion zone south of Watford’, said one frustrated Slough employer. Jobs were going begging in the Thames Valley, where firms were compelled to turn down orders because of labour shortages, and people were going begging in the north.

  Inequalities in Britain are reported in dramatic terms in the United States. It is one of the few subjects that gets London-based American journalists off their bottoms: ‘THE TWO BRITAINS: the gap between stagnant north and prosperous south is wider than ever’ proclaimed a headline in Newsweek a few days before I travelled to Durham. It contrasted pictures of Etonians disporting themselves in fancy dress on the Thames with the children of the unemployed playing amidst the dereliction of a shattered housing estate. ‘Some housing projects in Manchester seem straight out of the Third World’, read one caption. Kids hanging out on a northern council estate – ‘For the country’s underclass, few prospects of a better life’ – were set against young people in evening dress at a party at St Paul’s public school – ‘Laps of luxury’. Crude stuff, perhaps, but the persistence of such reporting creates exactly the image of Britain as a class-ridden, inefficient society that Mrs Thatcher’s whole premiership has been dedicated to eliminating, and in the country that Mrs Thatcher admired above all others and wished Britain to emulate. American reporters quote Disraeli with relish: ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are being formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’ ‘You speak of ...’ said Egremont (the hero of Disraeli’s novel), hesitatingly, ‘the rich and the poor.’

  Gordon Chopping, manager of the Easington unemployment centre, brought Disraeli up to date: ‘We will never provide jobs again on a sufficient scale. There is a new proletariat. It doesn’t wear suits; it doesn’t have suits; it doesn’t use credit cards or banks; it doesn’t pay taxes; it doesn’t buy consumer durables. Any work it does is on the black economy. Its members are a million miles away from people who watch ads on TV and can say “Oh yes, we’ll go and get one of those.” The trend is that if your father doesn’t work, you won’t. There is a permanent underclass, a dual society; whole streets where scarcely anyone works.’ Mr Chopping, grey-haired and bearded, wearing a venerable dark pin-striped suit, was the modern, benign equivalent of the workhouse master. His centre ran 102 ‘community programme’ jobs for the unemployed – which lasted for a year, and for which each worker was paid about fifty-five pounds a week – and it was his job to maintain morale, firmly chiding his flock with an avuncular authority when they invariably became negative. ‘We have to believe the pessimistic view is wrong. We cannot allow two societies to develop if we can do anything about it. We have got to continue on the assumption that everyone trains for work.’ This is a difficult assumption to make in the east Durham coalfield in the declining years of the twentieth century.

  In late 1986, unemployment in Easington stood at 18·7 per cent, of whom 38 per cent were under twenty-five and 41 per cent had been jobless for over a year. In seven years nearly four thousand jobs had been lost in coal mining, taking with them an estimated two thousand jobs in linked industries and services. Six thousand new jobs would have been needed within five years to reduce unemployment to the national average of 13·6 per cent.

  Mr Chopping is a former journalist and businessman, with a sardonic realism about his charges. He angered his superiors by suggesting that one third of young people who seek help had sub-standard literacy. ‘That was based on asking them to write down their names and addresses, and the number who hadn’t got a pen, and didn’t care to use mine, and would rather bring the forms back in the morning.’ The centre offered such work as decorating, draught-excluding, gardening, visiting the old and handicapped as ‘good neighbours’, constructing a BMX park for the village youngsters, and working in the office itself. Women were far more likely to land permanent jobs at the end of their year than were men – especially if they had a skill that could be used in an office or in caring for the sick or elderly. For young men the outlook was as bleak as the cold December North Sea that pounded their despoiled beach. ‘Half the kids leaving school in this area will never have a proper job; for the
lads there is really nothing,’ according to Mr Chopping.

  His centre was once the Co-op department store – a shabby supermarket still exists, but the store went the way of most other amenities, like cinemas, in such areas. ‘Even the fish’n’chip shop,’ someone joked wryly, ‘closes for lunch.’ In one room, the ‘good neighbours’ – eleven women and one young man – were waiting for their weekly pay. The man was aged twenty, substantially overweight, had a round, pudgy face behind his glasses. He had left school two years earlier with one A and nine O levels, which would have guaranteed him a job in the south; yet more than seventy job applications to offices and banks had not secured him a single interview. (Several of his friends, despairing of their civilian chances, had gone into the armed forces.) Very few seated round that table were prepared to move to find work. ‘I don’t see why we should: it’s the government who should provide jobs for everyone. Young people from this area have got to stay here and keep this place going, haven’t they?’ said one. Each had a dismal story to tell: the fat woman who couldn’t keep pace with piecework in a garment factory – she made thirty pounds a week against the norm of eighty pounds; the girl who was going to marry in six months’ time, even though the coal haulage firm for which her fiancé worked looked likely to lose its only contract and he would be sacked. She spoke of her father, a miner, redundant at forty-eight – ‘he’s no ties, he’s not bothered now, he goes up to the garden and that.’ Another young woman had been out of school for eight years, of which she had only worked for one year; an older woman said she saw no hope for her own son. A heavy silence fell regularly. Gordon Chopping, who had been listening to this catalogue of despair, told them: ‘People who put themselves out most get a job.’ He was rounded on by a middle-aged woman in a blue pullover: ‘Pack it in, Gordon – we know we’re going back on the dole. There are thousands of young ’uns competing for the jobs. When you go for one, there’s someone from a government scheme doing the job already.’