When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  However, Skem was designed for the industrial workers, not as a nursery for future captains of commerce and manufacturing, or even for purveyors of spices and woks. It would in any case, as a Labour councillor pointed out, take about one thousand small businesses to mop up the town’s unemployed. (Thorn and Courtaulds who had pulled out eleven years earlier had employed 1,600 each.) There were a few schemes to train school-leavers with marketable skills – an Information Technology Centre and ‘Tomorrow’s People Today’ – but they could not help more than a minority of the better motivated teenagers.

  My last day in Skelmersdale was a Saturday, and I arrived early, just as a wintry sun had broken through thin clouds of differing greys. There were very few people about: a boy cycled across a footbridge, silhouetted against the pale morning light, a man with a fishing rod and basket waited by the old town’s war memorial for a lift, a young woman stood by a bus stop. Beyond the ‘New Jerusalem’ flats, the dark hills rose towards Ashurst Beacon, inviting a brisk morning walk. At the town’s edge, birds chirruped and whistled – it was seven days to St Valentine’s – and the first snowdrops had appeared in the gardens of the small professional enclave at Elmer’s Green. For a moment, ‘Doletown’ was transmuted once again into ‘Wilsonia’. I drove slowly back towards Digmoor, and the illusion was shattered even before I reached the estate’s wretched row of shops: a large mongrel was defecating outside the Up Holland Labour Club – or, as the sign said, the ‘UP HO LAND LAB U CLU’. I turned east and took the road to Wigan Pier.

  Warehouses around the Wigan canal basin have been renovated, and now house the ‘Orwell Bar and Restaurant’, a gift shop, and an exhibition showing life in the year 1900, ‘The Way We Were’. A plaque said that the Queen had opened the refurbished quay. The work had been carefully, if a little preciously, performed – like Covent Garden in London or an American historical site. Some feel strongly that turning Britain into a museum merely emphasizes the country’s decline, yet it seemed that morning that the Wigan waterfront was a preferable place to be than Skem. But it is easy to succumb to images.

  Across the water from ‘The Way We Were’ stood a terraced row of houses, which appeared from their battered and boarded backs to be uninhabited. I walked across the bridge, and past a renovated mill, to have a closer look. The houses were all occupied, and from the front window of one an elderly woman stared hopelessly at the traffic that flooded past her door: the ground shook under the weight of lorries. Her living conditions could not have improved greatly in the fifty years since Orwell. ‘The Way We Were’ scarcely needed a museum.

  Barry Nolan, the Skelmersdale plumber who had tried his luck in Australia, had said: ‘The working man’s biggest downfall was the finding of the oil. At one time they used to depend on the working man. Now, with this “Big Bang”, they don’t need him any more.’ Those who are no longer wanted have been dumped in reservations like Skem, stacked in high-rise flats in the inner city, or left where their grandparents were, in shoddy terraces. The moral failure of Mrs Thatcher’s government is not that it tries to encourage wealth creation, but that it has abandoned its responsibility for those who lose out during a period of such fundamental change. Robert Hodge and his Conservative councillors understood their liability for a community not of their making, nor of their liking. Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative Cabinets – with honourable exceptions like Peter Walker and Michael Heseltine – have applied the same competitive laws to the dispossessed as they have applied the BMW brigade.

  The door to the George Orwell Restaurant was open, so I went in for a coffee. I was met by a short, toothless cleaning woman of about sixty, polishing the new brass. ‘Coffee’s seasonal,’ she said. ‘There’s no call for it at this time of year, and the bar’s not open till a quarter to twelve.’ ‘Could I at least use the toilet?’ ‘Yes, nip in the ladies. I’ll keep watch. There’s someone doing something to the urinals.’ She told me on my return how the cotton bales used to be loaded from this building on to barges, and how the railway lines ran from the collieries to the waterfront. Each had had its own little pier.

  Did she, I asked, know of anyone who remembered this George Orwell, in whose honour she was polishing brass so faithfully? She looked dubious ‘George Formby now, they liked him. They’ve got his picture upstairs.’ ‘Wigan Pier’ was Formby’s joke, not Orwell’s. Formby was owed the last laugh.

  ‌Chapter 9

  ‌A Little Learning

  Knutsford is an ancient and comfortable market town, twenty miles south of Manchester. Its name comes from ‘Canute’s (or Knut’s) Ford’ – water clearly had a compulsive attraction for the good king. The town was billeted by Prince Rupert’s marauding army during the Civil War, and was the ‘Cranford’ of Mrs Gaskell’s novel – the town centre, with its surviving cobbles and arches, and the heath facing the Georgian Gaskell home would still be recognizable to her mid-nineteenth-century neighbours. Its two narrow main streets – Princess and King, known locally as ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ and studded with classy clothes boutiques – indicate the affluence of many of its modern residents. A few miles away Jodrell Bank telescope tilts towards the heavens, and the town and surrounding villages provide, in country houses, up-market corporate headquarters for several national companies. Other professional and business people commute to Manchester.

  But to the east – past a green shed on which a freshly painted sign intriguingly offers ‘clog-mending’ – a Manchester overspill estate called Longridge borders the tamed Cheshire countryside. Its residents have been plucked from the dingier Manchester slums, and at night many congregate somewhat morosely at the Falcon Bearer pub, the estate’s sole amenity. When news reached one drinker that his wife had been rushed eight miles to hospital after a fire at their home, he stoically held his ground at the bar – there was still half an hour’s drinking time, and why waste good beer money on a taxi? – reasoned this transplanted Andy Capp. While I was there, a senior policeman announced that, after a local crime, they always searched first for culprits in Longridge, which may have been good policing practice, but was shocking PR. The estate was up in arms.

  There is little to bind these disparate communities together. The overspill residents find the town’s bijou charms alien and expensive; while prosperous Knutsfordians seldom head their Volvos or Porsches beyond the executive estates in which the town nestles, unless perhaps to drive a cleaning lady home. Two Englands exist cheek-by-jowl, yet – with the exception of a few people coming together in one common institution – see or know as little of each other as they did before the town planners ripped up the Manchester terraces and exported the tenants. That binding institution is Knutsford County High School, the town’s comprehensive and only secondary school, which lies a few hundred yards beyond Mrs Gaskell’s home on the opposite side of the town from Longridge. Across the open fields one can just hear the distant hum of the M6; a more severe blight, suffered by rich and poor alike, is the unholy din of planes labouring into flight from Manchester Airport. It was to the school that I had gone to investigate whether the comprehensive ideal, so bitterly denigrated by so many, could – in circumstances that gave it a sporting chance – stretch the bright child and fulfil the dull.

  The comprehensive conundrum lies at the centre of a web of national anxieties. When my family was about to come home from the United States, one insistent question peppered the inquiries of our relatives and friends. ‘What,’ they asked, ‘are you going to do with the children?’ The question was swathed in layers of unspoken thought, touching class, ‘standards’, political philosophy, accent and aspirations. Nowhere has such a deep seismic fault opened in Britain as that between state education, symbolized by the horrendous populist caricature of the comprehensive school, and private fee-paying schools, which are building as fast as they can to cope with swelling demand. More than forty years after the 1944 Education Act had promised decent secondary education for all, British children each morning depart to thoroughly separate experie
nces, so perpetuating differences between us which are no longer even quaint.

  Businessmen and industrialists, pragmatically concerned more with the quality and abilities of school-leavers than with the nature of the system, know there is a gathering emergency. The week I returned from Knutsford, Sir Peter Parker, the former British Rail chairman, called for a ‘war cabinet’ on education. ‘Somehow we must see the educational crisis in terms of a national emergency … disaster stares us in the face for the 1990s,’ he said, pointing to the critical shortage of first-rate teachers, especially in maths, the early school-leaving age in comparison to Britain’s industrial rivals, and the failure to educate adequately the least bright forty per cent.

  None of Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet educates their children in state schools. A teacher wrote to me: ‘Those responsible for administering and financing the system have decided that it is not good enough for themselves … would you buy a Ford car if you knew that all Ford managers bought Japanese cars?’ The gulf isn’t just in quality, but in kind, as if working- and lower middle-class children still do not require the critical intelligence and cast of mind that most professional people wish for their own children.

  Although, by the time I began this inquiry, one son had completed a year in a comprehensive, I felt I was little wiser about whether these schools – to which more than nine out of ten British schoolchildren go – ‘worked’. So much of the concept and the practice was alien to my own distant experience at a famous public school a quarter of a century ago. There and then the aim had been – in monastic isolation – to turn out people with an education which would prepare the best to be top civil servants or lawyers. Such an education takes a tight grip on the psyche, not as strong as the Jesuits’ grip, but real enough. Surely, our prejudices tell us, one cannot be truly ‘educated’ without learning large chunks of Wordsworth or Shakespeare by heart: ‘poetry’ now means free-form composition without rhyme or scansion – my eleven-year-old son thought that if you put a capital letter at the start of each line, you were a poet; and an educated man is one with Latin tags at the tip of his tongue. But a comprehensive – taking children of every ability and origin – cannot be expected to provide the high flyer with the environment of Winchester or Manchester Grammar School, or to achieve on behalf of its pupils all a grammar school did and more. Comprehensives are new beasts, not yet fully fashioned, and certainly not yet fully understood. It does them a grave disservice to judge them for what they are not.

  The casual evidence is startling in its contradictions. There was the sixteen-year-old girl at Woolworth’s, eight months on the job, without the self-confidence to look a customer in the eye, monosyllabic, and inefficient to the point that I had to suppress a strong urge to shake her. She had an infuriating way of expecting the customer to know the procedure – perhaps because she was too inarticulate to make herself understood – then muddled her own part, so that minutes were wasted while a supervisor came to sort out the nonsense she had made of her till entry. She was, my son told me, a former pupil of his school. With such examples in mind, a British teacher, who had worked much of his life in the United States, wrote to me asserting: ‘The neglect of education in England, except for a thin line of the truly privileged, is perhaps our supreme national disgrace.’

  Yet at Oxford, where I had gone to report Olivia Channon’s death from a heroin and alcohol overdose – not a good advertisement for schooling of a very different sort: her drug problems were said to have started at a public school – I met well-adjusted, bright former comprehensive students who swore by the system that had educated them. Indeed, a radical chic had seized the university, and ‘cred’ points were gained for not going to the ‘right’ school. No one, I was told, was more determinedly proletarian that the Wykehamist leader of one of the university’s main Marxist groups. It was bad form to embarrass public-school boys by quizzing them on their educational origins.

  But the difficulty in seeking dispassionate information about comprehensive schools is that it is impossible to find a typical school, and hard to find a representative one. In inner cities I could have visited ‘sink’ schools – though these are seldom measured against the problems with which they must contend: some of the apparently crazier manifestations of anti-racism, for example, are sincere attempts to cope with schools where well over half the pupils are black or Asian. In the depths of Surrey, on the other hand, there is no doubt a comprehensive school exclusively peopled by the children of accountants and stockbrokers. What I needed was a school that had enough advantages to give its pupils a fighting chance, while it was not so exceptional that it would instantly be dismissed by the agonized reader with the thought ‘of course, if I lived there I’d have no problems with the local comprehensive.’

  A friend had alerted me to potential comprehensive school disasters. His own two daughters had gone to a well-considered London comprehensive – ironically, he had pulled strings to get them in. He told me: ‘Violence was endemic with middle-class kids – the “melons” – being picked on as individuals and attacked as groups.’ One daughter got caught up in a murder case – a former pupil killed another – and was threatened by the killer’s sister, who was in her class, when she had to give evidence. His second daughter ‘joined a group of disaffected punk kids who didn’t work, played truant, took drugs, went shoplifting, etc., and finally dropped out of school altogether.’ Another parent wrote a moving article in the Guardian about her own son changing from ‘a willing, enthusiastic child to a surly, unhappy individual, who didn’t want to get up in the mornings.’ She quoted a poem by her son:

  He is the outsider

  he one they all mock

  He is the one they can’t accept

  Just because he is different

  Because he works hard

  Instead of talking

  Because he’s interested

  In school work.

  He gave up in the end

  He just wanted to stay at home.

  I was that outsider

  I was the one they couldn’t accept

  I was the one they mocked …

  Knutsford was suggested by John Tomlinson, Professor of Education at Warwick University and a former Chief Education Officer for Cheshire. He is a passionate and committed man, who might do wonders for the image of state education if he got the sort of media platform offered to the glamorous heads of big public schools. Even the Observer invites public school rather than state school headmasters to write on the problems of the state system. Our collective anxiety over comprehensives, he pointed out, ‘is that the ideal runs counter to our national tradition and philosophy. Society is hierarchical and divided, while the schools attempt to treat people of differing abilities according to their needs in a common community.’

  Such is the tarnished standing of the media with many teachers, I knew I would have to persuade the school I chose that I did not have horns and would not be making a beeline for kids smoking on the playing field. The Knutsford head, Mike Valleley, was nervous: ‘What “control” would he have?’ he asked. Three of his senior colleagues wanted to veto my visit. They were fearful that reporting the continuing effects of the long teachers’ dispute – at that time officially over at least for a while, but still causing the senior school to be locked at lunchtime because of lack of staff cover so that children wandered the town centre – or mentioning scarce resources would cost them students. Mr Valleley was terrified of litter being featured: ‘It’s the one thing the local press will seize on.’ But he clearly saw that exposing his school to a writer was a test of self-confidence that he and the school ought to be brave enough to take.

  My first (and later confirmed) view was that Knutsford could stand the scrutiny. It became a comprehensive in 1973 through the amalgamation of two secondary-modern schools, each standing in generous playing fields – Mr Valleley, like an eighteenth-century landowner, was master of all he surveyed – and linked by a path that runs between a field of clover and pleasant s
uburban gardens. The town never had a grammar school: eleven-plus scholars had had to travel. As well as drawing children from the town’s divided communities, the school takes pupils from outlying villages, so the school’s catchment area is socially mixed. Although a quarter of local parents pay for their children’s secondary education, the school is ‘comprehensive’ in that it is the only state secondary school, takes both sexes, and educates pupils to A level.

  A sixth-form block and sports facilities (which include an indoor swimming pool and are shared with the community) were added to the former boys’ school – now the upper school. The newer, former girls’ school – now the lower school for eleven- and twelve-year- olds – has such thin floors that it frequently sounds as if indoor hockey is being played upstairs. Paint has been at a premium since the school’s opening, and the litter – as in most schools – blights the grounds. But there are well-maintained lawns and shrub gardens. In the autumn sun, as teachers’ voices drifted through open windows, it seemed a positive and congenial school in which to pass one’s youth and learn. Children are well-mannered – no bowling strangers over in the long corridors – and usually wear smart school uniforms. Sixth formers are allowed mufti – jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. Several of the staff are distinctly snappy dressers. One senior woman would have perished at the thought, but she would have looked in place on a Conservative platform. Discipline, I sensed, was not a great problem. At one assembly I attended, five boys were singled out for having played hoaxes on parents, including one with a heart condition: the offence was being taken as seriously as it would have been at any school. Sanctions include detentions and suspensions, and I was told that the school would not hesitate to remove a child who was a disruptive influence.