by Mark Thomas
Takes a breath.
ADDRESS AUDIENCE VOLUNTEERS IN MASKS IF NEEDED: Take a breath.
And then looks back.
ADDRESS AUDIENCE VOLUNTEERS IN MASKS IF NEEDED: Look back.
David is the ex-Labour MP for the area and like most Labour MPs he improves with resignation.12
‘I think you’re right about fast food workers but as you get older you want to reflect on what you have done, to assess what you have achieved. I think we should bring out a book to celebrate all the great men and women who have made this club. Now if you’re doing a show you have to include them.’
David says,
‘Miners’ strike. Very important. We supported 150 families from this club.’
Someone else says,
‘And ban the bomb.’
David says,
‘And ban the bomb, very popular. And don’t forget the anti-apartheid movement, we had buses leave this shed for every demo. Don’t forget the local campaigns. The Pugney’s environmental campaign started here. The narrow boat collective started here. Folk club. Bygone bikes. The gays started here.’
I think people were gay before the club.
‘No, no they had their first public meeting here.’
So gays in Wakefield didn’t come out of the closet but out of the Shed?
‘Exactly.’
I have been coming back here since I was nineteen, I have performed here, organised demos, campaigned against PFI hospitals, attended meetings.
I love this place. This tiny hut is bigger than the sum of its parts. It is like a Tardis but one that only goes backwards in time. And for the first time since coming here for thirty-four years I worry this place is becoming quaint.
A wooden time capsule, a nostalgia cocoon where you can nurse pints and relive noble defeats.
For the first time I feel there is too much history here.
Peter is more considered.
PLAYS EDIROL:
PETER: The modern world is all about making you forget, isn’t it? It is all about you’re in this immediate moment and then it’s gone.
Anyone who has ever taken a photo of their meal and put it on Twitter that is you.
PLAYS EDIROL:
PETER: Whereas the Shed, all the badges and the plates from the miners’ strike and the sea strike, and everything else like that …
Exactly the things I am currently questioning.
PLAYS EDIROL:
PETER: … it places you in a historical struggle. It has got that kind of sense that you are part of a history. And this history is genuine and it is about people and about how people have worked hard to make their lives better and sometimes that is through politics and sometimes that is through social and artistic pursuits.
Peter and I have history.
I went to college near Wakefield, Bretton Hall, arts and education. I was a drama student. Now I know when you say the words, ‘I am a drama student,’ what you are actually saying is, ‘we are not going to be talking about you for about two hours.’
I was a drama student, I have a degree, I have a BA Hons in ME!
Peter and I were introduced by my friend Anita,13
‘I think you and Peter should meet you’re so similar. Very simpatico. Both gobby, bit out there, don’t mind giving it out. Even if you don’t like each other it should be entertaining.’
Two days later in a canteen,
‘Peter, Mark. Mark, Peter. Stands back to enjoy.’
‘Nah then lad is tha’ from that there London?’
‘I am.’
‘One of them middle-class bastards come up here to slum it in t’north.’
‘You’re from Wakefield?’
‘Aye, Wakey born Wakey bred, strong in arm thick in head.’
‘And sexist in T-shirt.’
He is wearing a mermaids of bondage T-shirt, with a pen and ink drawing of a mermaid with pierced nipples, bound hands and an improbable strap on tail.
That is a sexist T-shirt.
‘Now then I think tha’ what tha’s confusing is sexuality and sexism. This T-shirt depicts a cartoon retro vision of sado-masochism. Now when tha’ confuses and conflates sexuality with the oppression of women then if anything it’s tha’ who’s being the sexist.’
I liked him and it set the template for our relationship. He had a love of language that came from being working class and educated. I once had a mohican which I dyed blond – drama student.
‘What the bloody hell is that tonsorial aberration?’14
Peter and I formed a left wing student radical theatre group, we would write in an afternoon and perform in the evening, refusing to rehearse, believing that to be bourgeois affectation. Our slogan was, ‘Preparation NO, Improvisation, maybe …’
As we were a radical theatre group, in every other show I would play the role of US intervention in Central America. I’d wear a cowboy hat, walk on,
‘I am US intervention!’
Peter would twirl moustaches,
‘I am evil capitalist.’
And his brother Joe who was scrawnier,
‘I am noble but oppressed proletariat.’
That was the lexicon we were working with.
Our shows were always to raise money for causes and campaigns and we would perform anywhere we could – working men’s clubs, social clubs, churches, miners’ soup kitchens. But our home gig was the Red Shed. Surrounded by friends, comrades, trade unionists, commies, trots, feminists, veggies, greens, drunks and an assortment of folk who didn’t fit in anywhere else. And nothing keeps you on your toes like a hairy-arsed miner standing up mid-monologue saying,
‘I’m just going for a pint, don’t wait for me.’15
At the end of the miners’ strike I was in a student bar and a young miner I know called Ian comes in,
‘Mark, we’re going back to work and we had a meeting tonight. At the end of the meeting everyone were given an enamel badge to commemorate the strike and we had three strike breakers at our pit. They’re not getting badges so we had a vote and it were decided that two should go to the students for their support in the strike, so on behalf of North Gawber NUM I would like to present this to you.’
And he hands me a red plastic box, inside a foam backing and an enamel badge, a gold pit head against a black circle and a red outer circle with the words ‘North Gawber NUM Strike 84–85’.
Then he gives the other one to another student who has had nothing to do with the strike, or supporting the miners, in fact she says she is apolitical – ‘apolitical’ that is Tory for ‘I don’t want an argument’. Peter is incandescent.
‘She got a badge! She did nowt. My badge. She. She’s got my badge. A Tory. They give my fucking badge to a fucking Tory! No wonder they lost the strike.’
This has gone on for thirty-two years. And it has got so bad that on a couple of occasions I have offered my badge.
‘I don’t want your badge. I want my badge. The one she took from me!’16
PART 2
So I decide to help celebrate the Red Shed’s fiftieth birthday, I will commit a number of tasks:
I will help Peter organise the speakers and events for the Shed.
I will attempt to find common cause with the Bakers’ Union.
I will find the school and those children who sang through the bars of the school playground.
I am aware this is a somewhat saccharine image – urchins, singing, through bars, and I do not want to romanticise the working class. I’ll have no truck with that nonsense that every human action can be judged to be good or bad entirely on the class of the person doing it. Frankly that is just a parlour game of the Left – ‘prolier than thou’.
During the strike at Barnsley FC home games sections of the crowd would chant,
‘I’d rather be a nigger than a scab.’
So who wants to be first in line to get misty-eyed over that particular piece of working-class nostalgia?
But if we are to defeat the rising tide of racism and the whi
ff of fascism then we are not going to do so by pointing the finger and saying, they believe in myths, they believe in fairy stories, they believe in a vision of the 1950s that never existed. If we are to challenge that myth then our narrative, my narrative has to be true.
I am also going to find that badge for Peter and get him to shut the fuck up after thirty-two years.
I start my quests on that most unreliable repository of memory Facebook. I find the woman who has the other badge. I take a photo of the badge I still have. I mail a message,
Hi Mark here, remember this badge, you and I were presented with one each in the bar? I have mine. Do you still have yours?
She replies,
No, haven’t got it. Don’t remember.
Nonononononono.
I have failed at the first hurdle.
Things go slightly better with the Bakers’ Union. I hook up with a union organiser, Gareth …
LIFTS UP A CLIPBOARD WITH GARETH’S FACE ON THE BACK
… and I ask him, how on earth do you unionise in the fast food industry, when it’s not as if they want unions there?
He says, ‘Come with me, I’ll take you round Wakey.’
We head around Wakefield to every fast food outlet: Café Nero, Costa, Subway, Pizza Hut … By the way Greggs is unionised, they have national agreements and negotiations, paid holidays and fixed contracts … I have waited so long for a political excuse for those sausage rolls. Wahey! This isn’t gluttony this is solidarity!
We go into KFC straight up to the manager,
‘Excuse me, boss, we’re doing a petition to get the government to pay £10 an hour minimum wage, can we ask your workers if they would sign it?’
The manager says, ‘I’ll bloody sign. £10 an hour! I’ll take it round and make sure they sign.’
He comes back with the signatures of all the workers, who have included their contact details. And once they finish their shifts Gareth can contact them and that is where you start.
As for the children, I send out a clarion call to all true men and women of Yorkshire with memories of conscience, to stir their visions of the past and bring forth the facts. And to that end I go on BBC Radio Leeds Breakfast show.
‘Right with me now in the studio is Mark Thomas. Now you’re chasing children.’
NOT ON THE BBC.
NOT IN LEEDS.
I clarify the story about trying to find the children who sang in the schoolyard and how I want to speak to people about that event.
And the message goes out across the county of Yorkshire, down Denby Dale, along the Calder Valley, across the moor and back again. And BBC Radio Leeds beat their record for listener response … no one calls in. They have never had it so low.
Articles appear in the print media of the Barnsley Chronicle and the Wakefield Express again, no one responds.
And so it is that I have to find the village the pit, the school, the children myself.
I cannot remember the village or the pit but the one thing I remember is this village was no more than a forty-minute bus journey from where I used to live in Wakey. So I got a large map of the area and drew a circle around it, which is the distance I estimate a forty-minute bus journey to be. Any pits in that area are a potential target – there were twenty-seven pits within a forty-minute bus journey from where I used to live. So I must go round and find these pits, not easy as they are no longer in existence. If there is a school nearby, see if the route for the march back to work goes past the school. If it does I walk the route and see if anything jogs my memory. Find the school, find the teachers, find the children, find if the story is true.
For a quest such as this I call upon my friends and comrades.
MOVES TWO CHAIRS TO CENTRE
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER STAGE RIGHT: Peter, would you sit here?
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER STAGE LEFT: Will you bring Sandra’s mask and sit here?
GETS THIRD CHAIR PLACES IT BEHIND THEIRS AND KNEELS ON IT
I first met Sandra when I was nineteen and it seemed liked I had known her forever. She left school at fifteen, she became a dinner lady and before she had turned twenty-three she had visited Moscow to study Russian Literature, been accepted on the British Youth Council delegation to visit Cuba, been thrown off the British Youth Council delegation by a young Peter Mandelson – a badge of honour for any political persuasion – been reinstated on the British Youth Council by the Cuban Embassy and then greeted on arrival as a plucky schoolgirl hero fighting to reach the socialist motherland. She also has a car and often brings a picnic.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER PLAYING PETER: Before we go, I am sitting in the front, so if you have this mask and be me and I will be Peter.
HANDS AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER A MARK THOMAS MASK AND TAKES THE PETER MASK
Sandra drives.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER PLAYING SANDRA: Could you drive?
The pitheads are long landscaped away, the industry and the community it spawned airbrushed with all the dignity of a motorway verge.
At Dearne Valley colliery all that is left is a stone, ‘Dearne Valley colliery 1901’.17
At Barnsley Main,18 nothing, nothing but a set of colliery gates standing by themselves in wasteland. Were this three miles down the road in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park you’d charge £15 and say it’s an Ai Weiwei.
At Goldthorpe19 we can’t find any evidence at all of where the pit was so Sandra pulls over. Unwinds the window.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER: Use the button, use the button.
She leans out the window and asks for directions.
‘Excuse me, love, do you know where the pit was?’
Half-a-dozen people reply.
Armed with directions we stop at lights, and in front of us is a school, Victorian looking, steep eaves, iron bars. I photograph it, as Sandra drives off.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEER PLAYING MT: Could you take a photo?
I have a map to get to Woolley Colliery20 drawn by local artist John Ledger. It is a piece of paper and a single black pen line and a list of landmarks that we will pass – Dalton, football pitch, posh house.
‘“Posh House” … how are we to find … oh it’s there! … the one with a balcony.’
We arrive at Woolley21 Colliery.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE VOLUNTEERS: Would you take the seats back to table?
Now during the strike when the police began to assemble on picket lines, pickets and demonstrators would whistle and hum an old Laurel and Hardy tune.
WHISTLES TUNE22
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE: All together and if you can’t whistle hum it, on three for practice.
PRACTICE WHISTLE
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE: Great. I’ll cue you in in a minute. You keep it going, I’ll tell the story over the top, you do the soundtrack, and tell you when to stop.
At Woolley Peter has a flashback, ‘We were here, six of us, we came to support the picket and it were so early it was dark. The braziers were literally here. And as the sun came up the cops started to line up literally here. And from behind us we hear …’
MT CUE WHISTLING: On three. Keep it going, I’ll tell you when to stop.
Behind us hundreds of miners getting ready for the morning rush and shove.
ADDRESSES AUDIENCE: Keep it going.
Suddenly from the top of the hill a solitary police van with the one strike-breaking miner appears … and the whistling stops … There is a clatter of boots, then WHOOOAAAA and Peter and I are pushed through the police line, past one, two, three lines of cops. And we pop out on the other side of the police line, the place where everyone else wants to be, the only ones to have made it, surrounded by cops with truncheons. The van with the strike-breaker comes past and we shout,
‘Scab! … We’re drama students. Not in the face, not in the face!’
Peter leads Sandra and I up a rough asphalt path running along allotments, sheds, chicken coops, tied dogs and beds of the white bulbs and green stalks of leeks emerging from the earth.
He says,
‘D’you remember coming here on the march back? We walked along the High Road, came over the hill and through these woods, you remember?’
He stares at me,
‘We were here.’
His eyes are wide with expectation. And I realise Peter is trying to drag me into his memory.
‘We were on the march back here.’
He gazes with the look of a zealot awaiting my ‘eureka’ moment, when I say,
‘Yes, you are right. The school thing is wrong.’
Which means one of my best friends thinks that the story of the children is false. Though it is incredibly reassuring that he has come on what he obviously thinks is a wild goose chase to keep me company but in my heart I measure up the size of the loss if my story of the march back is untrue.
We head to the last pit of the day North Gawber, over the colliery now stands a Co-op superstore. We drive along the High Street and suddenly see the North Gawber Colliery Sports and Social Club, and on the wall is a Perspex sign with exactly the same design as my badge. North Gawber NUM, except it now says ‘Sports and Social Club’.
‘Pull over, pull over,’ I say.
We pull over and park and as I get out the club’s steward emerges, a woman with short hair, short leather jacket and a stare that has stopped a thousand drunks.
‘You can’t park here if you’re shopping.’
‘I’m not shopping, I’m doing a project on the miners’ strike and there was a lad at this pit who gave me a badge …’
‘Come in love, come in.’
We go into the club and she says,
‘What’s it about?’
‘At the end of the strike I was given a badge …’
Peter jumps in,
‘My badge, my badge were given to a Tory, can you believe that a member of the NUM gave my badge to a Tory …’
I say,
‘Sorry, this has gone on for thirty-two years …’
‘Rightly so. An injury is an injury to all …’
She says,
‘If it’s about a badge I’ll give you one.’
She goes behind the bar, produces a metal tin and brings out an enamel badge. It has ‘Sports and Social Club’ under it instead of ‘Strike 84–85’ but she pins it on his lapel and he stands there like he is receiving the Legion d’Honour.