The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  As 1978 gave way to 1979, workers at the Templeborough melting shop received their very own Christmas card from then prime minister James Callaghan. That was how powerful and how valued these workers and their labour was. No one could have known when they received that festive card how close the end was. Just one polling day away, in fact. Back then the works employed 10,000 men in conditions of unthinkable clamour and heat; one of them was the father of the man now singing on stage.

  Richard Hawley, Sheffield based singer and songwriter and a friend of mine, is something of a local hero; tonight he plays a homecoming concert here with the BBC Philharmonic orchestra. He talks of his dad, and how amazed and proud he would have been to see his son perform here. Son like father earning a living in this potently symbolic living relic of the region’s industrial might, although in very different ways. He falters a little as he speaks, and everyone in the capacity audience understands why. It is a moment completely without sentiment but one of real emotion. There is a lump in our communal throat; something in our collective eye.

  So much so that Richard and I have to stay up drinking in the bar of the Leopold Hotel, Sheffield, till three o’clock in the morning to fully process the evening’s events. I scribbled some notes in my Moleskine notebook. But, written in a shaky hand at a pavement table buoyed with fine wines and spirits, they now are about as intelligible to me as the Rosetta Stone or a Latvian verse drama. But I know what the gist of those thoughts were. Nothing could symbolise more sweetly, more sadly, more perfectly, the change in how we live and work and have fun than this heady night; a man singing beautiful and romantic songs of love and home and loss in the vast churchlike space where his dad once hammered and forged in a thunderous crucible of industry.

  There are ironies galore in stories like that of Templeborough/Magna, stories that have been repeated all over post-industrial Britain. Make no mistake; the nation that was the cradle of the industrial revolution is now a post-industrial country. Walk through the pedestrianised centres of our old industrial towns and cities, once ‘a world of great noise and much dirt’ as the Tyneside historian Paul Kennedy put it, you will now hear nothing, except maybe the tapping of a keyboard, the whoosh of a PowerPoint presentation, the jabber of an overloud mobile phone conversation. Look around – you’ll see offices and ‘outlets’, not foundries or factories. Look through the windows and what you glimpse is not bright cascades of sparks or the flickers of flames but row upon row of PC terminals; slack, tired faces; and suit jackets hung casually behind doors in strip-lit ‘workspaces’.

  When did all this happen? Not that long ago. I don’t regard myself as quite in the ‘sere and yellow leaf’ yet but I remember as a child of a world of men in overalls and factory hooters, the air being full of smoke and coal dust, and the smell of oil and engines. The sixties and seventies were still largely this kind of world; a crowded world, a noisy world, a dirty world; tough times but exciting ones. Paul Kennedy goes on:

  There was a deep satisfaction about making things … a deep satisfaction among all of those that had supplied the services, whether it was the local bankers with credit; whether it was the local design firms. When a ship was launched at Swan Hunter all the kids at the local school went to see the thing our fathers had put together and when we looked down from the cross-wired fence, tried to find Uncle Mick, Uncle Jim or your dad, this notion of an integrated, productive community.

  Then, about 30 years ago, began what’s been called the ‘De-Industrial Revolution’. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper’s daughter from what some might even call the north, had a keen tribal distrust of manual labour, manufacturing industries and their burly, powerful unions. Whether practical or ideological, she favoured policies that were not so much laissez-faire as let them ‘all go hang’. The job of government with regard to industry was not to intervene or protect their own, but to encourage competition, stand back and let the best, or at least the cheapest, man win. They did, from the sweatshops of Taiwan to the dangerous coal mines of Argentina.

  The 1980s saw Britain de-industrialised on a scale and at a speed unheard of anywhere else in Europe, possibly the world. Scant regard was given to the communities and classes destroyed by it; it was the law of the free market. All this time, Germany and Scandinavia were husbanding their economies and industries. And look where it got them.

  Britain became a financial clearinghouse and manufacturing industry was starved and ground down. Jobs in that sector were replaced by more precarious, short-term work in retail, services and the production of luxury goods. A new class of worker was identified by the theorist Guy Standing; where once there had been a proletariat, now there was the ‘precariat’, people, both local and migrant, skilled and unskilled, whose work was characterised as short term, unreliable, zero-hour contracted and certainly not for life.

  Oddly, the eminent leek-wielding sociologist and light entertainer Max Boyce had predicted this turn of events in the 1970s in his melancholic lament ‘Duw It’s Hard’. Boyce had actually worked underground for eight years and his song from the album Live At Treorchy, which was in practically every Welsh home in the 1970s, is a more poignant and insightful study of the coming of the postindustrial world than a thousand academic treatises.

  In our little valley

  They closed the colliery down,

  And the pithead baths is a supermarket now …

  They came down here from England

  Because our output’s low.

  Briefcases full of bank clerks

  That had never been below.

  Lest you think this mawkish tosh, and that’s tempting, consider Cortonwood Colliery, South Yorkshire, where the shower block and baths is now a branch of Morrisons. In Boyce’s song, the ex-miner gets a new job counting buttons in a factory. At Cortonwood, one bitter ex-miner told the BBC on a news programme in the nineties, ‘Oh aye, we’ve all got jobs again. Selling sandwiches to one another.’

  When Labour ousted the Tories in 1997, the last thing they wanted to dirty their hands with was anything as grubby and potentially problematic as the manual working class or their noisy, unpleasant manufacturing industries. Echoing the ‘we know best’ optimism of McLuhan and the US theorists, what had been a harsh, unpalatable tenet of Thatcherism was re-branded as an improvement. We would no longer have to get dirty or injured working in filthy conditions.

  New Labour and its prime movers had an unshakeable belief in what they called the ‘knowledge economy’. Infatuated with Silicon Valley and Bill Gates, they claimed they’d make Britain the e-commerce capital of the world within three years. Aditya Chakrabortty in a Guardian piece, ‘Why doesn’t Britain make things any more?’, based on his 2011 Radio 3 talk on de-industrialisation, summed it up nicely:

  The future lay in coming up with the ideas, the software, and most of all, the brands. Once the British had sold cars and ships to the rest of the world; now they could flog culture and tourism and Lara Croft.

  The odd thing is that all this techno-utopianism came from men who would struggle to order a book off Amazon. Alastair Campbell tells a story about how Blair got his first-ever mobile phone after stepping down as prime minister in 2007. His first text to Campbell read: ‘This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.’

  As you may have guessed, I am something of a romantic about the way things used to be. I come from a part of the world which owes its civic riches, its streets and parks, even the might of its football teams, to the former glories of its manufacturing industries. Every member of my family, up to and including me, worked in factories or foundries, mills or mines. But I’m a romantic with a fairly hard head. I hated my brief time working in the textile trade in the mid-eighties. I hated the desperately blokey milieu of the office, with its bullish moustaches and what would now be called ‘banter’. I liked the actual mill better; its bracing atmosphere was more brisk and convivial. There were young and old there, male and female. But the physical labour left me wrung out like a dishrag. The
carding room of a textile mill is a back-breaking, soul-sapping place, and at the end of a day lugging the heavy spindles around (bales were they? Doffs? I seem to have excised it from my memory) I was streaked with dirt and sweat and frankly knackered. But I am sorry they have gone. Without its heavy industry, Britain is a cleaner and quieter place. But it’s also in many ways duller and poorer.

  The one place British industry lives on splendidly, and goes from strength to strength, is in its recreation as a heritage tourist attraction for today’s worker, which is where I thought my look at modern leisure in post-industrial Britain should begin. Overseas, you can visit the cheesemongers of Alkmaar and Gouda, the vineyards of the Douro, even take a sip with the good ol’ boys at the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg. But these are all going concerns and the tours are sidelines.

  Britain is the world leader in post-industrialism and post-industrial heritage tourism. As writer Richard James put it, ‘Britain now lavishes the same care on its industrial heritage as it once reserved for its castles and cathedrals.’ How have we turned these pits of sweat and toil, these dangerous, dark, noisy spaces, into places where the former workers’ kids can now go for a nice day out, have a baguette and do some interacting?

  With Magna (Or the Magna Science Adventure Centre, to give it its full name), the designers took the wise decision to leave the exterior of the huge buildings just as they were, and merely colonise and smarten up the interior space. That now holds a concert hall, a banqueting suite and an exhibition that brings to life the shop’s incendiary and incandescent heyday. At Magna, on the hour, they have something they call Big Melt. Quite a thing it is too. You can see and hear it from every part of the building. Essentially, it’s a massive modern son et lumière type show with pyrotechnics and robotics. The idea is to replace the look, sound and feel of ‘E’ furnace, one of Templeborough’s original gigantic (and back then thrillingly futuristic) arc furnaces of the 1950s. It’s an impressive 12 or so minutes, tension ratcheted up by the doomy background sound, mood lighting, a voice-over that’s richly local but gruffly dramatic, and naturally the massive furnaces themselves.

  A phalanx of little kids were milling about expectantly when I was there, in outsized hard hats with clipboards and big novelty pens. They were being herded with difficulty by a harassed looking young female teacher, herded like cats, but cats in a massive noisy foundry, which is even harder than the proverbial. As turbines thrummed and machines of unknowable function rolled along great gantries above, a little Indian lad was very carefully drawing a dog on his mate’s forehead, skilfully taking advantage of the noise and clamour as cover. Then there came a whoosh of sparks and a hot garland of flame from below.

  Go along yourself. Take some kids; they may not follow exactly the sections of exposition about how burgeoning demand for cars created a need for cheap steel which in turn led to the demise of the open-hearth system in favour of electric arc furnaces. But they will have a ball. It’s hard not to. The Big Melt is enough to bring out the little kid in anyone with its arcing showers of sparks, flashes of electric light and tongues and tributaries of fire. Who wouldn’t enjoy the rumblings and shakings below and overhead and the narration’s splendidly, reassuringly macho talk of ‘lowering five metre long graphite electrodes’, ‘giant casting pots’ and ‘doing in 90 minutes what took volcanic eras’. There will be ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and possibly the odd whimper.

  Of course, Sheffield and Rotherham being what they were, some of the little ’uns granddads will have worked here in what the voice-over calls ‘the sweltering heat all day’. Jarvis Cocker, son of Sheffield, made a documentary film called The Big Melt about how steel shaped the character of the city, and it was this point about the work itself, the daily routine in these extraordinary conditions, that stayed with him. ‘It was just super-intense extreme conditions. The idea of even being in a place with a massive ball of flame coming at you most of the day, with an ear-piercing noise. That was your working environment. That’s just crazy.’

  The process by which Templeborough became Magna, of how the ‘swords’ of industry were beaten into the ‘ploughshares’ of leisure, is one that’s been echoed and mirrored all across industrial and postindustrial Britain. In Blaenavon, South Wales, there’s Pwll Mawr, the Big Pit. If you’ve seen the cover of the Manic Street Preachers National Treasures album, that’s the Big Pit’s main shaft and winding wheel there on the cover. A working colliery from 1860 to 1980, it’s now the Big Pit National Coal Museum.

  Museum is slightly misleading though; the idea is to give the feel of what a working pit was like. My dad made pit props in an engineering works called Gullick Dobson and he will tell you that the ones in the Big Pit are not there for show but to stop the mine roof falling in on you as you take your tour underground. In fact, just like a working pit, it’s covered by the regulations of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Mines. This can disconcert some visitors when they find they must wear a hard hat, safety lamp and battery, and on their belt a carbon-monoxide filtering Rebreather which will buy them an hour and a chance of survival in the event that the mine fills with toxic air. Mobile phones or battery devices are not allowed or, rather, ‘contraband’. (This reminds me of the time I made a TV film in the disused nuclear reactor at Sellafield. During the intensive security briefing I was told to surrender any bottled water, food, cigarettes or snuff. ‘Blimey, I’ve lost so much snuff at nuclear reactors this way,’ I quipped. No one laughed.)

  At the Bradford Industrial Museum, I have taken wine and cheese with the J B Priestley Society and admired his amateur watercolours in a building that was once known as Moorside Mills. In the town’s considerable commercial heyday, it used to be a thriving mill where they spun worsted, the fine smooth yarn that made the city rich and powerful. In Saltaire, the old mill houses some rather more celebrated art works by another local lad, David Hockney. There’s some ironic consolation to be had in the fact that, though the industries themselves have been killed off by neglect or malice, they have spawned a new sector of the economy, a new market; the heritage industry. If its unwitting mother was Mrs T, its father is a Yorkshireman called Frank Atkinson.

  Frank Atkinson was born on 13 April 1924, the son of a labourer and a schoolteacher. An inquisitive child, he was obsessed with fossils and museums and soon became the youngest member of The Museum of Barnsley Naturalists and Scientific Society. Later he was appointed director at Wakefield Museum and Art Gallery. In 1952, Frank toured Scandinavia and was struck by their ‘folk museums’, demotic, unstuffy, ‘living’ museums dedicated to enshrining and preserving a record of disappearing ways of life. In Sweden and Norway, these were chiefly rural communities. But Atkinson decided that England, specifically the industrial north, ought to have a similar museum devoted to its heritage. Atkinson knew that the communities and ways of life associated with mining and shipbuilding were declining. He said, ‘It is essential that collecting be carried out quickly and on as big a scale as possible. It is now almost too late.’

  After decades of collecting, sourcing and wrangling with various county councils, the Beamish museum was opened in 1971 on 300 acres that had once belonged to the family of former prime minister Sir Anthony Eden. It’s a fine spot, a wooded river valley, in a peaceful corner of County Durham. The wood is called Hell Hole Wood and a nearby village is called No Place, but these are complete misnomers, particularly on an unseasonably balmy late October morning with the sun blazing down from a cloudless sky on woods of copper, amber and russet. Some will say, rightly, that something clearly cannot be quite right for it to feel like a day in high summer when it’s nearly Bonfire Night. I decide to put my climatic fears for the planet to one side, take my coat off and enjoy it.

  The entrance arch, though I didn’t notice this at first, is no decorative construction but a bright red steam hammer the size of a house. Through it, the site stretches away, though there’s no way of taking it all in or getting any clear idea of how big and rich and various it is fr
om here. Pretty much everything you can see from this ridge to the wooded hills in the distance is Beamish, farmsteads and towns, crannies and pockets, each celebrating and enshrining a different era of northern life and work.

  Almost immediately a tram appears, chugging along the rutted track just below the entrance. I decide to join the small waiting queue. It mainly comprises a big family group headed and marshalled by a bustling, genial kind of dad in what seem to me insanely optimistic white pumps for a day late in the year on the County Durham coalfield. His lad of about ten is dancing around with suppressed anticipation. ‘Have you ever been so excited about anything?’ Dad asks me with a smile. Well, to be honest, yes. But I take his point.

  Small boys of all ages will find oily, smoky delight in Beamish’s handsome fleet of trams and buses. They include the Sunderland 16, an open top vehicle that, after Sunderland’s tramways closed in 1954, had been a football changing room and a farmyard apple store before being lovingly restored to the job it does best. There’s a ‘Blackpool Balloon’ that plied its trade on the Golden Mile in the 1930s and the Oporto 196, born in the Boavista motorworks of Portugal’s second city and now a stunner in South Shields’ blue and primrose livery; the Jose Mourinho, the Special One, if you will, of trams.

  Ours pulls to a gentle stop before us, we embark and I head for the top deck of Newcastle 114, the actual tram that ran from the ’Toon to Gosforth circa 1902, as its snowy-haired and luxuriantly moustachioed Geordie driver tells me with evident pride. This occasions among my neighbours, two middle aged ladies with small dogs, a similarly warm assessment of Newcastle’s current Metro system, its speed, convenience and handiness for the shops of the Metro Centre. One day, perhaps, centuries hence, we will wax nostalgic for that as we look at a Prototype Metro-Cammell Metrocar of the current system in a future museum, but today, as we roll down the hill by the waggoners’ station, we ride through the County Durham of a century ago.