At the very moment when Orwell’s landscape was crumbling into dust, Allan Ahlberg had written Peepo! as a tribute to his own working-class childhood. Born to an unmarried mother in Croydon in 1938, Ahlberg had been adopted by a family from Oldbury, in the Black Country. His father was a manual labourer; his mother was an office cleaner. He had grown up in a world of brick back-to-backs, tin baths and coal fires, a pub on every corner and a football in every street. But he did not romanticize it, recalling a ‘fair few clips round the ear, no books and not much conversation’. His driving ambition was to get out: he scraped into the local grammar school and eventually became a teacher. Only in his late thirties, prompted by Janet, an illustrator, did he begin writing children’s stories. Many of their books – Burglar Bill (1977), Cops and Robbers (1978), Each Peach Pear Plum (1978), Funny Bones (1980), The Jolly Postman (1986) – became children’s classics, thanks not least to Janet’s wonderfully funny pictures, and by Allan’s own account they ‘made an absolute fortune’. Yet he never left the Black Country behind. ‘When I was young my ambition was to leave and I did when I was 18, but now I go back, and I love it,’ he said later. It might be a ‘poor, blighted, devastated landscape’, but it was ‘the only patch of the world that I love’.3
For more than a century, the world Ahlberg described, the great foundry of the West Midlands, had been synonymous with Britain’s industrial might. This was the landscape that had shocked the future Queen Victoria, horrified Charles Dickens and inspired J. R. R. Tolkien, whose nightmarish visions of industrial modernity, ‘wheels and outlandish contraptions … a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and a stench’, might have come directly from the streets of West Bromwich. It was also the landscape that had given heavy metal to the world. Judas Priest’s lead singer Rob Halford, whose father worked for a Walsall metalworking firm, recalled that at school:
We’d be doing English, and we’d be next to a metal foundry, and the steam hammers would be banging up and down, and the whole desk would be shaking … Walking home, the air was full of all these bits of metal grit, and you could taste it, and you could breathe it in … You literally breathed in metal.
His bandmate Glen Tipton, who worked as an apprentice at British Steel, agreed. ‘We really did grow up in a labyrinth of heavy metal. Huge foundries, big steam hammers,’ he remembered. ‘You could always hear the steam hammers. There was always a steel mill within audible distance.’ The title of the band’s most successful album, British Steel, released in April 1980, said it all. ‘Pounding the world like a battering ram Forging the furnace for the final grand slam,’ runs ‘Rapid Fire’. ‘Hammering anvils straining muscle and might Shattering blows crashing browbeating fright …’4
Yet at precisely the moment British Steel reached the record shops, that world was falling apart. For decades, the industrial towns of the West Midlands had prided themselves on their prosperity, work ethic and collective spirit. In 1975 the unemployment rate in the Black Country had been just 1.1 per cent. But then everything changed. By 1980 it had reached double figures. In some towns, one in four people was out of work. In the borough of Sandwell, which included West Bromwich, Smethwick, Oldbury and Tipton, ‘metal-based manufacturing’ accounted for almost half of all jobs. But most were either in gigantic firms such as Lucas and GKN or in tiny, family-run companies making one or two components for the big beasts. So when the recession came, its scale and speed were devastating. The first half of 1980 brought thousands of redundancies every month: some 30,000 people, who had once made things like steel bolts, pumps, pressure vessels, brass stampings and electrical components, were thrown on to the dole queue almost overnight. Six months earlier, the local Evening Mail had called 1979 ‘the year they tore the heart out of Sandwell’. Never did it imagine that 1980 would be even worse.
For many of the area’s Labour MPs, the fault lay with the government. But many local businessmen recognized that there were deeper forces at work, too. For years, said The Times, they had warned of growing levels of cheap imports: taps from Italy, carpets from the United States, ‘even Christmas cards from the Soviet Union, which are regarded as a threat to jobs at Kenrick and Jefferson of West Bromwich’. Many Midlands towns suffered from a perilously narrow industrial base: Bilston depended on the local steelworks, Kidderminster on carpets, Stoke on pottery. In Coventry, tens of thousands of jobs depended on companies such as Rolls-Royce and British Leyland – precisely those companies hardest hit by the high pound, feeble productivity and foreign competition. ‘That makes us very vulnerable,’ admitted the head of the town’s Chamber of Commerce. But it was too late to do anything about it now.5
Not even the most pessimistic observers envisaged how bad things would get. Even two years after the end of the recession, unemployment across the West Midlands was stuck at about 17 per cent. Once, said the Sunday Times, ‘Coventry was the most prosperous city in Britain; Wolverhampton, West Bromwich and Wednesbury the grimy foundations on which the full employment economy rested’. But now the area had become ‘Britain’s most devastated industrial wasteland’, while ‘the names of firms which have slashed jobs or shut plants reads like a roll-call of the biggest names in British industry: British Leyland, BSA, Swan, Alfred Herbert, GKN, Lucas, Typhoo, Bird’s, Dunlop.’ In just four years, the jobless figures in Wolverhampton had swelled from 8,000 to 26,000. In Coventry, unemployment had leapt from 15,000 to 40,000; in Walsall it had gone from 9,000 to 31,000; in Sandwell and Dudley, from 11,500 to 53,000. For every new job that opened up, almost fifty people were out of work.6
In Tipton, once the home of James Watt’s ground-breaking steam pumping engine, a visiting reporter found the factories boarded up, the scrapyard for sale, the canals eerily silent. There was only one place where there were ‘people visibly at work’. Fifteen minutes’ walk from the station, the reporter found the terraced streets crowded, the old-fashioned pub serving faggots and peas, a chain-maker hammering red-hot metal, the ironworks bustling with activity. It was as though he had been transported back in time. He had. This was the Black Country Living Museum, the architectural equivalent of the Ahlbergs’ Peepo! Its open-air recreation of the Victorian era had opened in 1978 on twenty-six acres of derelict land, complete with disused mine shafts and sewage works, with the aim of rebuilding ‘stone by stone and brick by brick, the Black Country when it was at its most industrious and its heart was sound’. At the time, nobody could have envisaged how poignant those words would seem.
Today, when post-industrial dilapidation has become a familiar feature of our national life, it is hard to recapture the shock as people’s neighbourhoods crumbled around them. Even children of the age of affluence had never imagined that this world would be swept away so quickly. No doubt this helps to explain the success of the Black Country Living Museum. By 1982 it was already attracting some 120,000 visitors a year, rising to 250,000 three years later. For many people, its forges and kilns, its Victorian pub and old-fashioned sweet shop, seemed moving reminders of the world they had lost. Many years later, the columnist Caitlin Moran, who grew up in Wolverhampton in the 1980s, recalled her father’s words whenever they drove into town in the mornings. ‘When I was a kid, at this time of the day, all you’d hear was the tramp, tramp, tramp of people’s feet as they walked to the factories,’ he would say. ‘Every bus would be full, the streets would be seething. This town had something to do and money in its pocket. People used to come here for work and get it the same day. Look at it now … A ghost town. Where have they gone? Where have they all gone?’7
What happened to the Black Country was not unique. It was much the same story half an hour north, in the heart of the Potteries. Reflecting on a long walk through the Six Towns in the autumn of 1980, the essayist Lincoln Allison thought few places in England better lived up to the ‘mistily nostalgic vision of industrial society, a world of clogs clattering on the cobbles, coals burning in the grate, street parties on Jubilee day, and hot buttered crumpets and a mug of tea without pausing to take
your muffler off when you come back from the match on a Saturday’.
But in the Potteries, as elsewhere, change was irresistible. Unemployment might be lower here than in the Black Country, but one in ten people was still out of work. ‘Folks round here could either be miners or potters. Nothing else for it,’ wrote Beryl Bainbridge when she visited Stoke three years later. Not any more, though. When she visited the Chatterley Whitfield colliery, once the largest mine in the North Staffordshire coalfield, she found weeds growing from the power house, the window frames rotting in the repair shop, grass growing on the slag heap. After more than a hundred years, it had closed in 1977. Now it was Britain’s first underground mining museum.8
Even in London, once a great industrial city, visitors found the same melancholy picture. Trudging across the Isle of Dogs in the summer of 1979, Allison found an ‘eerie silence’, broken only by the occasional sad hoot from the Thames. Thanks to the rise of containerization and the establishment of huge new terminals downriver, the docks were virtually dead, the workforce falling from 35,000 men to just 2,000 in barely two decades. ‘There wasn’t a human being in sight,’ wrote Jonathan Raban, who wandered through the ‘miles of corrugated iron and slag-piles’ three years later. ‘It looked as if the great work of destruction had been set in train years ago, then suddenly abandoned on a whim.’ By this stage, Michael Heseltine had established the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), and, across the Thames, Raban spotted the first signs of redevelopment: warehouses converted into flats, forests of estate agents’ signs, the promise of a fashionable new existence amid the ruins of industry. But not everybody welcomed the new order. On a ‘lone atoll of redevelopment’, Raban spotted some graffiti: ‘SOD OFF LDDC. THESE ARE OUR BACK GARDENS NOT YOURS. WE WANT HOUSES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE, NOT PALACES FOR PLAYBOYS.’9
‘These are our back gardens not yours.’ Here spoke millions of people, bewildered and alienated by social and economic change. Gazing down from the hills above Bolton, Jeremy Seabrook thought the skyline looked the same as ever, ‘the towers of churches, the rectangular mass of mills, the black cylinders of chimneys’. Only when he walked down into the town did he realize that everything had been transformed, ‘mills into garages and warehouses, churches into stores or car showrooms’. Even the refurbishment of thousands of mouldering pubs, made lighter and more welcoming for a new generation, seemed a rebuff to the working-class men who had been regulars for decades. In 1982 the Three Tuns in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, immortalized as the Moon and Stars in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), underwent a £25,000 renovation to cater for younger drinkers, complete with fruit machines and Space Invaders games. But the regulars did not like it at all. ‘It’s wicked,’ said one old miner, sitting beneath a loudspeaker pumping out the Stranglers, Meat Loaf and Adam and the Ants. He did not mean it as a compliment. ‘They have done it up for the young ’uns. I’ve been coming here for 53 years, and this bar has not been changed above 20 years since.’10
Hundreds of miles away, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, another elderly man was gazing sadly at a changed world. Harry Jack had been born into a working-class family in a Scottish lowland mill town in 1902, the year the Boer War ended. His life had been defined by work: work in textile mills, down a coal mine, on a cargo steamer, in a lead factory, in a hosepipe factory. ‘He ended his working life only a few miles from where he had begun it, and in much the same way,’ Ian Jack wrote after his father died in 1981: ‘in overalls and over a lathe and waiting for the dispensation of the evening hooters, when he would stick his leg over his bike and cycle home.’ Harry had inhabited a world steeped in tradition, in which the past was always present. He ‘embodied it and spoke of it continually … it came home from work every evening in its flat cap and dirty hands and drew its weekly wages from industries which even then were sleepwalking their way towards extinction.’
Yet now Harry’s world was gone. The cargo steamer had been scrapped; the coal mine was a field; the mills had become car parks. His old school had become a supermarket; his old house had made way for a traffic island. In the village of North Queensferry in Fife, where he spent the final decades of his life, everything seemed different. The neighbours died; new people moved in, ‘wives who wore jeans and loaded small cars at the nearest supermarket, husbands who drove what twenty years before would have seemed an impossible distance to work’. The newcomers gutted the old cottages, knocked down walls or painted them white, ‘hung garlic from their kitchen shelves’. They called their dinner ‘lunch’, their tea ‘supper’. They set up a heritage trail and revived the village’s annual gala day, yet at the same time the shops closed and the grocery vans stopped calling. Even the newspapers no longer made sense: one day, Harry threw down the local weekly in disgust, with the words: ‘There’s nothing in here but sponsored walks and supermarket bargains.’ It was as if the past had been destroyed, every remnant changed or obliterated. By the time Harry Jack died, it might never have existed.11
In some ways, therefore, the story of Britain in the early 1980s was one of shattering loss. In Margaret Drabble’s state-of-thenation novel The Middle Ground (1980), the forty-something magazine columnist Kate Armstrong visits her old home in working-class east London, only to find everything ‘changed forever’, the narrow streets of artisans’ houses replaced by ‘a wilderness of flyovers and underpasses and unfinished supports … raw, ugly, gigantic in scale’. And two years later, in the final episode of Boys from the Blackstuff, Alan Bleasdale gives the ailing George, the last link with Liverpool’s industrial past, a moving eulogy to the vanished age of working-class optimism:
Ah Chrissie, it just seems like soddin’ yesterday, the midday gun. The women sandstoning the steps and the flags. The kids playing alley-oh, the little shops on the corner where you got the three pennyworth of fine Irish, the old snuff, and the twist of tobacco, and your old gran had a flat top cart there, used to sell salt fish and a big barrel of ribs, straight off the pig’s back, from the Irish boats and on the third Saturday an organ grinder and his monkey … And there we’d be pilin’ into Effin’ Nellie’s or Peg-leg Pete’s for a couple of pints of good beer, maybe the first of the week and the crack … the crack … we’d talk of many things … Of politics and power and come the day when we’d have inside toilets and proper bathrooms … of Attlee and Bevan, Hogan and Logan, the Braddocks and Dixie Dean … and Lawton and Liddell and Matthews and Finney …
For George, the end of everything he knew and loved comes as a devastating blow. ‘I can’t believe there is no hope, I can’t,’ he says desperately. But a moment later, he is dead.12
Twenty years earlier, the Beatles’ home town had been feted across the world as the city of the Cavern Club and the Mersey Sound. But those days were long gone. With Liverpool now a byword for urban decay, mass unemployment, family breakdown and juvenile crime, it had become an essential destination for writers seeking apocalyptic colour about the state of the nation. Almost without exception, they agreed that it was uniquely forlorn, a doomed city stranded on the edge of England. Very rarely did they visit its middle-class suburbs; instead, they made straight for the very shabbiest, most poverty-stricken areas. Walking towards Everton from the Pier Head, Lincoln Allison found himself in ‘deserted streets surrounded by factories and warehouses and occasional heaps of rubble … The silence is eerie, frightening. You hardly get silence like this anywhere on earth.’ But there was worse to come:
Going up Stanley Road towards Bootle, the townscape degenerates into the most sordid I have ever seen. Urban life cannot get any more raw than this. Nowhere else have I seen men pissing in the street in such a public way. There’s a lot of vomit on the streets, most of it apparently special fried rice, though I don’t examine it too closely. All the shops are boarded up. This isn’t because they are closed; it is because Rule One of life round here is that glass gets broken. Rule Two is that any other surface gets written on, politically for the most part, with the UDA, UVF, SAS, SWP and I
RA well represented.
Never before, in England, had Allison seen such a ‘concentration of rock-bottom urban circumstances’. Only in the United States had he witnessed urban dereliction to match it – and in Scotland.13
Liverpool’s problems were not, of course, unique: the people of Glasgow, Detroit, Naples and Marseilles would have found them very familiar. Were they exclusively Margaret Thatcher’s fault? Obviously not. But she made an irresistible scapegoat, partly because she was so clearly implicated in the recession, but also because she so obviously lacked the slightest sentimental attachment to the traditions of working-class Britain. And since images of working-class Britain tended to be so masculine – the flat cap, the factory, the pub, the football crowd – it surely mattered that she was a bossy middle-class woman, the perfect personification of the social and economic changes undermining the foundations on which an entire world had rested.
Even so, it is sheer fantasy to imagine that, if she had never come to power, the world of Peepo! would have survived unscathed. In many ways it was dead already. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of Victorian terraced houses had already been demolished and their residents decanted into tower blocks. Football crowds were already in free-fall; chapels were already deserted; pubs were already closing; the great manufacturing industries were already shedding workers; and, most profoundly, the social and cultural assumptions of Allan Ahlberg’s childhood had already begun to crumble. Ahlberg’s own story, that of a bright boy trying to escape from the world he celebrated, was part of this transformation. Indeed, there is a case that what really destroyed the landscape of Peepo! was not so much economic decline as economic affluence. Men did not stop going to the pub because they had run out of money; they stopped because they were watching television. Even the fate of Harry Jack’s old school, demolished to make way for a supermarket, tells a story of affluence as much as one of loss.
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