Pa Purple: ‘Well, OK, yes, you’re right. It can’t eat the teeth. But that’s still a canny way of getting rid of a body.’
Daughter Purple: ‘Not really, Dad. They could still identify you from your dental records, like.’
Just then another family arrive, led by an efficient-looking young blonde woman in her early thirties. She turns to the others with a look of stern admonition and barks, ‘This is where we lost Darren,’ before entering the farm. Possibly it’s a search party.
Inside, there’s no sign of the elusive Darren but the farm is lovely and homely. Vera Lynn’s singing on the radio and a little girl in pigtails (I’m not sure if she’s a visitor or an extra) warms her hands in front of the fire. There is Glory Roll to eat, a stodgy forties’ teatime favourite and a tiny plate of bacon, eggs, cheese and such which represented an adult’s weekly ration for the week. It looks minuscule. It wouldn’t feed the average Beamish visitor for 20 minutes let alone a week. No wonder no one was fat. As I stand round the back of the farm making these notes, I look up into the doleful eyes of yet another gigantic pig, leering over the wall at me from about six inches away. If I close my eyes, I can see it still. I probably will forever.
Beamish is a delight. Go there. Make a day of it. Make a night of it. At the risk of sounding like an over-enthusiastic ad voice-over, it’s fun, it’s educational, it’s different. But my favourite part of Beamish also carries an undertow of wistfulness, a bottom note of pride and sadness, an elegy for a vanished way of life that recognises the hardships of that life as well as its joys.
Hetton Silver Band Hall stands at the entrance to the early 1900s Pit Village, Beamish’s beautiful, brilliant recreation of life in the County Durham coalfields at the beginning of the last century. At its peak in 1913, when again this village is set, they dug 56.5 million tons of coal a year out of the ground. Towns and villages like this, like Esh Winning, Bedlington, Annfield Plain, Seaham, Ushaw Park and Langley Park, came into existence just to work the seams, deep dark seams with resonant names: Maudlin, Five-Quarter, Ganister Clay, Brass Thill.
The band hall was moved here brick-by-brick from South Market Street, Hetton-le-Hole on Wearside with the help of that community. I picked up a little grizzling on social media about the relocation, saying it was a pity. Possibly. But I can’t help thinking it’s far, far better than it becoming a poundshop or nail bar which was a far from unlikely fate. Inside, pride of place is given to a huge Durham Miners banner with a quote from Das Kapital unapologetically emblazoned upon it: ‘Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.’
Karl wasn’t long dead, and his ideas were just about to transform the world, when the original of this Edwardian pit village was booming. That boom made these men and their families the aristocrats of the working class; they earned three times as much as agricultural workers. But they earned it, as we’re about to see, in conditions scarcely believable today.
As you wander down Francis Street with its tiny neat cottages, each little house with a shed for racing pigeons or plant potting, you get the feeling that, however hard the life, the sense of community here must have been extraordinary; hundreds of families living side by side, men working side by side underground, kids going to the same school. This must have had its darker side, of insularity and claustrophobia, but it must also have fostered strong ties of solidarity and belonging. There was even a communal bread oven down the back alley for making ‘stotties’ and sweet treats. Inside the little colliery-owned houses, families slept cheek by jowl. Mum and dad in the front room, grandma and grandpa in the Dress Bed, stored folded in a cupboard, the kids all in the one tiny upstairs room accessed via a ladder. Staircases arrived just before the First World War. Down the road in the Methodist chapel, Sunday school would be held, and the occasional magic lantern show.
Popping into the school reminds me of how close that older world was in the north I grew up in. It’s as if little changed apart from hemlines and hairstyles until the early 1990s, when seemingly overnight we went from being an essentially Victorian milieu to one of 24-hour Peruvian street food vendors, craft microbreweries and boutique hotels. The classroom reminds me a little of my first primary school, St Joseph’s just off Wigan’s Miry Lane, a name with something of the Thomas Hardy about it. It had these same antiquated posters of skeletons and nations of the world, the same A is for Apple, B is for Ball sequences, the tiny wooden-framed slates for the children to practise their handwriting. We didn’t have hoops and sticks, although I would often hear my Lancastrian nana talk of them and threaten us with one for Christmas. Here in the yard, a few baffled kids of today are trying them out, trundling the steel rims across the yard with varying degrees of competence and clatter. Now a relic from another era, in their day these were as techy, flash and ubiquitous as Kandy Krush, Tumblr or Snapchat, which of course are terms that might be as outré and outmoded as Omo and Bournvita by the time you read this.
Not far from the schoolyard is the very reason that villages like this existed. To get there, you take a walk past Davy’s Fried Fish and Chip Shop (the queue is, naturally, phenomenal) and there it is; a small, damp, blackly forbidding entrance into the hillside itself. This is the Mahogany Drift Mine; a real working mine between 1855 and 1958, and the memory that will linger longest from my trip to Beamish.
You pick up a lamp and wait your turn, and for the previous tour to emerge, bent backed and blinking. A guide in period gear (older readers, think Brian and Michael on Top of the Pops) then leads you to the dark mouth of the mine entrance. He picks out a small boy in front of me and asks him how old he is. ‘Seven,’ comes the self-conscious answer from the tiny lad. ‘Well then, in six months’ time you’ll be ready to go in here.’
There’s palpable shock in the queue. But the guide is absolutely right. That was the age of the youngest lad to be found working as what was called a trapper boy, a young lad who squatted at the swinging wooden doors and opened them for the passing trucks laden with coal. Each trapper boy was given a candle, an expensive commodity, and hence a poor kid who wasn’t up to the job was said to be ‘not worth the candle’.
‘Ready?’ asks the kindly guide, and we, including the fearful looking little lad, enter the Mahogany Drift Mine. By the time I’ve gone about 20 paces, I’m hurting. Badly. The low roof of the mine entrance tunnel means that you must walk bent double, like a very old man, which is how I feel very quickly. The alternative is to crack your head on the rock ceiling and the rafters. Alternating between these two equally painful activities, I make my slow way through the tight, echoing tunnel, ankle deep in chilly, mucky water.
Try it. Stoop down now and walk across the room a couple of times. Every time you feel like stretching a little to ease your aching back, get a friend to hit you on the top of the head with a brick. This was a Mahogany Drift miner’s commute to work for a mile-and-a-half each way. That’s like walking between Manchester’s Piccadilly and Victoria stations. If you’re in Birmingham, like walking from Five Ways to the Bull Ring. Or, if you’re in the sticks, from Tottenham Court Road tube to Harrods. Crooked backed, feet sloshing through cold, dirty water in the dark. We complain if the escalators are out of order.
Mahogany Drift Mine was what was called a ‘pillar and stall mine’, a precarious way of working shallow seams with low corridors, the coal face being held up by wooden stakes and props. The hydraulic pit props that my dad made at the Gullick Dobson factory were a long way off and, by the time they came, Mahogany Drift had gone the way that all our mines soon would.
When you got to the end of the tunnel you could stand up a little and maybe walk a mile along the seam to your stall. Once there, there were a couple of methods by which you could get the coal that would comprise your wages, since all the miners were on piecework. Most preferred lying down on their side and lighting a small charge of dynamite under the face thus causing it to collapse. You ran the risk of bringing the whole face down on you or blowing your own hand off, of cour
se, but most miners preferred that to the hated Widowmaker, a rock drill that used a hammering motion to pound the face and created clouds of noxious gas and dust. Tobacco and snuff were needed to try and clear the lungs and throat and fend off silicosis and ‘black lung’. After a year or two of this, many were unable to work and often died within six months or so. The Widowmaker had been as good as its name.
This they did for eight hours a day, six days a week, lying in dirt and water and a candlelit cloud of choking filth filling the trucks – by hand with a shovel – with the coal they’d hewed. Ten trucks if you were good (and lucky); four tons in an eight-hour shift, and then walking back the mile-and-a-half to what, even in the depths of winter, into rain and snow, but particularly on a long summer evening or a cool moonlit autumn, must have felt like heaven. Till tomorrow.
As I leave Beamish, I feel very fortunate in being born when I was. That was their life. We’re just playing at it.
The Industrial Revolution re-drew the map of Britain swiftly and enduringly. Even in this post-industrial era, we still live on and in that map by and large. After industrialisation, places that had once had great power and significance – Canterbury, for instance, or Winchester – became dormitory towns or tourist destinations, as cattle markets, courts and ecclesiastical seats became less important than muck and brass. Manchester is your classic example here. Cotton saw it expand explosively from a small Lancashire town to the richest city in the world in just a few decades. Other backwaters grew into crowded, bustling cities too, often powered by specific industries. In Glasgow and Barrow it was shipbuilding. In Sheffield it was steel, as we have seen.
In Swindon it was a man in a stovepipe hat that Jeremy Clarkson thinks is the greatest ever Briton. Don’t hold that against him though.
A slight, unmistakeable but largely unfair whiff of comedy hangs around Wiltshire’s largest town. For a place of its size and history, it has few famous sons or daughters. Quirky popsters XTC spring to mind, as do comic Mark Lamarr and pint size glamour puss Melinda Messenger, but I had to resort to Google to find out about Billy Piper, Diana Dors and some of the members of Supertramp. Don Rogers, whose winning goal gave the town its moment of football glory when they beat Arsenal to win the League Cup in 1968, was actually from Somerset, though he runs a sports shop in his spiritual home. Jasper Fforde’s comic novels are set here, as well as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In the Night-Time. Python Terry Jones wrote a short story called ‘The Lift that Took People to Places They Didn’t Want to Go’ which delivers people to Swindon.
When I tweeted to the effect that I was Swindon bound, many of the replies had a mocking ring. One asked me to find out in advance ‘if it was shut’, a remarkable slur when you consider that the correspondent came from Devizes, hardly itself the city that never sleeps.
Now then, Swindon is not by anyone’s definition the north I agree. But I had been tipped off that, if I wanted to see how the labour of yesterday is the leisure of today, I should take a diversion south for a few hundred words or so. I wanted to include a mention of maybe the best example in Britain of how a one-industry town is now trying to turn a largely vanished enterprise, the one it was founded on, into a twenty-first century leisure destination, built on workers’ memories and the burnished iron vestiges of a vanished Britain.
In 1842, Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose the little market town as the site for his new railway works that would build and service the locos for his new Great Western Railway, or GWR. It was a remarkable story of rapid, explosive expansion and the classic tale of benevolent corporate capitalism and a paternalistic employer building a community. Swindon was a company town back in the days when there were such things.
One can argue about Marxist Dialectics and False Consciousness until you’re blue (or rather red) in the face. But it would be hard to argue that GWR was bad for Swindon. The company built a neat, pretty little railway village to house the workers. It had what must have been one of the first ever ‘health centres’, with a clinic, a hospital, a pharmacy, swimming pool and Turkish baths. Each week, GWR workers paid a small portion of their wages into a healthcare fund and in return they and their families received free cradle-to-grave medical treatment and dentistry. Those unfortunates who lost limbs in war or at the works could have new ones custom built free in the carriage shop of the works. This pioneering system was used by Nye Bevan as a blueprint for the NHS.
Swindon had the UK’s first public lending library and thanks to its Mechanics Institute and their ambitious New Swindon Improvement Company, the town had probably the best-educated manual workers in Britain who could avail themselves, free, of night classes on everything from first aid to playing the xylophone. Ideologues might dismiss these notions as quaintly patronising paternalism, but from the viewpoint of the early twentieth century, isn’t there something rather admirable and touching about working people (and it has to be said, their employers) wanting to use their free time to ‘better themselves’, not just in the sense of improving their material status but in the sense of broadening their minds and expanding their horizons. They bettered themselves in a more practical sense too. Swindon had powerful trade unions and thriving local democracy.
I think about this in the queue at the Tesco Metro. It is a swelteringly hot summer day, and the young chubby lad on the till is red-faced and sweating profusely in his thick black work fleece. (Note to self: does anything else happen ‘profusely’ except ‘sweating’?) He has a soft Wiltshire accent and a kindly manner thrown into a kind of melancholy relief by his acne, his piercings and his many and varied tattoos; a kind of floral motif on his neck, a tendril emerging from the fleece’s collar and on his forearm, in florid italics, ‘You Only Live Once’.
The Tesco Metro is in the modern part of the New Town, the Swindon that the GWR built. The old New Town (if you catch my drift) is the part around the original works, which I’m going to be visiting and I’m told is pleasant. The new development though, with the Holiday Inn and the shopping area, is as unlovely as these places always are. It’s crowded in a kind of aimless way, with milling shoppers who seem more stupefied than energised by the magnetic lure of retail. Here we can marvel anew at how Britain has become a nation obsessed by coffee. Every other shop in Swindon’s shopping precinct is devoted to the sale of it, and everyone from toddlers to old ladies on Zimmer frames seems to be slurping a skinny hazelnut latte from a corrugated plastic cup the size of a milk churn. Outside each of these, on metal chairs, a few smokers puff on the most expensive cigarettes in Europe, some furtive and sheepish, some voluble and cheery in their habit.
Steam is the museum of the Great Western Railway, and stands on the wonderfully named Fire Fly Avenue on the site of the old GWR works, which it shares with the HQ of the National Trust. It is a very popular attraction though ‘it won’t be so busy on a glorious day like today’ a guide tells me, as he directs me through the impressive hallway over which loom the letters GWR, an acronym indissolubly knit with another, less-used one: IKB. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The good burghers of Bristol had long been fearful of being eclipsed by an upstart called Liverpool as an Atlantic port. They realised that a fast, efficient rail link from the West Country to London was vital. To get it, they needed an engineer of prodigious talent. They found it in a 20-something with no previous experience of railway construction or design and with an extraordinary name even by Victorian standards.
There are several tall-ish tales about how the Great Western Railway works came to Swindon. Some say that Brunel and his engineer Daniel Gooch were out surveying in the countryside round about one day and Brunel dropped his lunchtime sandwich on the ground. Declaring it an omen, he said that this would be the site of his works. But Gooch, disappointingly, leaves this out of his account:
I was called to report upon the best situation to build these works and, on full consideration, I reported in favour of Swindon, it being the junction with the Cheltenham branch and also a convenient d
ivision of the Great Western Line for the engine working. Mr Brunel and I went to look at the ground, then only green fields, and he agreed with me as to its being the best place.
The story of Swindon is the story of the railways, and that story is told brilliantly at Steam. In its heyday, the works were a citadel within a little Wiltshire town. It had its own gasworks, its own laboratories, its own fire station, its own doctors and nurses. A watercolour on Steam’s wall shows what New Swindon was like in 1849 and it’s essentially a pastoral scene with a few houses dotted around meadows through which run lazy streams. Within a few years of this painting, though, the GWR works had mushroomed from nothing and dragged little Swindon into the modern age with it as it created it. The pretty and compact streets around the works were known as the railway village; 300 homes whose workers, swelled by thousands of others from elsewhere, would pour down the dedicated subway tunnel each morning and night to the blare of the klaxon by which the town kept time.
Everyone in the town had a connection with the works. Many of those workers’ stories are told vividly on recordings throughout the museum. According to these testimonies, working here was actually lively and invigorating, if tough. It was work undertaken with pride by a workforce who knew just how good they were, as they produced three state of the art locomotives a week. As one worker recalls: ‘You learned from “the old sweats” who weren’t afraid to give you a clip round the ear. There was a real pride in working in the machine shop, if you did job badly it wouldn’t be the boss who told you off but the bloke at the side of you.’
Making a train, as of course I’d never considered before, involves a whole range of associated crafts and workshops. There’s the oily, smoky miasma of the engineering shop. There’s the clamour of the boiler room, which those in the know avoided for its noise. (In Swindon, it’s still said that if you see two men in the street talking, one with his nose in the other’s ear, ‘they must work in the boiler room’). But also there was the quiet concentration of the seamstresses in ‘upholstery’ and the detailed craftsmanship of the carpentry shop. In the main halls, you can see the result of their labours; trains so huge, imperious and beautiful, like the GWR 4073 Class Caerphilly Castle and the GWR 4000 Class 4003 Lode Star, that you start to understand how people fall in love with them, even if you’d never write down those numbers in a little book. You begin to appreciate why, from the Night Mail film to Sherlock Holmes with his Bradshaw to Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, trains and railways loom so large in our national culture, especially the Age of Steam. The noise, glamour and mystery of major stations then must have been incredible. No one with blood in their veins would set their thriller or romance around Southampton Airport Parkway, or the Northern Trains Sprinter to Westhoughton.
The Pie At Night Page 5