There is nothing for you.., p.4
There Is Nothing for You Here, page 4
The hard working conditions and the rich communal life came hand in hand—but when one went away, so did the other. The pit closures devastated places like Roddymoor. Unemployed and retired miners were abandoned in dying villages, stripped of their jobs, social networks, and former amenities. Young folk left in droves because they had to, not because they wanted to. There was no work to hold them at home anymore and no opportunity to find something else. There was nothing for them there.
Granny’s Death Box
Not everyone could escape the gutted remains of communities like Roddymoor. Dad had lived with and looked after his parents until he married Mam—as many of us called our mothers—and moved permanently to Bishop Auckland in 1964. Granny and Grandad could not make ends meet on Grandad’s miner’s pension. Granny suffered from crippling arthritis, and Grandad had Parkinson’s, which got steadily worse. Until the local government’s housing authority did renovations in the early 1970s, their row house, part of a subsidized development that had originally been built for local workers and their families, had no “mod cons” (modern conveniences), including indoor plumbing. They needed help physically as well as economically.
When I was old enough, Dad took me on the bus to stay with my grandparents or sent me on my bike to fill in for him. It was eight miles or so, depending on the route you took, but even covering that short distance up narrow back roads could be an adventure. Everyone knew each other in Roddymoor. When I went up to stay as a child, I was always “Alfie’s lass” or “Billy’s bairn” when I encountered the neighbors or other relatives. Granny called me “little Alfie.” I would collect coal in a scuttle from the coal house in the passageway between their house and the next section of houses to put on the fire in the blackened old range in the main room. This doubled as a stovetop and an oven where they did some of their cooking. The kitchen was basic, with a tiny fridge that used to be chilled with ice blocks, a couple of cupboards, a sink, and a bare floor.
Roddymoor was dimly lit. The electricity, when it was installed, was always flickering and going out. It seemed to have lost its power in transmission. The streetlights were few and far between, which made for fantastic starry nights but unpleasant encounters with potholes in the streets and rats as well as the occasional fox in the back garden on the way to the “nettie,” as we called the outhouse. The foxes were after the hens, which Grandad and his neighbors kept in a coop at the bottom of their gardens where they backed onto a field. There were only a few hens, so their loss was a potential disaster. Grandad used to have more hens and a pig on his allotment, but as he got older, he couldn’t keep it up anymore. Everything was confined to the tiny back garden.
Dad once told me a story from his early childhood in the condemned building, when a local farmer had given him some eggs to take home. He noticed they were cracked and threw them away. Granny cried. They had nothing at all to eat that day. Mindful of that story, I was always careful when I collected Grandad’s eggs.
Beyond what Grandad could grow and whatever Dad could spare from our garden, Granny and Grandad had no fresh produce. The village itself was a “food desert.” It had one small shop for basic goods. There was a fish and chip shop and a couple of other shops less than a mile away in the next village, Billy Row, and a whole town full of shops a bit farther away in Crook, where Granny had grown up. But Granny and Grandad couldn’t get there. The bus no longer came into Roddymoor and they couldn’t walk as far as the next bus stop. Granny was largely immobile because of her arthritis and old injuries from an accident when she had worked in Crook’s leather factory. Stuck in the house, she sat in the same chair all day and subsisted on cheap canned food. She became obese. Grandad said there was nothing wrong with being poor, but there was plenty of difficulty in poverty when your life spiraled down.
My grandparents had endured a lifetime bookended by adversity and deprivation. Granny and Grandad had contended with World War I, World War II, and mining and other industrial accidents on top of poverty, poor health, and infectious disease. Granny Hill had a “death box” in her bedroom—an old hatbox filled with death notices, funeral cards, and mementos of her classmates and friends who had died in World War I or down the mines, or “just died.” She called it “the box.” I called it the death box, because that’s what it was—an old battered box filled with death. There were stacks of yellow-stained, mildewed pictures of dead relatives and friends, most of them nameless, tied up with pieces of string. Nothing was scribbled on the back of the pictures to say who they were or who they had once been—someone’s sister, brother, mother, father, child, or special friend.
There was a formal school picture in the box, from Granny’s school in Crook, taken sometime before World War I. Almost all the boys had been crossed off in black ink across their chests. And judging by the pencil-written postcards in the box, including a couple from the front, Grandad was not Granny’s first choice as husband. But he was one of the few who had come back from Flanders. According to relatives, Grandad had been shot ten times or hit with shrapnel from exploding shells, gassed with chlorine and mustard gas, and bayoneted along with his horse after they got trapped in the mud. He seemed invincible. Grandad never gave me any details—I was just a child—but he was certainly covered in plenty of scars. He had narrowly escaped a couple of rockfalls and accidents down the mine, including one just before his retirement when the “windy pick” (pneumatic drill) had pierced his pelvis, forcing him to wear a truss to keep his battered insides in for the rest of his life. Going down the pit never filled Grandad with terror, but he described World War I as hell on earth.
Every County Durham mining town had a cenotaph commemorating the Great War (as well as the conflagrations that came along later and swept off the local men again—World War II, Korea). There was usually a plaque on the stone with the names of the men whose remains were never recovered. Other corners of the town cemetery marked one catastrophe or another down the mines. The men in all those towns and villages were decimated by war and work. There were no cenotaphs or special corners of the graveyard for those who died later from poverty or despair, or both, when the mines had gone, but there should have been.
My grandmother had certainly earned herself a place on a memorial plaque. In her old age, Granny was stuck with Grandad in a rundown row house in Roddymoor with nothing to do, apart from looking through that box, and nowhere to go. Her life was reduced to a couple of rooms and whatever she might see when she dragged herself up to go to the toilet and shuffled past the back window: a sliver of sky and the patch of garden with its broken-down fences, cinder path, and a couple of chickens.
In all the time I spent in Roddymoor, I never really had a proper conversation with Granny. There was little to talk about when you never left the house and every day unfolded and ended in the same way, with no opportunity for something new. She would ask me a few questions about school or what I’d done if I went out to play, but that was about it. She would not reciprocate if I asked her anything about her childhood.
It took me a while to realize how lonely and depressed Granny was. When I was younger, I just figured she was the quiet sort and didn’t want to talk. She would sit and sit, and occasionally read some magazines that Mam sent her. So I would also sit quietly and read, or go out to walk about Roddymoor. It was hard to stay upbeat in her situation. Almost no one came to visit apart from us. After Grandad died, Granny came to live with us while she waited for a slot to open up in a government-subsidized nursing home in Bishop Auckland. Dad requested this so we could walk to see her every day. She wasn’t a resident of the town, so she had to wait.
This was the most stressful period of my childhood and adolescence, with all of us crammed into our house 24/7—although the hospital loaned Dad a wheelchair so we could take Granny outside on nice days. Nonetheless, she couldn’t get up the stairs to go to the one bathroom we had, and we did not have a spare bedroom for her. In Roddymoor the toilet had been downstairs, in the space where a pantry had been; to go up to bed, Granny would sit on the stairs and push herself up while I or Grandad braced and held on to her. (Coming down was a bit of a nightmare and left her with huge purple bruises on her back, legs, and arms if she slipped.) The stairs in our house were far too narrow to carry out the same maneuver, so Granny spent two years living in our front room, sleeping on the sofa, with a commode so she could go to the toilet at the back of the dining area, in a little wooden addition that Dad built with the help of neighbors. Mam gave her sponge baths.
Eventually Granny got assigned a nursing home place just a few blocks away. She lasted only another year. She wasn’t sick, but she was in chronic despair. A week before she died, Granny told Dad she had simply had enough.
Viva Bish Vegas
Bishop Auckland was a metropolis in comparison with Roddymoor when Dad first went to work there, but within the decade it was also spiraling down. In the early 1980s in County Durham, as Margaret Thatcher’s reforms kicked into gear, thousands of jobs disappeared at once. In one County Durham town, Consett, which was around the same size as Bishop Auckland and only twenty miles away, the steelworks closed in 1980. British Steel Corporation, the parent entity, declared Consett no longer commercially viable. Its technology was obsolete. At one point in the late 1880s, Consett had housed the largest steel plate factory in the world. When I was born, in the 1960s, about six thousand people worked there. When the steelworks closed, there were around forty-five hundred workers. Everybody’s dad, brother, and husband lost their jobs at once. Consett’s official unemployment rate was 35 percent, twice the national average in the UK in the 1980s. This had a serious knock-on effect. Numerous regional suppliers and retailers in Bishop Auckland and County Durham were tied to the works at Consett.
In 1984, Shildon Wagon (Railway) Works, one of the last remaining large industrial employers near Bishop Auckland, with 2,600 people on its books, also closed. Jobs in the plant accounted for 86 percent of Shildon’s male workforce in manufacturing as well as a sizable percentage of men in Bishop Auckland, who also worked in the forges and foundries that supplied the factory. Even at this juncture, it was one of the largest construction plants for British Railways, having opened in 1833 to serve the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world’s first major rail company. But the orders for new railway wagons and also the contracts for repairs were slowly drying up. The works were no longer profitable.
In Bishop Auckland in the 1980s, the question “What does your father do?” was now “What did your father do?” Everyone seemed to be out of work and looking for something. Somehow, my dad actually had a job. In that respect we were extremely lucky. Bishop Auckland and the local hospital were his source of opportunity.
Although it was never as world-famous as Newcastle or Sunderland in its heyday in the nineteenth century, Bishop Auckland had once offered all kinds of opportunity and attractions. The bishop of Durham—a powerful prince, not just a clergyman, who was charged by the king or queen with raising his own army to fend off the Scots—had his county residence in Bishop Auckland, next to the ruins of a Roman fort. The town was a hub for the North East railway network, on the route of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It was well known for its industry, its large number of churches, and its strong retail sector.
Bishop Auckland’s main street, Newgate Street, was the “golden mile.” It ran in a straight line along the route of an old Roman road that terminated farther north, at Hadrian’s Wall. Newgate Street’s portion of this byway stretched from the railway station to the marketplace in front of the Bishop’s Palace gates, crowned by a Victorian Gothic town hall. The street was lined with family grocers and butchers, clothing and department stores, several theaters, pubs, and a few fancy tearooms. The celebrated children’s writer Lewis Carroll and the comedian Stan Laurel both went to Bishop Auckland’s King James I Boys’ Grammar School. Stan Laurel’s father, Arthur Jefferson, ran the town’s music hall, the Eden Theatre, for a while. Great-Grandad Thompson Hill briefly performed there in a vaudeville act with his famous older cousin, Jenny Hill (Elizabeth Thompson), whose other stage name was the “Vital Spark,” when she was on a regional tour. The twice-weekly market by the Bishop’s Palace attracted shoppers and sellers from around the region, including Travellers (both Gypsy Roma Travellers and Travellers of Irish heritage), who came with their caravans, including traditional vardos and distinctive Vanner horses.
Travellers still came to Bishop Auckland when I was a kid, but by this point the town had changed. They would set up camp at a place down by the River Wear, as well as on vacant land around town, and tether their horses to graze on any available patch of grass. Sometimes this was at the end of my street or in the recreation grounds in the town park near my elementary school. Bishop Auckland was a place with fewer cars than most in the 1970s and 1980s. Most people, like us, couldn’t afford one. A common sight on the main streets was a boy, or sometimes several people packed close together, sitting on a two-wheel trap or buggy with a black-and-white Vanner horse trotting out front. Touring the town by buggy or on foot was the main form of entertainment.
When I was a teenager, Bishop Auckland was affectionately known as Bishop or Bish. The big event of the week was “going down Bish” on Saturday afternoon to “look at the shops.” We never had any money to buy anything beyond a cup of tea or a soft drink. The real agenda was to walk up and down Newgate Street, hoping to run into someone you knew. We didn’t have a phone, so unless my sister, Angela, and I agreed to something on Friday at school or went to knock on someone’s door, meeting friends happened on the fly down in the town. At some point “Bish” morphed into “Bish Vegas.”
By then Bishop Auckland was the exact opposite of the local entertainment mecca it had been a century before. This clearly started as a joke on a Saturday night in one of the town’s pubs. But the moniker fits. Because life in Bish was a bit of a gamble.
“Bish Vegas” became a way for people to make fun of themselves and boost flagging spirits in a place that had once been somewhere and was suddenly nowhere when all the mines and the industry disappeared. Humor reconciled the disconnect between your experience and everything that people, and library books, told you had been there in Bishop Auckland in the not-so-distant past. For forty or fifty years Bishop Auckland was stuck, a hollowed-out husk of its former self.
In summer 2013, a self-styled “Bish Elvis” posted a video on the internet. Titled “Viva Bish Vegas,” its soundtrack was a sendup of Elvis Presley’s famous song about Las Vegas. Bish Elvis, with some backup from friends, provided a singing commentary as the camera toured up and down Newgate Street and around the marketplace, taking in the boarded-up buildings and FOR SALE and TO LET signs. The historic part of the old King James I Grammar School building had been burned down to its bones in an arson attack. Empty buildings were daubed with graffiti. The video began with a rip-off from the opening moments of the 1977 movie Star Wars, offering a wry and quickly retreating textual overview of the town’s history. The video was affectionate but damning in its depiction of decades of decay, deprivation, and the loss of opportunity.
Bulldozing the Past
Between the mid-1960s and the 1980s, much of the North East’s rich industrial heritage was not only lost, it was actively destroyed. Centuries of economic development and innovation were bulldozed in the name of “reclamation.” As coal mining was a centuries-old occupation, the landscape didn’t go back exactly to what it had been before. Tiny villages, farms, and patches of woodland, long lost to make pit props and scaffolding, were not restored. Vast new grassy fields, housing developments, and “light industrial estates” covered the old mine workings.
Clearly the past was haunted, its memories too painful to deal with. It was a stain on the present, better to be erased. The disappearance of coal mining, all the other industries, the jobs, and the way of life associated with the pit villages was a major trauma. The industrial remains—the slag heaps and rusted metal of the old pit-head machinery, the empty factories, the abandoned furnaces—meant people were constantly reminded of everything they had lost. No matter that these remnants were monuments to considerable human achievement. They were testaments to the things our grandparents and parents had made and once took pride in.
For my entire childhood, something was being pulled down in Bishop Auckland. On shopping days, when Mam and Dad dragged us downtown to buy food rather than window-shop, every corner was an opportunity for nostalgia. They would pause to look at something: “I remember when this was . . .”; then they’d taper off, leaving the memory hanging and Angela and me asking, “What? What are you talking about? What was here? Where did it go?” The main part of the train station went, erasing all the lines radiating out to places we wanted to get to. Only two lines were left. One went to the town of Darlington and from there to Middlesbrough and Saltburn-by-the-Sea. Taking the train to Darlington was now the only way to get to Durham and Newcastle as well as London and Scotland. The other line went “up the dale,” or further up the River Wear toward its source in the Pennine Hills, where there was a big cement works. We didn’t really know anyone up there in “woolly back” or “the back of beyond,” where there were more sheep than people. Without the train station, the opportunity to visit friends and relatives, including Mam’s family, who still lived farther south in Teesside, was confined to bus trips.
Stan Laurel’s father’s Eden Theatre was demolished. For a while there was nothing on the spot. Then a small bed of flowers and a bench were placed there with a tiny plaque. The site was eventually marked, many years later and only after a public appeal, with a very small statue of Stan. The town cinema closed while I was a teenager. Star Wars was the first and last blockbuster movie to come to town. Half the town lined up to get tickets, but generally going to the cinema was another luxury a lot of Bishop Auckland residents couldn’t afford in the 1970s and 1980s. There weren’t enough revenues to keep the movies coming in and the cinema open. Doggarts department store and its tearoom closed. No more birthday treats of cream teas with Mam’s mother, Grandma Vi, when she came to visit. Doggarts’ once-grand building was cannibalized into a series of smaller shops. Eventually some of those shops went out of business too. They were just boarded up. And so went the rest of Bishop Auckland’s main street.
