Thurnscoe and Houghton Main Colliery, 1970–75
While Gary can often be found among the more talkative and extrovert crowds in discos, David Hollingworth is more content to sit back and listen to the music and observe the people. More of a Parkin, says Winnie, thoughtful, and without the notorious Hollingworth gab. Because he used to be shielded by Gary, some people in the family believe him to be shy, which he thinks is wrong; it makes him sound as if he doesn’t have friends, when in fact he has plenty. The girls at school like him because, they say, he has dreamy eyes and looks a bit like David Essex.
He is at his happiest fishing in rivers and lakes in the countryside. A few years ago when he was twelve, a cousin had taken him angling in the lakes of Cusworth Hall near Doncaster, and beside the still, cold, umber-coloured water he had been caught by the calmness and the challenge like a perch caught on a hook. The next day he had borrowed tackle from Colin Greengrass and spent eight hours beside the brickponds in Bolton-upon-Dearne, and since then school, social obligations and his holiday job delivering milk have been inconveniences to be endured between fishing trips. He works his way around the local waterways, and sometimes catches the early train to Ulleskelf in North Yorkshire where people fish for roach, perch and bream on the banks of the Trent and the Wharfe; in all these places it is not the tranquillity in itself that appeals to him, he explains to his uncomprehending brother, but the combination of quiet concentration and a clearly defined task. He likes the feeling he gets when he blocks out all thoughts except those about fish, and the hum of life grows quieter than the lap of the water in the reeds. Sitting with his gaze on the river, he is incapable of feeling bored. At the end of most days, he wishes that he could travel back in time and do it all over again.
When David reaches his teens he grows his hair down past his collar, and starts going into Goldthorpe to listen to music in Duffield’s record shop, and to watch the kids in Ellis’s menswear boutique comparing Ben Sherman shirts, Sta Press trousers and jumbo-collar lengths. Sometimes he and Gary buy an LP with pooled pocket money and, if it’s by an artist their mam says looks like a druggie, smuggle it into the house together. At other times he listens to records or roams the villages with his school friends Mark Perry and Alan Ogden, but he is equally comfortable fishing or walking the lanes around Thurnscoe on his own, as happy with himself as with anybody else, as his mother puts it.
It is his liking for the outdoors and water that brings David into contact with Marie Poole at school. Opened in the autumn of 1969, Thurnscoe comprehensive is a new building, its straight, clean lines and large windows representing a faith in the power of built environments to foster clearer, fairer minds. In a village where many of the old terraces still have outdoor privies and no bathrooms, and the closeness of the pit means people fight a constant war against dirt, this idea is still radical. Such progressiveness carries through to the school’s timetable which has the boys studying cookery and needlework and the girls working with metal and wood. In the fifth year there is an outdoor pursuits option, the first pursuit being the construction of a fibreglass canoe that pupils are taught to use on local lakes. David signs up as soon as the list appears on the noticeboard, and borrows a book about canoeing from the school library.
In the first lesson he is surprised to find that half the group is female. Among them is Marie, one of the good-looking girls frequently discussed by the boys at Ellis’s and Duffield’s. Marie has long, glossy auburn hair and a way of walking that makes the boys look. In the playground she and the other tonged-haired girls who glue Marc Bolan pictures to their exercise books stand with their arms folded, chewing gum to cover the smell of cigarettes, and scanning the playground as if their maturity means they are intuiting events ahead of anyone else. David Hollingworth likes her because she seems funnier than the other girls in the group, but he has never spoken to her. He permits himself a slight hope that they might discuss a common interest in canoes, but the idea is dashed in the first lesson.
‘I didn’t have you down as a canoeist, Marie,’ says Mr Birchall, their teacher.
‘It gets us out of PE, sir,’ Marie replies. ‘But you never know, do you?’
David sometimes catches her eye over a work bench, but apart from when he passes her a chisel or a carton of glue he does not manage to speak to Marie during the design and building phase. The closest they come to conversation is in the last lesson, when Mr Birchall takes the class to try out the canoes on a lake in a park near Barnsley.
It is a warm Friday afternoon in July. The boys and girls strip down to swimming costumes beneath their uniforms and, at Mr Birchall’s orders, carry the canoes from the minibus to the lake and line up along the edge, threatening to push each other in.
Marie, in a purple bikini, says, ‘I‘m not going in no canoe for anybody, sir! I’m discoing tonight and I’m not getting my hair wet and going out looking like a drowned rat. Are you off out, sir?’
David laughs. He has already practised in the canoes in the school baths, so feels confident, and finds Marie’s nervousness endearing. When he looks down the line at her, her straight auburn hair looks beautiful against the purple bikini top.
Mr Birchall pushes a canoe into the water and wades in. He is young, bearded and casual and, away from school, speaks to the children as an older brother might. ‘Let’s have someone in to demonstrate, then,’ he says, and before anyone can volunteer he picks out Marie.
‘Come on,’ he says, looking up at her. ‘You start us off.’
‘Get lost.’
‘Not scared, are you?’
‘No, I’m not scared. I don’t want to wet my hair.’
‘You won’t have to.’ He makes her get in the boat. Everyone is laughing, and no one is taking canoeing seriously at all. What the boys are taking seriously is Marie Poole.
Mr Birchall holds her upright in the boat and, exaggerating her nervousness, Marie paddles out into the lake. When he tells her to roll the canoe over, she just looks at him, and paddles back. When she gets out she has command of the group, with her friend Tina Cooke playing a supporting role. As the teacher persuades another girl to climb into the canoe, Marie, now feeding off the adulation, stands on the edge of the lake and plays to her audience.
‘At least my hair’ll look alright tonight,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t have gone out stinking of pond water.’
Laughter.
‘I couldn’t have gone out smelling like a pond, could I, Dave?’
She is talking to him. Why? he wonders. His eyes flick from side to side; everyone is looking.
‘What do you reckon, Dave? Smelling of ponds and lakes is no good, is it?’
‘I don’t mind t’ smell of ponds and lakes,’ says David, and his friends snigger and groan.
Marie is looking straight at him. ‘Don’t you?’
‘No. Some lakes have got a nice smell.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well now we know.’ She looks round at Tina and the other girls. ‘Are we going out tonight then, Dave?’
‘Don’t know,’ he says, and feels his eyebrows twitch. Now the girls snigger.
‘Don’t take any notice of them, Dave. You come out wi’ me.’
‘We’ll see,’ he says.
Mr Birchall hears the teasing and laughter, but just grins weakly, as if he is in on Marie’s joke, and helps another girl into the canoe.
‘Dave’s coming out wi’ us, in’t he, Teen?’
More cackling laughter around the pool. It is not hostile, but it makes David the centre of attention, and he feels his face burning.
When Mr Birchall asks for a new canoeist, David pushes forward and gets in. As he paddles away he hears the laughter fading and, in spite of himself, imagines Marie Poole in her purple bikini behind him on the shore. When they get back to school, however, Marie does not mention going out with him again.
David leaves school with his final report on a summer Friday in 1974. There is no trip to the pit for David’s year, but the careers officer encourages him to think about the mines because they’re a big employer and the wages have gone up again. Mark Perry and Alan Ogden go to work at the collieries where their fathers are employed, and David goes with half a dozen lads to Greg Brown’s paint spraying works, opposite the Albion sewing factory on Lidget Lane, where most of the work is fixing up cars for quick re-sale, or painting old coaches. As he counts the board and lodging from his pay packet into his mam’s hand, he knows his childhood is ending there and then. Told what the home’s food, rent and heating cost, he suddenly assumes a responsibility to the family; it makes him feel grown up, proud and vulnerable at the same time.
*
The reason David’s career officer could urge him to consider the high wages being offered by the pits was that in early 1974 the British miners had gone on strike again, and won another large pay rise. This time, aided by developments in international politics, they had helped to bring down the Conservative government, and fostered a new buoyant and optimistic mood in the coalfields.
The initial problem was that large pay awards in other industries had within months eroded the gains from the 1972 strike. In the summer of 1973 the miners voted for a pay claim of £8–£13 a week in defiance of the Heath government’s wage restraint policies, and then in October 1973 a war in the Middle East led to a seventy per cent increase in oil prices. With oil now expensive there was increased demand for coal, which improved the union’s bargaining position. Rejecting the Coal Board’s offer of less than half the claim, the NUM began an overtime ban in November 1973. Edward Heath declared a state of emergency, with power cuts and a three-day week. In January 1974, the oil price doubled again: wage negotiations failed and the miners voted to strike.
The strike begins at midnight on 9 February. Two days later the Heath government calls a general election for 28 February, asking the public whether the government or the unions is running the country. The public is undecided; a minority Labour government succeeds Heath, and Harold Wilson is returned as Prime Minister. The Pay Board, an agency set up by Heath’s government to advise on pay and prices policies, endorses the union’s full claim, and the Coal Board awards the largest increase in the history of British mining, raising wages for faceworkers by more than thirty per cent. In October 1974, the Labour Party wins another general election and, with the Coal Board and the NUM, agrees a long-term plan for coal based on national output almost doubling by the end of the century as oil use declines. Some old mines will be closed and some new ones sunk. An important part of the plan is the development of a new ‘superpit’ in the Vale of York near Selby, thirty miles north of the Dearne Valley. The Selby complex will be the largest pit in Europe and one of the most technologically advanced in the world: ‘A New World of Mining’, as the Coal Board’s promotional leaflets promise.
One big winner in the changes, and now seen as a champion by many Yorkshire miners and an important figure in both the new world of mining and British politics, is Arthur Scargill. Elected president of the Yorkshire Area of the NUM in 1973, he had a high media profile before the 1974 strike, and after it he becomes a national celebrity. Though public opinion about him is divided, even some of his opponents respect the way he has stood up for his members. (‘Gordon doesn’t like him,’ Pauline tells Winnie, ‘but he says he wishes Arthur Scargill’d come and run t’ National Farmers Union for a bit.’) The NUM’s Victorian neo-Gothic offices in Barnsley become known as King Arthur’s Castle, and Harpers & Queen magazine runs a profile of him. One Saturday night he appears on Michael Parkinson’s TV chat show. When the host (also the son of a Barnsley coal miner) asks Arthur what, in the event of a communist revolution such as he sought, would happen to the Queen, he replies, ‘We’d find her a job in Woolworth’s.’
The high wages, and emphasis on skilled work in futuristic mines, kindle the imagination of Gary Hollingworth, now a builder’s apprentice with long hair in the style of David Bowie. By 1974, with the novelty of receiving his own wages having worn off, and his dad telling him to get a better job because he could do more than fetch and carry on building sites, he feels restless and ambitious. Regretting the dead squib of his own education, he daydreams about becoming a teacher, the sort of person who would understand boys like him and talk to them decently. He has no idea how a man like him would go about that, though, so for want of any other ideas he tries self-improvement, reading more books and ordering the Guardian and The Times at the newsagent. One night in the Fairway he meets an intelligent, free-spirited girl called Elaine, and when they start going out Gary finds they understand each other; after a few weeks he decides that he is in love, and suggests they get engaged. Elaine, still in her last year at school, says yes. It is a youthful promise, for Gary the outward sign of an adult relationship, and a clear mark of his ambition.
Next he needs a job suitable for an ambitious husband. In March 1975, to the jeers of his dad who says mining is a dead-end, he applies for a job at Houghton Main, where Kenny works. Besides the good wages and new, lucrative bonus schemes, the Coal Board offers training and education and the chance for a grafter to work his way up to a good job.
At Houghton Main’s personnel office Gary does not tell the officer in charge about his tuberculosis, and he is signed up with no questions. After six weeks’ surface training at Barnsley Main, he does thirty days in the underground galleries at Grimethorpe colliery. The training officer then pins up a typed list of the newcomers’ names and the jobs they have been assigned at their own pits. Gary is to be an air measurer in the Houghton safety team.
When he arrives for his first full day at work, he is directed to the team’s brick cabin in the yard. Inside are half a dozen men, some handling air pressure gauges and anemometers on a workbench, others warming themselves on a fat steam pipe on the opposite wall. The cabin smells of oil, cement and tobacco. As he enters, the men look up. He recognises Kenny sitting on the pipe. He and Kenny are the youngest by about ten years.
‘Who are thar?’ The speaker, a man in his forties, looks at Gary as if he is an inept burglar who has just broken into the cabin by mistake.
‘Me?’
‘No, him next to thee.’ There is no one next to him. ‘What’s tha want?’
The other men look at him and grin expectantly. It is the miners’ hello: the first speaker insults the other and the spoken-to replies with something that must be neither too vicious nor dull. If you are a newcomer, extra care is needed. The easy option of self-deprecation is a bad idea, conveying an untrustworthy need to be liked – unless you are fat, in which case it indicates a sense of humour. The worst thing is to be polite: ‘How do?’ and a shake of the hand means either that someone will only ever tell you what he thinks you want to hear, or that he privately considers himself superior. You can be bluff and witty, but not a smart-arse.
‘I’m working here.’
‘Why, does tha need some brass to buy some scissors?’ This is a reference to Gary’s collar-length hair. The older men, most of whom have served in the armed forces, hate it. In some pit yards there are safety signs saying ‘Long Hair? TAKE CARE!’ because long-haired young men keep getting their hair caught in machinery. Some of the older men say it serves them right.
Gary says, ‘No. They’ve got up-to-date haircuts in Thurnscoe’ – which is a good answer because it moves the subject from himself to the village, and the other Thurnscoe men at the pit.
‘They’ve got lasses’ haircuts wi’t’ look of your two.’ He shoots a glance at Kenny. ‘Tha wants to watch thysen down there in t’ dark . . . What job’ve they given thee anyroad?’
When the men have established who Gary does and does not know, and where his family is from, the safety engineer instructs Kenny to look after him for his three weeks of close personal supervision. ‘He’ll show thee where to go,’ he says. ‘Now bugger off, tha long-haired Thurnscoe bastard.’
The team enforces the colliery’s safety measures, and monitors the dust, gas and air in the pit. Pits are ventilated using large fans at the top of air shafts and a series of air doors in the tunnels. The doors stop and direct the air flow so the air is pushed down all the workings and prevented from blowing the quickest route down the main roadways and back to the surface up the upcast shaft. The air measurers check the flow, pressure and composition of the air to ensure that the pit is safe; their jobs carry a lot of responsibility because a single mistake can lead directly to an explosion.
For the first few weeks the long-haired Thurnscoe bastard works as a guffer – a go for in the Barnsley twang, meaning a lad who fetches and carries. Kenny teaches him how to take the measurements and how to enter them in the legal records in the safety team offices, and roadway by roadway, seam by seam, Gary learns to navigate the pit. He uses the computers in the offices to find out averages and make projections, and he develops the tact and banter needed to answer back when men complain about safety checks. Checks and enforcement are difficult. The manager, himself under pressure from the area bosses, sets ambitious targets. There is risk-taking out of recklessness, out of wanting to get a job finished, and out of men pushing themselves to ensure enough coal is dug, and the men who intervene are derided. Gary soon realises that if you follow regulations precisely you will not only be disrespected, you will also be measuring your output in spoonfuls. He learns to handle difficult situations by watching and listening to the older members on the team – men who had fought in the Second World War at Alamein, Monte Cassino and Arnhem. They had authority and somehow knew how to order people about, and when to protect them from themselves and their managers.
*
Gary calls Roy from a telephone box in the village once a week, but tries to avoid talking about work because his dad ridicules him.
‘You still at t’ bloody pit then?’
‘Aye, I’m doing alright – ’
‘Bloody crap job. I don’t know where your ambition’s gone.’
‘I brought nearly £50 home last week.’
‘Fifty pound! When I was your age I was driving tanks in t’ Army.’
Gary tries to explain that it’s different to when Roy was younger, and that the pit pays better than most other jobs. It looks after you: your wages are paid straight into the bank, tax deducted, and the NCB provides you with a house if you need one. When you’re on the sick you just put your sick note in and it’s all taken care of. Why can’t his dad see that?
But Roy can see nothing. He keeps on criticising and by the end of the conversation Gary feels ashamed, and has to walk around the village until the feeling goes off.
His grandad is a little more understanding, but he worries. (‘What’s tha want to go down t’ pit for, lad?’ ‘Money, Grandad.’ ‘Well mind tha takes care of it then, and thysen and all!’) It is Winnie who most shares his feeling of achievement. Inside, Gary is proud of his job: miners helped to build the nation from iron and coal, and it is still the fuel that powers the country and keeps people warm. Even if the men are cantankerous and cynical about management, he can tell many of them feel the same satisfaction that he does. Some make a point of going home in their pit muck and helmets, as a sort of uniform and statement of pride. Winnie listens to him telling her this with unsentimental approval.
‘You say right, Gary,’ she says. ‘You be proud of yourself, love. You be proud.’