Yes! Yes! UCS! Townsend Productions written by Neil Gore.

Oscar Wilde:  ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has ever read history, is a man’s original value.’

A writer’s job is to remember. The better the writer, the better we remember. I’d a day out at The Golden Friendship Club on Saturday. Jim McLaren performed two miracles—and perhaps there’ll be a play about that one day—buying the old Masonic Club and finding the money to renovate it. If he wants to hang a picture of his mum, Agnes, and Auntie Molly Kelly in one of two the main halls, well, that’s really up to him. In the old days, you had to stand up for old Queen Lizzie. He’s standing up for his mum, and she’s more to my liking. He needs a third miracle to find the funding to keep the place going. The Golden Friendship is a Community Hall in a real sense of being paid for and belonging to the community. Workshops during the day and Neil Gore’s play, Yes! Yes! UCS!  were held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UCS work-in on the Clyde in 1971 (for those not very good at arithmetic a Covid year wasn’t carried over, so to be pedantic, 51 years).

Bernardine Evaristio: Girl, Woman, Other, ‘she wants people to bring curiosity to her plays, doesn’t give a damn what they wear’.  

When I came into the hall Jim was there to meet guests. There was no sneaking past in casual wear. They set the seats out with a free copy of The Morning Star (cost £1.50) which made me smile. I didn’t think they still printed it. I’d a quick chat with that old dinosaur, John Foster. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him in a tutorial asking us if we knew what hegemonic meant. We were more interested in when The Wee Howff opened. He taught us always to cite your sources. Hating Tories was a given.

Rhyming couplets and verse Yes! Yes! UCS! 

I’m up for a writer’s challenge. So a quick sketch of Peter Barra McGahey with his handlebar moustache:

 Fae John Brown’s on the Clyde—James Scott Dry Dock—tae Govan and Yarrows

Land, river and sea, nane belanged to Barra McGahey

The sootie tenemenet walls, Dalnator, where we lay out past

Glasgow Airport moles that didnae depart

An a the rats and birds that flies

pay a feu rent fae their tinker’s tents

the dog that shits, cats that hiss

the foreman’s toot isnae his

Fae James Scott Dry Dock, Yarrows and John Brown’s on the Clyde

Land, river and sea, nane belanged to Barra McGahey

The Morning Star we see.

Yard owners haunds oot free.

Their coats of arms with all its charms

Our cranes feeds your wains memes

With patriot calls to our common country

Futile dreams and poet themes of equality

the match that lights the dout

lame-duck yards goin slow

Tartan paint and a long wait—work to rule

Fair democracy, where do we place we?

We that toil should own the soil and Broomilaw

A welded chain for those that pass laws again

Fae John Brown’s on the Clyde—James Scott Dry Dock—tae Govan and Yarrows

Land, river and sea, nane belanged to Barra McGahey

No part of our common we.

A zip in his trousers at the back

for emergency purposes only

Christmas lights on his welder’s hat

the unfair and grand

none as light-headed as he

In Barra’s place, we place our grace.

None forgotten, or will be.

His gravelly laugh still finds a path

To our common humanity.

We had lunch in the hall, and Jim put on a fine spread. We could make a donation to a food bank or to The Golden Friendship. I grew up in the seventies. I could never have imagined the idea of food banks. Worker’s memories of taking over the yards and forcing Ted Heath’s government to backtrack. Go from spending a possible £6 million government package to nearer £36 million is at the core of our day out. Yes! Yes! UCS! as an antidote to the highest grossing film of 1960, I’m Alright Jack, with the stereotypical bungling and walkouts of the shop steward movement in Union Jack Foundries portrayed by Peter Sellers meant to typify a Britain that was going in the wrong direction.

I asked John Foster if there was still a Communist Party, still a Socialist Movement. In particular, if it had younger members. I don’t think anybody in the hall was under forty, apart from the two actors that played Aggie and Eddi.

I’d guess very few adults under-thirty could tell you what the plaque on Clydebank College labelling a building John Brown’s means. The Clyde has become a feature, a waterfront for selling property.

John Foster did say there was a growing Socialist movement. I’d guess Greta Thunberg, aged 15, sitting in silent protest outside Parliament (Skolstrejk för klimatet) is more important and certainly better known.

Ted Heath’s government was defeated. We had the oil-price hike and stagflation. But the token woman in Heath’s cabinet was Margaret Thatcher. Her destruction of the miner’s union with the help of a media vying with each other to create fictional stories about Arthur Scargill and present them as facts stand out.  M15 and a pumped-up police force and the loss of around 80 000 jobs is well documented in what was described as a war against terrorists. Less well documented is how we lost the propaganda war in which food banks, for example, is sold to us a positive trend.  

When I hear about a critically acclaimed singer and songwriter, I usually do a bit of planning of my own, and nip away before I get caught. I don’t listen to music in the way that other people don’t read books. I could add or go to the theatre. But when I saw a friend and nipped outside during the break of Yes!Yes! UCS!  I admitted Findlay Napier had been the best part of the day. I still don’t listen to music, but he caught me on the good side.

I asked Jim why Neil Gore’s production wasn’t on the stage. He told me it wasn’t deep enough for the set. It was impressive. A mock-up of tenement buildings, with doors that open and decades to slide into. We get to see Heath in cartoonish blue and hear his voice. ‘There’ll be nae bevvying’ cries Jimmy Reid. The roar of the crowd. On two girls’ shoulders the production hangs. I feel for them. Art makes us and unmakes us. This might be their first and last job. The yards were a men’s playground, to channel the dispute through women takes balls.

Anne Ryan was out having a fag at the canal. I’d joked with her that in 1970, everybody would have been out of the hall and smoking. She was the solitary pariah of the path, until another guy ambled over. She asked if I’d smoked, ‘Nah, I was a good boy’.

‘Whit dae yeh think of the show?’

She made a face. ‘He seems to like it.’  

Radical politics doesn’t sell is hardly a headline, even in The Morning Star. George Orwell in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm described how ‘unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban’. Ironically, Communist China is probably best at this. Rupert Murdoch, second best. We’ve come a long way since the nineteen-seventies, backward step by backward step. Only the past can live in the present. I brought my curiosity to play. Perhaps Townsend Production doesn’t quite capture the zeitgeist. The fault might be mine. I don’t do musicals and I don’t do theatre. The wrong man in the right place. Go see for yourself. Make your own head space.    

Gdansk

In November, 1988, a crowd of around 20 000 cheered as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, met Lech Walesa. He was a shipyard worker from the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk and leader of Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union movement.  

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski had Thatcher’s car stopped before she reached the airport to board a Royal Airforce jet to London and presented her with a bouquet of flowers.

‘I came to see and to have a long talk with Mr. Walesa . . . . I knew that I had to come and feel the spirit of Poland for myself,’ said Thatcher.

Almost thirty years ago, 17^th September 1980, Walesa led a strike against a programme of economic austerity in which the Gdansk shipyard would close.

Walensa’s key demands were reinstatement of sacked workers and a wage rise for those in work. Strikes spread to other industries and throughout Poland.

‘We shall not be found wanting when Poland makes the progress toward freedom and democracy its people clearly seek,’ Thatcher said, garnering praise for her support of a free trade union movement.

Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mine Workers, in the miner’s strike, 1984-85, key demands were no different from Walesa, with his claim that the National Coal Board in the name of economic austerity had a ‘hit list’ of 75 pit closures and the government was stockpiling coal and converting power stations to burn other fossil fuels.

The spirit of Poland, support for a free trade union movement, and freedom of movement were reported sorely missing from the spirit of Thatcherism. 84 000 miners and then there were none. Lest we forget, that’s democracy for you.

William McIlvanney (2016 [1975]) Docherty

I think this was the first William McIlvanney novel I read. It won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. When McIlvanney was writing the book there were still such a thing as a coalminer. There’s probably a picture of one in the Daily Mail hate archives, the equivalent of a Lascaux cave drawing to remind them what these men that held the country to ransom, the aristocracy of the working-class, trade-union movement, looked like. Coal powered the industrial revolution, but the men who dug it out saw little of the rewards. Such was its value coal miners were exempt from conscription in the First and Second World Wars. In the latter war 1939-45,  men could be conscripted not only to the army, navy, or air force, but also to the coal face and coal mines near the industrial heartlands. Bevan’s boys kept the machinery of war and killing going   It must have been around the 1980s when I read the book. And according to the right-wing hate mail propaganda machine, Arthur Scargill, and the coal miners were again holding the country to ransom. The strike of 1984-85 was notable for the coal miners out on the streets collecting donations and food – we had food banks even then. Scargill, of course, suggested that Thatcher and her cronies, including Ian MacGregor, had stockpiled coal and oil and set out to break the unions and to do away with the coal-mining industry. History proved Scargill right. It doesn’t take Agatha Christie to tell us there were 84 000 coal miners then there was none. Policing operations were particularly inventive. The cover up at Hillsborough part of that sad tradition. Hi, you might be shouting, what happened to the book you’re meant to be reviewing?

Well, it’s quite a simple book, a love story of the working class. It’s quite a difficult job to make a superhero out of an ordinary working man, Tam Docherty, who died, how he lived, a working class hero, laying down his life for another. There is another argument that the real hero of the book is Jenny, his wife, who gave him three boy and a girl, but who, with little money and loaves and soup pots works miracles that Jesus would be jealous of. He only fed the 5000, Jenny has to do it every day for over 25 years. You’d need to look at Maheau’s wife in Emile Zola’s classic story Germinal to show how one wage is never enough and each child is sacrificed to the pits, for an adequate comparison of how little miners made and how far it had to stretch. Or Jenny’s daughter, Kathleen, who marries Jack, who beats her and spends his wages on booze. Realism begins with reality and not fake news.

Mick, Docherty’s oldest son, loses the sight in one eye and one arm in the trenches in the First World War and he accepts he’s one of the lucky ones. He made it back. But his search for  meaning has contemporary resonance and one of the books he reads to make sense of the post-war world is The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. What he says to his wee brother, Conn, after his fight with his other brother Angus, is relevant today as it was then. Angus has broken with his father and his family. He’s got a girl pregnant and refuses to marry her. He marries someone else, Annie, and fathers another child. But Angus represents everything his father detests. Individualism, an atomised life, and every man for themselves. Tory dogma. Angus’s brute strength, he deludes himself into believing, will safeguard the future of his family. The older brother’s bitter experience, when the sky might be up and it might be crashing down, has taught him better.

‘Whit’s happenin’?’

‘Whit’s happenin’? is that folks don’t ken whit’s happenin’. They just want wages an’ they canny accept that they’ll hiv tae tak mair. Tae get whit ye want, ye’ve goat to settle fur mair, that’s a’.’

His father understood that better than anyone, he lived it. A community is not a collection of individuals looking after number one.

‘He was only five-foot four. But when yer hert goes from yer heid tae yer toes, that’s a lot of hert.’

The William McIlvanney’s and Docherty’s of this world would have their work cut out making sense of Tory councillors elected in Ferguslie and a moron’s moron elected as President of the United States. It makes a pleasant change to read about a working-class hero without the tag, Benefits, being added. Coal miners, aye, I remember them well and I understand what they stood for, what they stand for.

‘Nae shite from naebody.’

 

Anniversary of the Miner’s Strike 1984/5 today (all those years ago) they went back to work.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “In Loving Memory.”

My brother phoned me today. He works in Fife, Longannet Power station, been there about twenty years. Longannet is one of the few coal-fired power stations that is still on grid. It was opened in 1972 and has a capacity of 2400 MW. Most of the other coal-fired power stations in Scotland are closed. That’s not a bad thing. With global warming mankind is on life support and we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. I understand he really doesn’t give a fuck. Year after year his company gets taken over by another company. They all tell him the same thing. I want you to do more with less. So they tell him what shifts he’ll do. If they say nightshift there’s no extra. If they say dayshift no extra. Weekends no extra. Be thankful you have a job. They’ll shut down one unit. Then another. Then he won’t have a job. That’s life as we know it now.

Let’s look at the options. My brother-in law is a nuclear engineer. I used to go down and visit my sister in Dunbar when she had kids and they both worked in the plant. Torness capacity is 1300 MW.  It opened in 1988. All the other power plants in Scotland provide MW power in hundreds not thousands of MW.

Longannet was literally built on coal. Coal powered the industrial revolution. Not oil or gas. Coal. During the Second World War coal was so important that men were directed into army, navy, air force and coal mines. Jimmy Saville modelled himself as being a Bevan boy. Coal miners were hard men. Life was hard, brutal and short.  In my recent review of Red Dust Road Jackie Kay mentioned that (I think it was) her dad’s brother a miner in Fife got buried in landfill and had to get dug out. George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier goes down a pit. This is the 1930s, but his descriptions of getting to the coal face, which could take an hour and half of cracked head and crawling in insufferable heat, blindness, dampness and putrid air could have come straight from Zola’s Germinal of the 1850s French coal fields and the wages, as in the novel, were subsistence level. No more, no less. Workers had to live, but each mining office had an official stamp which they frequently used, to save time, because miners died every day.

Miners really were in it together and this sense of solidarity translated into union leaders that wanted a fair share for those that produced the society we now live in. In the 1960s and 1970s coal miners were the aristocracy of the working class.  Their fathers and fathers before them may not have been paid a living wage, but their unions made sure that they were as well paid as school teachers. Up until the 1990s Britain was reliant on coal for its power stations.

Bankers didn’t hold the country to ransom, because of course nice middle-class men would never do that sort of thing. Whereas miners produced coal that powered the country, bankers produced esoteric algorithms and ways of moving money from A to B so that their increasing share of C and D was moved into their accounts. When bankers weren’t doing that they were producing bespoke ways of moving cash out of the country to avoid taxation. Cheating isn’t cheating when dealing with billlions as the HSBC scandal shows and not for the first time. Government of course being a bad thing and being caught and facing a fine, well nobody died, nobody hurt.

Miners paid their tax and they paid for the nation’s wealth with their blood and the blood of their children. What has happened to the miners has happened to us all. Arthur Scargill said there was a government hit list. He said the Thatcher government stockpiled coal and wanted to fight. Then, of course, he said the NUM had been infiltrated by MI5 and we would be better investing in alternative forms of energy such as wind, wave, and solar. The man was clearly cuckoo. There used to be 84 000 miners, now there are a handfull. Longannet still uses coal in 2015. We bring it from abroad.

Lessons learned. Every man for himself.  Don’t trust the police. Don’t trust the law. Hundreds of miners fitted up by the Scottish constabulary that waved loads-of-overtime-money in miner’s faces. Being charged with an offence meant not just a criminal record but automatic dismissal by the coal company that employed them. Double wammy.

Lesson learned, employers call the shots. Wealth flows from the poor to the rich. Be grateful you have a job. Be grateful there are food banks because almost quarter of a million children in Scotland live below the poverty line. Be grateful Arthur Scargill wasn’t a banker because there would be no telling what victory would have looked like.