Close the Coalhouse Door – Again. A Golden Age for Left-wingers

Close the Coalhouse Door – Again. A Golden Age for Left-wingers

27 June 2012

At the back end of the 1960s, student Marxists (and I was then one of them) were trying to make friends with what they (or we) called ‘The Workers’. This mythical social force was, to us, an undifferentiated mass of muscular proletarians who could be persuaded to overthrow the capitalist state and put us in power. From time to time, actual contact would be made. When it was, we found out that ‘the workers’ were in fact individual human beings, not a faceless class, and that, while they were often touched and even impressed by our concern for their well-being, they had real lives of their own to lead, and real concerns not to be solved by our stupid revolution. They often disappointed us, too by turning out to have patriotic and religious opinions that, if our theories were right, they should not have had.
Even so, there was something tremendously moving and romantic about the great heroic industries that still existed then, especially coal-mining with the act of going to work a daily exercise of courage. The mighty bond of shared adversity held pitmen and their families together, and left outsiders feeling not merely excluded, but cheated of an emotional richness and a solidarity they could never hope to feel in their blander, safer lives. It’s a little like the shared adversity, and the shared warmth, of wartime. One of my most treasured memories is of the day I went down a pit for the first and only time, crawling on hands and knees through an 18-inch seam a mile underground, and relying utterly on the competence and support of the men I was with. Thanks to them, and not to me, I never felt a moment’s real fear.
But that would come some time after I had seen Alan Plater’s play ‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, which I think must have been in my last term at York University in the summer of 1973. I travelled up to Newcastle to see it (John Woodvine, one of the stars of the big TV police drama of the day, Z-cars, headed the cast). It must have been a revival even then, as the play was first staged in 1968. It was a summer evening after final exams were over, and I was with some equally revolutionary companions. I remember that, after the train fare and the theatre tickets, we had enough cash left for just one half-pint of beer each in the interval. Students were wonderfully well-off in those days, but we didn’t have credit or debit cards, or loans of any kind, and you could only spend what you had, which I’m inclined to think is a good system.
Anyway, I enjoyed Plater’s dialogue and Alex Glasgow’s memorable agitprop songs (Glasgow was a genius at pithy revolutionary rhymes – I still remember one of them called ‘We want more pay’ about the 1972 miners’ claim, almost word for word) and we came back on the train in a kind of euphoria. Perhaps the workers really were on our side.
Piffle, as it turned out, but the thing lingered in my memory as part of a mis-spent but instructive youth So when it was revived this summer in my local theatre. I went back to see it again. And I found that it is not I, but the Left, who suffer from belief in a golden age.
The play has had to be pretty powerfully re-engineered in the intervening 40 years . I wish I could see a copy of the 1973 script, to check my memory. In some ways the best scene in the new version is the opening one, where the audience are cleverly taken out of the post-Thatcher present day into a pre-Maggie Garden of Eden in which there are actual miners, living in terraced houses in pit villages, under the shadow of the winding gear.
Some of the rest of it I recalled as if it were yesterday. But was there so much football in the original? And were there any f-words, or a fight? Maybe the fight, but I very much doubt the f-words. The inclusion of the phrase ‘all fur coats and no knickers’ was pretty shocking in provincial Tyneside, less than ten years after the abolition of stage censorship. And the proto-feminism? Was that in there 40 years ago? Left-wing revolutionaries in the early 70s weren’t, as I recall, very interested in the women’s movement. Rather the contrary, quite often.
But at the end of it there’s a curious moment where the actors speak at some length of an alternative history of the past four decades, in which there was no Thatcher, no collapse of manufacturing industry, no privatisation, and the cottage cosiness of the pre-1979 world somehow survives, along with plenty of socialist nobility.
Alas, I do not think this was the alternative. The gentler, poorer but kinder Britain that seemed so inviolable and settled in 1973 was already finished by then. The giant social changes of the 1960s were working through the system – comprehensive education, the huge expansion of the teaching profession, the growth of social work as a profession, the liberalisation of divorce, the revolutionising of the benefits system, the breakdown of taboos on sex, bad language and pornography, the abandonment of the principle of punishment in the justice system had already come about in the Wilson years . These changes mattered, and the altered the way people lived, though it wouldn’t become clear till the early 1980s just how much this was so.
The introduction of colour TV made that medium a hundred times more powerful (and conformist) than it had been before, thanks to the ‘ETBPLG’ effect (‘Even the Bad Programmes Look Good’).
And beneath all, that slow-motion earthquake, British membership of the European Community (as it then was) was compelling changes that nobody wanted or expected, and exposing our economy to forces from which it had until then been shielded. I remember, round about 1972, hearing a conversation between two in-the-know journalists on the fringe of the revolutionary movement in which one was saying to the other that the political classes knew that membership of the ‘Common Market’ would have a devastating effect on our way of life, but that they had thought it better to keep quiet about it, as the alternative was far worse. And then there was the 1973 Arab-Israel war, and the colossal oil shock which followed, the moment, which, for me, ended the sunny carefree atmosphere which had somehow persisted in this country since the mid-1960s.
Much of what happened under Maggie (over-rated by her admirers and her detractors in almost equal measure) would have happened anyway, by my guess.
It is all very well blaming Ted Heath or Margaret Thatcher , or Rupert Murdoch (or Arthur Scargill, for that matter). Each played their individual parts in the transformation. But far more influential than any of them was old Roy Jenkins, who remains the most influential British politician of the age, despite never having held the supreme office ( and he, as you’d never have guessed from meeting or hearing him, was the son of a miner, a strike leader imprisoned during the general Strike of 1926. Close the Coalhouse Door, indeed).

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