There Is Nothing for You Here, page 3
Both my parents were also born in the North East of England: my mother, June, in Billingham, an industrial town farther south in Teesside; my father Alfred, Alf, on the edge of Roddymoor, a tiny coal-mining or “pit” village a few miles north of Bishop Auckland. June left school at age sixteen and immediately started nursing training, finding great satisfaction as a midwife. Alf became a coal miner at fourteen. He missed out on any kind of further education apart from on-the-job training because of poverty and family challenges. His working life was scarred by frequent unemployment. He constantly had to start again. When the last of the several local mines he worked in closed, he briefly labored in a brickworks and a steelworks. In the end he became an auxiliary (or ancillary) worker in the National Health Service, or NHS. He met June there, in Bishop Auckland General Hospital, but as a hospital porter, he found himself on the lowest rung of the system. He was in his thirties and never went any further.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
The nature of the place that I came from, the shift in my father’s work from the coal mines to the hospital, my mother’s profession as a nurse, my overall family circumstances, and life lessons from my experiences in and outside of school did play important roles in shaping my educational and job opportunities. But ultimately they ended up assisting more than constraining my prospects. And, as I discovered later, in my professional life, they gave me a unique set of insights, offering me an entirely different perspective on global affairs from those of the majority of national security experts.
My family’s experiences and the events of my youth from 1965 until I came to America in 1989 were echoed in the lives of millions of others who mostly lived far beyond the political spotlight. In the decades after I arrived in the United States, the fate of my home area in the United Kingdom was that of every major mining community in the Appalachia region, stretching from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the south up to West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the north. America’s coal country too lost the mainstay of its economy and opportunity. It was also emblematic of industrial regions across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and indeed in other parts of Europe. This fact was a significant revelation once I moved beyond the narrow confines of the blighted world that I was from and finally began to understand the forces shaping our lives in the twentieth century.
Structurally, the United Kingdom and the United States—like Russia and other advanced economies—cycled through a rapid buildup of extractive industry and mass manufacturing in the 1920s and 1930s and again at the end of the Second World War. Our nations began the descent into what became known as the postindustrial era in the 1960s, and especially after the 1970s, when they were hit by successive oil shocks. Major oil producers in the Middle East, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), imposed an embargo on countries such as the UK and the U.S. for supporting Israel in its Yom Kippur War with Arab states. Both the United Kingdom and the United States had their own sources of oil and gas, but they remained dependent on Middle East imports. Domestic coal—no matter how much you had (and both the UK and the U.S. had a lot)—could not substitute for everything, especially in transportation. The embargo forced a period of harsh adjustment to sudden energy scarcity and soaring prices, including gasoline rationing and utility cuts to curb demand. It also led to a substantial restructuring of the automotive industry to favor smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
The United Kingdom and its huge coal, steel, shipbuilding, and manufacturing industries were especially hard pressed by the oil shocks and related developments. The 1970s saw stagnant growth and soaring inflation. Alongside the oil embargo, the global economy began to change rapidly, with technological breakthroughs that enabled the automation of manufacturing and put more emphasis on the movement of capital and finance than on raw materials and goods. When I was growing up, the UK, the U.S., and other advanced countries had to figure out how to move their economies from reliance on energy-intensive heavy industry to high-tech manufacturing, finance, and services. These latter sectors had a much smaller manual labor footprint and greater demand for educated, skilled workers.
Breakthroughs in transportation after the Second World War also played a role in changing the economic geography of both the United Kingdom and the United States. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, industrial production was essentially rooted in specific places—constrained by distance and the high costs of transportation for raw materials and energy supplies, like iron ore and coal, as well the difficulties of shipping goods to consumers in other parts of the country. Regions in both the UK and the U.S. became specialized in large-scale production if they were close to sources of raw materials and had easy access to transportation routes, including major inland waterways (large rivers and canals in both countries and the Great Lakes system in the U.S.) or coastlines. These regions became freight railway and shipping hubs until new technology—long-haul trucking and heavy-lift aircraft, for example—revolutionized transportation. Advances in power generation and long-distance electricity transmission, alongside other innovations in technology and infrastructure, called for new raw materials (such as rare metals) that had to be sourced globally, and also meant that manufacturing industry no longer had to be tethered to a particular location close to all its inputs. In the postindustrial world, in a highly integrated and complex economy, everything and everyone could theoretically be on the move. The biggest challenge for governments and societies was how to deal with the human costs of modernization and technological change. What would happen to all the places and people that were products of the old, fixed economy but might not be needed in the new?
Regions like mine in the UK North East were the specialized places of a more geographically limited past. The industries that dominated them were no longer competitive at the same scale in the new technologically advanced and globalized economy. Nor were the manual workers, like my father, who had been employed in extractive industry and mass manufacturing for several generations. Workers’ education and skills were specifically tailored to thrive in their twentieth-century industrial workplaces. Now they were obsolete. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people didn’t choose what they wanted to do or where they wanted to live. They moved to where the work was. If the jobs were dependable, they stayed. Local educational systems developed alongside the industrial economy, with a specific purpose and job pipeline in mind. Workers’ children were being prepared to hew coal or manage a mine, not create computer code or set up their own business. Families went to the same schools and headed toward the same professions—down the mines, into the steelworks, to a shipyard, or onto a factory assembly line. Children learned the same things from the same teachers, textbooks, and classes as their parents, and sometimes their grandparents, had (given the fact that many people married and had children straight out of school).
Places like Bishop Auckland were in the right place for the creation of large-scale extractive and heavy industries in the nineteenth century, but in the wrong place for the new technology and innovation that came along at the end of the twentieth century. They quickly became forgotten backwaters. What had made them attractive as a location for heavy industry made them unattractive for the information economy, which clustered around places without unsightly mine shafts and factory smokestacks but with “locational amenities” more conducive to creating a new density of advanced technology—amenities such as colleges and universities. People who lived in the old, specialized towns and regions suddenly found themselves stuck in place. They were not equipped for the knowledge economy, which was developing in other locations. They didn’t have the educational background or the qualifications to move somewhere else—nor did they have the financial means.
The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. Margaret Thatcher came into office in May 1979, right around the time I realized I was part of the working class. Ronald Reagan followed soon after, in January 1981. Together, Thatcher and Reagan dominated the 1980s, my teenage years and early adulthood and my transition to university. They forged an era of increasing consensus on stimulating growth through free-market economic policy, enhanced competition, free trade, and lower taxes. Their policies were shaped by the celebrated University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who became an adviser to both. Inspired by Friedman and others from the Chicago school, Thatcher and Reagan broke with post–World War II economic and industrial principles. They espoused minimal state intervention, market liberalization, deregulation, and the privatization of public services.
In the UK, Margaret Thatcher was a trailblazer and a revolutionary. She reprivatized the so-called commanding heights of British industry, pushed unprofitable coal mines, steelworks, and factories to close, broke the backs of trade unions that had paralyzed the country with labor disputes in the 1970s, and liberated or tore individuals (depending on your perspective) from the confines of their traditional workplace-oriented communities. For his part, Reagan even had a term—“Reaganomics”—named after him to sum up his administration’s particular policy mix of pulling back government regulations, cutting taxes, reducing social-sector spending, and greatly enhancing military spending.
Thatcher’s and Reagan’s respective domestic policy choices helped pave the way for economic growth in the 1990s and early 2000s. But they also created deep societal and spatial inequalities in the United Kingdom and United States between the places and people that could adapt to all the changes and those that couldn’t. This sparked and then fueled the partisan divides that would produce crippling political rifts decades later, in 2016 through 2020. In some respects the crises of 2020 would mark the final reckoning with the revolutionary reforms of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.
Dying Villages
Up until the 1980s, coal mining defined County Durham. But by the time I was born, in 1965, County Durham’s mines were on the verge of closing, as my father had already discovered. Even if I had been a boy, I could not have followed Dad down the pit and maintained a family tradition stretching back generations. That opportunity was gone. The jobs in the mines were not coming back, no matter what desperate action was taken. Demand for coal and coal miners dropped alongside the rise of the new high-tech and financial sectors and automation. Durham miners soon became more famous for initiating big strikes or “industrial actions” than for producing coal. The last pit in County Durham closed for good in 1994, and the last shipment of open-cast-mined County Durham coal out of the North East’s world-famous port in Newcastle was in February 2021, as I was working on this book. In just over half a century, everything was gone.
The closure of the coal mines was a colossal blow, depriving the miners not only of their jobs but also of their entire worlds. In the nineteenth century, the rise of coal brought the North East prosperity. Investors opened mines, large and small, across the region. Mine owners pulled men in from local farms and from elsewhere in England, the Scottish borders, Wales, and Ireland. There were dramatic changes to regional maps and County Durham’s demography between 1801 and 1885. Villages centered around a mine became towns. The British censuses beginning in 1841 (which was the first to record the names of individuals in households) captured my relatives driving those demographic changes as they moved about in search of work, having children along the way. Mining and the pits that spread across the region were the foundation for every other industry, including the steel industry (locally called the ironworks) and shipbuilding in coastal cities such as Newcastle, Sunderland, and Middlesbrough. Each of these three big cities sat at the mouth of one of the region’s principal rivers that flowed into the North Sea: the Tyne, the Wear, and the Tees. Newcastle-on-Tyne was the magnet for industry, goods, jobs, and people for a large hinterland extending north into Scotland as well as south into the English Midlands. Newcastle became a major financial center, renowned for its fine architecture and gracefully curving city streets.
In this period, County Durham and the rest of the North East of England were at the center of industrial innovation. It was the industrial forerunner of America’s Silicon Valley. The people of the North East extracted the resources as well as invented and made the technology and manufactured the goods that people used all around the world. You didn’t “take coals to Newcastle,” because Newcastle shipped coal across the globe. In Sunderland on the River Wear, the locals were nicknamed “Mackems.” They were the people who “mack ’em,” or “make them.” They made the steel, ships, trains, massive machines, and bridges that everyone else needed. Sunderland was so rich and renowned that American president Ulysses S. Grant came to preside over the laying of the foundation stone for the city’s combined library, museum, and art gallery in September 1877. It was the first UK public library and museum outside London.
But things turned sour for the region and its inhabitants, including the Durham miners, in the twentieth century. During World War I, my paternal grandfather, William “Billy” Thompson Hill, and other miners went from the pits to the trenches in Europe. At the end of the war, mines and factories scaled back production. Men came back from the front to find fewer jobs than they expected. The UK spiraled into economic crisis, saddled by high government wartime debt. Trade and consumption patterns shifted.
Then came the 1929 financial crash. The 1930s were a tough time for the North East. Grandad Billy got blacklisted for taking part in strike action. He was in work, but mostly out of it, during the 1920s and 1930s. When Dad was born, in 1932, Grandad was unemployed. The family was homeless. They lived in a condemned building for several years, in a couple of rooms where the rain didn’t pour through the roof. Dad slept in the bottom of an old chest of drawers until he was a toddler and then with his parents. The family was dependent on handouts from local charities, including miners’ self-help funds, and relatives who still had jobs. Grandad did menial work for local farmers in return for food. Dad’s older brother (named Billy after his father) was sent to live with a succession of less-impoverished relatives who could feed and clothe him, leading to a lifetime of estrangement from his parents. Uncle Billy went off as soon as he could to train as a mining engineer elsewhere in the country. The family rarely saw him again.
Thousands in the North East were in the same situation as my grandparents. No one wanted to be on the dole. In October 1936, two hundred unemployed men from County Durham, including some of Grandad’s friends and relatives, went on the Jarrow March, one of England’s most famous organized labor protests. They walked three hundred miles to London to petition Parliament to bring jobs back to the North East.
It took a few more years, until the eve of the Second World War, for the mines to open again. The war and local labor activism helped propel social and industrial reforms that led to the nationalization of the coal industry, welfare provisions, and a brief golden age for Durham miners in the 1950s. Not coincidentally, this was also the high point for my coal-mining family: the period between 1947, when Dad went down the mines, and the early 1960s, when Grandad retired and Dad’s pit closed.
In the 1950s the Durham miners thought they had it made. They were thriving after all the deprivations before and during the war. Miners worked hard down the pit together for several generations. The local community was their safety net and source of contacts for new opportunities. Men working in the pits made sure all the families in the village had coal to heat their homes as well as food from the local Co-op (the Co-operative or community store) if a miner was laid low by work-related injuries. If a pit closed, miners would alert friends and relatives to vacancies and vouch for their work record with new mine managers.
Miners and their families were part of a vibrant social network of welfare clubs and societies stretching across County Durham, funded by the dues they paid to the Durham Miners’ Association and community contributions. There were UK amateur cup-winning football teams as well as writing and art societies (George Orwell had links to them, as did some famous Soviet writers from the 1920s). There were pigeon fanciers and whippet and greyhound breeders and trainers. Grandad indulged in these pastimes at various points. Like every other miner, Grandad had an allotment—a share in a communal garden—where he and others grew prizewinning vegetables that went on to be eaten.
To be sure, there was nothing romantic about working down a pit. Dad worked on the so-called Ballarat seam in his pit near Roddymoor. It was a little over three feet at its peak height—a claustrophobic squeeze for even the smallest miners, which Dad was not. It was backbreaking work, and Dad was plagued by a slipped and herniated disk and spinal stenosis later in life.
The mines that gave the men their jobs cast a long shadow over their health in other ways as well. Coal dust and lung damage finally caught up with both my grandfather and my father. Grandad died in the winter of 1979 from pneumonia. Dad passed away in January 2012 from the sudden onset of congestive heart failure, also after a bout of pneumonia. They both made it past their seventies, which wasn’t bad for a Durham coal miner. Most miners never made it to retirement at sixty-five. Grandad’s younger brother Jonathon, Uncle Jonty, died at ninety-seven, which was way beyond the normal expiration date. Dad always marveled at that. Dad himself had retired from his job at the hospital before pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease, was recognized as an occupational disease by the UK government in the late 1990s. There were not a lot of retired miners still alive to seek compensation by then. Dad had chronic asthma and bronchitis every winter, but because he wasn’t, as he put it, “on his last legs” when he applied for compensation, he got the minimal amount. The men who really needed the money, who had been brought down by the dust and the emphysema that came with it, were long dead.
