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CHAPTER 1
BLENDING BLEWBROUGH
94 Blewbury–Didcot
794 Middlesbrough–Grangetown–Eston– Middlesbrough
Soon after dawn in Blewbury, Oxfordshire, and the village is coming to life. There's a hint of early sun away down the A417 towards the Thames Valley and the horses will no doubt soon be out on the Berkshire Downs to the south (these are still the Berkshire Downs, though forty years ago Blewbury was part of a tract taken from Berkshire and awarded to Oxfordshire). At Linnets and Beavers, Rose Cottage and Dragonwyke, down Westbrook Street where Kenneth Grahame came to live after completing The Wind in the Willows, in Church Road and Church End, in Berry Lane, Eastfields and Dibleys, the day is beginning. The air is full of birdsong. And outside the Load of Mischief, three people, of whom I am one, await the day's first 94 bus to Didcot.
I thought the Load of Mischief would be a pub, but it isn't. It's a private house adorned with a little plaque that celebrates its previous life. Like two others before it, this one has gone out of business, leaving only the Red Lion and the Barley Mow. That's part of a process which has seen the village transformed from a community where in the mid-nineteenth century more than half the working population were employed in the farms and fields to a pleasantly prosperous place where most people find their employment at some distance. Where once they set out on foot for a day's work with the plough or harrow or tractor, it's now more likely to be the four-mile journey for Harwell and the Atomic Energy Research Establishment or the ten miles to Culham, where the Centre for Fusion Energy is home to the JET (Joint European Torus) and MAST (Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak). And sometimes the journey is still more ambitious, to the City of London, for instance: seventy miles away.
Look here upon this picture, and on this. Well before dawn, a week later, I am in Grangetown, east of Middlesbrough, on a road that leads to the coast at Redcar. The night is still deep dark, but the sky is lit by the gushes of flame which flare day and night from industrial works which can never sleep. Grangetown is close to the Tees, and the birdsong here is mainly the mournful cries of seagulls. Outside the Magnet Hotel, two people, of whom I am one, await the day's first 794 Boroughbus to Middlesbrough. I thought the Magnet would be a pub. But it isn't: it's more the shabby wreck of a pub which after a time of trouble and turbulence closed down, perhaps for good. An air of defeat hangs over it. Disconsolate boards say it's for sale, but only the bravest of souls is likely to buy it.
It's a very cold morning in March. Alongside me at the bus stop is a figure so comprehensively swaddled up that I cannot tell if it's a man or a woman. The bus is due at 5.37. After five shivering minutes it hasn't arrived. But a voice which emanates from the swaddling clothes is reassuring. 'It's usually late,' she says. 'But it always comes'. At 5.45, it suddenly does, signalled by a thrilling blaze of light as it hurries out of the northern darkness towards the Magnet, to sweep us down towards the Eston Hills.
The sky is blue-grey now, streaked in the east by an almost industrial red that seems to promise (and will indeed deliver) a glorious morning. This was, long ago, rural England, as Blewbury, for all the change that's come over it, still is today. A 'venerable village', Blewbury had already been termed in a tenth-century charter. Later it became, like others around it, a wool town, but that trade faded away. You can get some picture of what it was like in the middle years of the nineteenth century from the census of 1861, when the men were predominantly agricultural labourers, and most of the working women domestic servants. This, like many others before the railways came, was a self-contained community where 60 per cent of the people were Blewbury born, and the great majority of those denied that privilege came from nearby villages.
Five family names – Herridge, Aldridge, Corderoy, Martin and Belcher – accounted for one in five of those in the village; ten family names covered almost a third. The Herridges and Aldridges mostly worked on the land; the Corderoys were big farmers, people of power and influence.
Then change came, especially when the railway arrived in the 1880s. Today almost all the village's shops have gone, and Blewbury lost its railway in 1962. Apart from the A417 racing across the southern edge, all feels calm and settled. Streams run through it, which made it a place of watercress beds. At its heart is the church of St Michael and All Angels, Grade I listed, celebrated for a chancel window designed and created by J.F. Bentley, who built Westminster Cathedral.
You won't find an estate agent's office in Blewbury, but there are plenty in Didcot, whose windows demonstrate that houses round here don't come cheap. But then there's plenty that makes Blewbury feel like a fine place to live. There are favourite walks on the Downs and below them you can choose the ancient Icknield Way or the older, higher Ridgeway. The poet Edward Thomas came here to write a book called The Icknield Way, published in 1913, calling in for a while at the Load of Mischief and deconstructing at length the sign that still hung there (the 'load' was a large obstreperous woman being carried by a crushed-looking man.) There is easy access to Thames-side villages, which mattered to Kenneth Grahame, who had been living for years before close to the river.
The contingent aboard the 94 this morning is not what I had expected. I'd assumed there would be people heading for jobs in the City, but not so. People of this persuasion prefer their cars, as the car parks around Didcot station – some already full when we get there at twenty to eight –will shortly attest.
So most of those aboard this morning are students or workers in Didcot shops. Only the driver, a local man recently returned from years in New Zealand, who greets most of his passengers by name, is conspicuously chatty and cheerful. It's a route, consistent with the unhurried nature of Blewbury, on which not much happens. Beyond East Hagbourne, a gentle and privileged-looking village, there is hardly a notable sight till you come to the outskirts of Didcot, and then to its centre, and beyond it, that potent magnet, the railway station.
'Didcot-change-for-Oxford' people in Oxford used to call it, since this was what the porters bawled out on the station platform, where so many tedious minutes were spent awaiting the trains that would carry them on to their dreaming spires. The Didcot you saw from the train in those days looked like a drab little town, an impression soon confirmed if you got out and gave it a closer inspection. The line had only taken this course because more lordly Abingdon had been aghast at such an impertinent infiltration and told Brunel to take his project elsewhere. Indeed, there were some in Oxford who tried to resist the railway. 'It would, so the greybeards thought, place awful distractions in the way of undergraduates,' Jan Morris writes in her book about Oxford: 'it would disturb the metabolism of the place, vulgarize the learned setting, and bring hordes of common strangers into the city'.
Though the coming of the railway set Didcot growing, that progress was augmented by the army arriving here at the start of the First World War. It was the army, even more than the railway, the local historian Brian Lingham says, that fashioned modern Didcot. Maybe: but it's the railway that is helping to refashion it now. Didcot station has been uplifted to 'Didcot Parkway'. When the 94 puts you down at the end of the 15-minute run from Blewbury, the station concourse is thronged and here awaiting your patronage are trains for a generous range of destinations: four in the next hour for London Paddington; a fast train to Bristol Temple Meads and another to Malvern by way of Oxford; one for Cardiff and one for Cheltenham. Yet at no little cost: the expenditure needed here has reached a level unimaginable to people in a place like Grangetown. The cost of a weekly season ticket to London Paddington (45 minutes on faster trains) was increased at the beginning of 2016 to £123.70, while the price of an annual season ticket was raised to £4,832.
Despite that, the gateway status of Didcot has made it increasingly sought after, helping it expand from a village to a town of 25,000, and growing. Big Sainsbury's, big Tesco, of course, and since 2005, the Orchard Centre, which marshals the PC Worlds, Argoses, Nexts and other near-essential ingredients in the way we shop now. There is also a five-screen cinema; and the Cornerstone arts and entertainments centre, completed in 2008 at a cost of £8 million; as well as a tourist lure in the Didcot Railway Centre, which trades both on rail nostalgia and on modern childhood addictions like Thomas the Tank Engine. A shop-cum-office, occasionally open, on the edge of the Orchard Centre, makes much of other local successes: notably, the famous scientific achievements at Harwell and Culham and new adventures in science and technology now under way – with still more to follow.
Didcot acquired additional claims to fame with the building in the 1970s of a mighty power station featuring six drum-like towers, 375 feet high, whose design (by Sir Frederick Gibberd) collected awards, though Country Life magazine named it the UK's third-worst eyesore. Three of these towers were demolished at 5 am on a Sunday in July 2014. Though warned to stay away, thousands turned up to watch, including one enthusiast who told a reporter that Didcot had not seen a day like it since its football team won the FA Vase. The other towers remain, but seem likely to go within a decade. And the area won't on the whole be sorry. When the plans to build the complex were unveiled, the Oxford Mail solicited local opinion and found a strong sense of outrage. This power station, one woman complained, was all wrong for this part of the world: it was going to make it look 'like somewhere up North'.
Like Middlesbrough, perhaps?
* * *
By the middle of the nineteenth century Middlesbrough was establishing itself as one of the wonders of modern Britain. It wasn't just Middlesbrough which thought so: William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had come to the town in 1862 and, addressing one of those monstrous banquets in which prosperous citizens in Victorian England so delighted, had described it as 'this remarkable place, the youngest child of England's enterprise' and 'an infant Hercules'.
A mere thirty years earlier there had been next to nothing here. In 1801 there were only four houses and two dozen people. Then in 1829, Joseph Pease, one of the Darlington family who had created the Stockton and Darlington railway, and a group of his Quaker businessmen colleagues saw that a tract of low-quality land here on the banks of the Tees, to which the railway could be extended, could furnish the ideal location for the transportation of coal from the South Durham coalfields, where the Peases were major owners, to London and expanding markets elsewhere. The settlement they created then was north of the railway: small and compact, but a place of some ambition, as you can see from the sad remains of some of the buildings that survive: the now abandoned town hall, the Greek Revival Custom House of 1837. By 1831, the little town had a hundred and fifty inhabitants. Ten years later it had five thousand. Yet this in a sense had been a false start. Other claimants, notably Hartlepool, fourteen miles up the coast, began to erode Middlesbrough's apparent success.
Then, just as the coal trade faltered, a new technology came to Middlesbrough's rescue. The agents of innovation, enthusiastically backed by the Peases, were Henry Bolckow, from Mecklenburg in north Germany, who would one day become the town's first mayor and its Liberal MP, and John Vaughan, born in Worcestershire of Welsh parents – not only business partners but neighbours who had married a pair of sisters. It was they who became the agents of the matchless success that Gladstone honoured. By 1870, Middlesbrough and its Teesside hinterland would produce from its more than forty blast furnaces around 15 per cent of the world's iron output. People talked of the town as 'Ironopolis' and compared it to Ballarat and the Klondyke. This was not the only British town to have suddenly sprung up from nothing. Barrow-in-Furness, Hartlepool, Crewe and Birkenhead were conspicuous others. But this one beat the lot.
Yet even in its glory days, the place was stocking up problems. Housing was run up at speed, dirt cheap and basic, to accommodate the new work force – housing which would become the next generation's slumland. The town's population was overwhelmingly male, since initially those drawn there by the prospect of work either had no families or chose not to bring them. That made for aggression and drunkenness. And the Irish, who came in large numbers as they had to other booming British towns and cities, were the subject of resentment, which sometimes turned to violence. In 1871 Irish incomers made up 9 per cent of the town's population, well below the figure for Liverpool but a match for Manchester's 9 per cent and far greater than the mere 2.5 per cent in Birmingham. Many of these arrivals would not stay in Middlesbrough long: but while they did, they were hardly a force for peace and stability. And Middlesbrough, though it also had shipbuilding and ship repair, was all along ominously dependent on the fortunes of a single industry. In 1861, almost half of those at work in manufacturing were employed in ironworks, though that figure had eased down to 33 per cent ten years later. But in general, the town lacked diversity: 85 per cent of the male workforce were employed in manufacturing, with only one in ten in the commercial sector.
Yet none of that was allowed to detract from the town's pride in its historic success and the mark it had made across the civilized world. The iron it supplies, said the Middlesbrough newspaper editor H.G. Reid, 'furnishes railways to Europe; it runs by Neapolitan and Papal dungeons; it startles the bandit in his haunts in Cicilia; it streaks the prairies of America; it stretches over the plains of India; it surprises the Belochees; it pursues the peggunus of Gangotry. It has crept out of the Cleveland hills, where it has slept since the Roman days, and now, like a strong and invincible serpent, coils itself round the world'.
In 1889 the Prince and Princess of Wales, who came to open the new town hall, the grandest building the town had yet seen, with a clock tower designed to echo Westminster's, were greeted to a characteristic deluge of self-adulation from the mayor, Raylton Dixon, an old Etonian shipbuilder. In his great book Victorian Cities, Asa Briggs quotes Dixon's response to the flattering address of the Prince: '"His Royal Highness owned he had expected to see a smoky town. It is one, and if there is one thing more than another that Middlesbrough can be said to be proud of, it is the smoke (cheers and laughter). The smoke is an indication of plenty of work (applause), an indication of prosperous times (cheers) – an indication that all classes of workpeople are being employed, that there is little necessity for charity (cheers) and that even those in the humblest station are in a position free from want" (cheers)'.
Yet even as they stood to toast the town, and themselves, there were signs that the boom years might soon be over. What had made the Middlesbrough industry so dominant by 1880 was the discovery thirty years earlier of a seam in the Eston Hills near-perfect for the making of iron. Yet by 1880 iron was losing ground to the new technologies of steel-making. Middlesbrough might have been Ironopolis, but Sheffield seemed set to overtake it as the city of steel. By 1880, Bolckow and Vaughan were both dead, and their successors could not avert what began to look like irreversible decline. There would be later boosts in times of war, and with the establishment of new enterprises at Wilton, on the south side of the Tees, and especially at Billingham, on the northern side, contiguous with Middlesbrough though in no sense part of it, where chemical manufacturing – originally developed for wartime purposes – began and expanded and came in the 1940s under the high command of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). But here too, from the late 1970s onwards, once booming industries began to falter, even to disappear.
The decline of Teesside inevitably blighted communities like Grangetown, where my 794 Middlesbrough Boroughbus journey begins at the Magnet Hotel. After years in the care of successive local authorities, Grangetown has since 1974 been part of what is now known as Redcar and Cleveland. The original community here was called Eston Grange, taking its name from the village of Eston, sheltering under the hills where Vaughan and his geologist friend John Marley discovered their seam. Eight streets were run up, on a grid pattern, designed to contain 768 houses. This was a characteristic Middlesbrough settlement. The 1881 census shows a community utterly dominated by the jobs which first iron, then steel, had created. Some 72 per cent of people in work here were earning their money from iron and steel.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Riding Route 94"
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Copyright © 2017 David McKie.
Excerpted by permission of Pimpernel Press Limited.
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