Fire and Horror : the Representation of Teesside in Fiction - Andy Croft

This article by Andy Croft is an important one in the discussion of the Teesvalley literary culture. Earlier versions of parts of this essay have appeared as 'A Hole Like That ; the Literary Representation of Cleveland' in the Cleveland and Teeside Local History Society Bulletin, no 58 Spring 1990, and as 'A Sense of Place,' broadcast on BBC Radio Four, 8 July 1991.

Fire and Horror : the Representation of Teesside in Fiction

by Andy Croft

Most of Sheila Kaye-Smith's 1928 novel Iron and Smoke, takes place in the Sussex landscape familiar to Kaye-Smith's readers. It begins, however, in 'Eden-in-Cleveland,' on the edge of 'the Great Smoke itself - Middlesbrough and all the fuming travail of the Tees marshes, a land of everlasting fog,' an opportunity for Kaye-Smith to rehearse some familiar oppositions between North and South, new and old, money and land, disruption and tradition, dirt and art, industry and nature. The effect is to transform the romantic conventions of the opening courtship scene into the abduction of Persephone, the expulsion from Eden :

He leaned beside her on the balustrade, his elbow scarcely more than an inch from hers. The nymphs and fountains had come back into his imagination with the silence and the big white moon that had now entirely lifted herself above the arabesque of the hills. The silence seemed to be part of the moonlight... it seemed part of his dream of a temple-like house with shimmering white façade - fluted pillars supporting a huge three-cornered architrave, and on the lawn before it the freckled pool of a fountain where a naked nymph stood pouring water from a shell. He fearfully broke the silence and the dream of the white house.

'Jenny.'

She turned her face towards him in relief. The last few moments had been unendurable to her in their embarrassment. He saw her eyes look out sweetly and wonderingly from under the pale frizz of hair on her forehead, while her bosom heaved the laces of her gown. He trampled on his dreams and kissed her.

'Oh... !'

The start, the quiver of her under his lips, told him, if he had wanted telling, that he was the first who had ever been so bold. But though startled she was not dismayed. Her recoil was no more than the natural recoil of surprised innocence. He kissed her again, and there was none, only a fresh and sweet delight. He was touched by her yielding. His heart woke - he seemed to clasp his nymph.

'Jenny - darling little Jenny. I love you.'

As he spoke the moonlight suddenly changed, going up on a sheet of flame. The night turned crimson, and for a moment Humphrey felt his heart bound with fear, but he next he remembered the blast furnaces at Carlingrove. This was not the first time that he had seen them belch into the night, wiping out moon and stars, transforming the peaceful fields of Eden-in-Cleveland into some landscape of fire and horror, a frontier-stretch of hell. (1)

This is worth examining for a number of reasons. First, it is an extremely rare reference to Teesside in British fiction. Although it has a combined population of over half a million people, the area has rarely been written about, the experiences of its people rarely written-up. There is no room, for example, for any entry on Teesside in Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature. Although the case of Teesside is an exceptional and an extreme one, the fact that Drabble does find room for entries on 'Wessex' and 'Barsetshire' is a reminder that it is nevertheless part of a much wider omission from the central canon of English fiction, traditionally uncomfortable with writing about region, industry, class and work (the blurb on a recent Penguin edition of Sons and Lovers seems to think that the novel is set in the Northamptonshire coalfields...).

Second, it is an example of the way that 'Teesside' - on the few occasions it appears in fiction - operates as a kind of topographically inexact, mythical landscape, 'Eden-in-Cleveland,' a 'frontier-stretch of hell'. Even Pat Barker's Union Street, though recognisably set in Middlesbrough, carefully avoids identifying the town beyond the end of the street, while the geography of Barker's A Century's Daughter is extremely elastic. This no doubt reflects a widespread popular uncertainty about the identity, not to say the location, of the industrial conurbation at the mouth at the Tees comprising Middlesbrough, Stockton, Hartlepool and Redcar. (2) At the end of Kingsley Amis's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Old Devils, Muriel Thomas finally leaves her husband and moves - much to everyone's disbelief - to Middlesbrough - or 'Yorkshire or Cleveland or whatever it is called these days' (as if to make the point, 'Middlesbrough' was not even spelled correctly in the first edition of The Old Devils).

Third, it exemplifies the fictive representation of Teesside as a short-hand for the uncivilised and barbaric, the desolate and the hopeless. At the end of Steel Saraband, a 1938 novel by 'Roger Dataller', an unemployed steel-worker leaves South Yorkshire in the (hopeless) hope of finding work on Teesside. In Margaret Drabble's 1969 novel The Waterfall, Jane finds a sad little letter from her estranged husband, written shortly before they separated - when he was working in Middlesbrough. One of the details by which Graham Greene established the loneliness of Fred Hale in Brighton Rock is the fact that his only relative is 'a second cousin in Middlesbrough' (who does not even turn up for the inquest). In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell used the 'unemployed in Middlesbrough, seven in a room on twenty-five bob a week,' three times in one chapter to haunt poor Phillip Ravelston :

'in a way, of course, he knew... that life under a decaying capitalism is deathly and meaningless. But this knowledge was only theoretical. You can't really feel that kind of thing when your income is eight hundred a year. Most of the time, when he wasn't thinking of coal-miners, Chinese junk-coolies, and the unemployed in Middlesbrough, he felt that life was pretty good fun...' (3)

Huddled in their 'frowzy beds, bread and marg and milkless tea in their bellies,' a people and a place Orwell had never seen, reduced to a single, simple, timeless history, a negative phenomenon, unable to speak for themselves, the music-hall poor, as exotic as 'Chinese junk-coolies.' A few years earlier, J.B. Priestley described Middlesbrough in English Journey as 'more like a vast, dingy conjuring trick than a reasonable town,' while Aldous Huxley compared the development of Middlesbrough to 'a fungus, like staphylococus in a test-tube of chicken-broth' (although he liked the ICI works at Billingham, which he thought was like 'a magnificent kind of poem') and the film-maker John Grierson called Teesside 'a dangerous jungle'. (4)

Teeside then is rarely a real place in fiction, more commonly a 'frontier-stretch of hell,' an underworld populated by Morlocks, a City of Dreadful Night. At the heart of Margaret Drabble's A Writer's Britain, a coffee-table study of writing with a sense of place, is a study of the 'Industrial Scene.' There are vivid, ambivalent accounts by George Borrow of Merthyr and by John Dyer of Leeds, Charlotte Bronte on the West Riding, Ebenezer Elliott on Sheffield, Dickens and Mrs Gaskell on Manchester, Sillitoe and Lawrence on Nottingham, Bennett on the Five Towns, even Orwell on Wigan. But for the 'massive engineering feats... the building of railways... the explosions and blazing furnaces of the Industrial revolution' (which Teesside might be said to represent more than any other part of Britain) Drabble has to turn to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, with its teeming orcs and goblins, 'spawning' in the dark and evil industrial landscape of Mordor. (5) Compare this description of nineteenth-century Middlesbrough from Storm Jameson's 1927 novel, The Lovely Ship :

The night was dark, with a moonless sky pressing down on the sinister flaming labyrinth of furnaces and shafts. Every few minutes a column of flame-driven smoke shot up into the sky, illuminating the ironworkers' quarter and the docks beyond. A blade edge of river flashed in the short-lived glow, and the sky was flushed with a tawny bloom like the bloom on dusk-red berries... The darkness throbbed with a steady beat as if some monster were alive and moving in the night near her. (6)

Or this 1914 poem by the poet A.E. Tomlinson, born in Middlesbrough but by then a student at Cambridge :

Tumult of furnaces ;

 Red and ominous, splashing with flame the wash of the river ;

 Red and seethed as a jungle dawning, transfused through the mist ;

 Red as the ebb-swilled flats at sunfall, glazed and a-quiver

 Red, and primordially dour, as the hell of the Yiddish Christ

 Tumult of furnaces ;

 Intoned, sacramental, the oaring that climbs from the blasts ;

 Eery their asthmatic vomiting, baffling the sloth of the night ;

 While the long geyser flames tongue and leer as the darkness lasts

 Staining the low-banked clouds with the bubbling crater's light. (7)

 

Or this 1930 poem by Wilfred Gibson :

Across the Cleveland countryside the train

Panted and jolted through the lurid night

Of monstrous slag-heaps in the leaping light

Of belching furnaces : the driving rain

Lacing the glass with gold in that red glare

That momentarily revealed the cinderous land,

Of blasted fields, that stretched on either hand,

With livid waters gleaming here and there.

By hovels of men who labour till they die

With iron and the fire that never sleeps,

We plunged in pitchy night among huge heaps -

Then once again that red glare lit the sky

And high above the highest hill of slag

I saw Prometheus hanging from his crag. (8)

This Teesside is a dangerous, exotic, fallen world, a part of England which writers don't have to know in order to know, a mythical, nightmare Teesside of the imagination. Muriel Thomas writes long letters to her friends in The Old Devils, reassuring them that there really is life so far North. They, however, are not fooled :

'the theatre, what's she talking about ? In Middlesbrough ? It can't be the theatre as civilised folk think of it... If you want my opinion, she's protesting too much. Life's not turning out to be much fun, how could it in a hole like that...'(9)

The fictional representation of Teesside is therefore a kind of imaginative hole, an extraordinary absence in the literary record. Middlesbrough Borough Council's Tourism Office recently designed a number of literary itineraries to bring coach-tour operators into the area - 'James Herriot Country' (Thirsk), 'A Woman of Substance/To Hold That Dream Country' (the TV serials were filmed in Richmond), the 'Nicholas Nickleby Tour' (Dickens visited Barnard Castle while he was writing the novel), the 'Dracula Trail' (Whitby), 'the Wonderland Tour' (Lewis Carrol lived in the village of Croft as a child) and 'Brideshead Revisted Country' (the TV adaptation was filmed in Castle Howard). A remarkable achievement, to miss Teesside altogether, as though the cultural identity of the area can best be defined by omission. This essay is an attempt to describe the hole the size of Teesside in British fiction, to explain its shape, and to ask why there are so few familiar, recognisable, resonant images of Teesside in British fiction.

As the historian argues in Mark Adlard's Interface, a 1971 science-fiction novel set on twenty-second century Teesside (now called T City), the roots of the 'De-Naissance' can be located in the nineteenth-century :

'James Watt was hammering, chipping, and filing away at his primitive engines with all the passionate frenzy of Michelangelo hewing his Moses out of Carrara marble. But nobody knew and nobody cared. Nobody made an act of imaginative sympathy which would have brought the steam engine into the mainstream of thought and feeling. This divergence led to the exclusion of the engineer and al his works from the subjects considered worthy of treatment by an artist...The situation was made worse by the provincialism of the old capital and the south. As always, the people of London couldn't believe that anything important was happening outside their city boundaries. And to the superficially educated gentry of what used to be called the Home Counties, the development of railways in the north was no more than a threat to fox hunting and grouse coverts...The building of railways in England was the most gargantuan enterprise undertaken by mankind since the building of the pyramids. As if by divine ordinance England produced, at exactly the same time, its greatest crop of poets of genius. But what did the poets write about ? Wordsworth wrote about daffodils, Coleridge about Kubla Khan, Byron about ancient Rome, Shelley about skylarks, and Keats about Grecian urns...' (10)

Nevertheless, as other chapters in this book demonstrate, most comparable industrial areas of Britain can boast stronger identities, constructed in large part by nineteenth-century regional novelists who were committed to what the Halifax novelist Phyllis Bentley called 'locality, reality and democracy,' and who successfully insinuated a sense of their part of Britain into a wider, popular, national identity. Why then, has Teesside has been so curiously absent in English fiction, even in those historical moments - say, the 1840s, the 1930s, the 1950s - when 'England' was discovered to lie outside the traditional centres of political and cultural authority, and when regional writing was understood to express something important about 'Englishness' ? Why is the birthplace of the railways, the Victorian industrial experiment which for many years set the world price of iron and steel, almost entirely absent from the dream we have of ourselves which we call English Literature ?

Part of an explanation may be found in the relative lateness of industrial development on the Tees, particularly the gold-rush towns of Middlesbrough and (West) Hartlepool. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century there were 900 people living in Hartlepool ; by the end of the century there were 60,000 ; in 1820 there were just 15 people living in Middlesbrough ; by 1900 there were 96,000. These were unskilled, immigrant (and often polyglot) frontier towns, built, owned and politically-dominated by a tiny and alien Quaker bourgeoisie living in rural North Yorkshire. This was an unskilled working-class, lacking the autodidact culture of education and self-improvement which Nonconformity provided in other parts of the country, and whose trade unionism was dominated by small craft unions. Its formative political culture was Labourist, rather than Radical (as in Manchester) or Syndicalist (as in South Wales) or Marxist (as in Scotland). It was the WEA rather than the national Council of Labour Colleges that met the educational aspirations of working people on Teeside. To go to University was to leave home.

To become a novelist required leaving Teesside. E.W. Hornung, for example, grew up in Stockton, a long way from the world of his best-selling gentleman burglar, 'Raffles'. Naomi Jacob, the most prolific and popular novelist to come out of Teesside, left her school-teaching job in Middlesbrough and emigrated to Italy when the education authorities objected to her wearing trousers (only one of her seventy-five novels, The Beloved Physician - a medical romance based on the small-pox epidemic of 1898 - is set in the town). Although Harry Heslop started work in the iron-stone mine in Boulby, his novels are set in South Shields (where, as a young miner, he won a DMA scholarship to study at the Central Labour College in London). That professional Scot, Compton Mackenzie, was actually born in Hartlepool, while the reputation of Teesside's most distinguished writer, Gertrude Bell (whose father was a Teesside Iron Master) is based on her travel books about Iraq. (11)

As these rapidly developing communities were emerging, an influential group of writers calling themselves the 'Bards of Cleveland' (John Wright, John Walker Ord, Henry Heavisides, Thomas Cleaver, Tom White, Elizabeth and George Tweddell, James Milligan and Angus MacPherson) sought to develop a popular sense of a regional identity in relation to Victorian England around Teesside's most famous son - Captain James Cook. It was an ambitious project, to say the least, inserting Teesside into the claims of a national imperial mission. 'Can Cleveland's vale produce no warrior's name ?' asked George Tweddell ; his answer was unequivocal :

Upon your hills he bounded young and free,

 In all the pride of boyhood's joyancy,

 And when in foreign climes 't was his to roam,

'Mongst savage hordes where ev'ry face was strange,

 Oft would his soul across the ocean stray,

 When rest he sought at close of weary day,

 And in delightful reveries would range

 The verdant hills and valleys of his home. (12)

This was only a local variation on a major theme in late nineteenth-century verse, the homesickness of the builders of Empire finding solace in images of pre-industrial, rural England. But Tweddell was also campaigning to restore the Cook monument, a campaign which was directed against industrial Teesside ('ye, vile, money-grubbing Cleveland slaves !'). (13)

This was crucially an anti-industrial vision. At the moment when modern Teesside was making itself, the local literary intelligentsia took a strategic decision to define the place as a rural, anti-industrial landscape, whose tenuous historic claims were missionary and exotic rather than technological or economic, rooted in distant colonies of the mind rather than among their neighbours, turning their backs on the Tees and staring into the past, out to sea. Tweddell's long sonnet sequence (published in 1870) begins with a defiant personal definition of ideological geography :

I've sat on Rosebury with many a bard

Whose harp-strings, once so musical, are mute

 On earth for ever : we full well did suit

 Each other, in congenial regard

 For the loved landscape here unfurled to view.

 Yonder towers Guisboro's fine old ruined Arch,

 Memento of the Past - our onward march

 Mark'd by yon blast furnaces ; churches not a few,

 Towns, farmsteads, rivers, fields of every hue -

 As grass and corn, and fallow - and o'er all

 The watchet ocean ; prospects that ne'er shall pall

 Upon one's taste : the picture is ever new.

 We may roam far and wide before we see

 A finer sight than here from Rosebury.

Apart from the technical limitations of this kind of writing, what is most striking about it is the determined limitation of its vision. Behind the laziness of the language lies the careful construction of 'Cleveland' as a pre-industrial, rural idyll somewhere in Northern Italy. The deliberate archaisms are part of Tweddle's attempt to present himself as the heir to a local, oral literary tradition, self-consciously derived from Caedmon (the poet as harpist, the archaic diction), and set in opposition to the industrial Tees and the 'vile necessities of trade'. (14) The religiosity of the diction sets the shepherd-poet and his Arcadian view apart from the world of the 'manufactures' :

Not among smoke of busy, crowded town,

Where manufactures for the world are made,

And man's best nature seems all trodden down,

To suit vile necessities of trade,

Has my life's Spring been past : but I have learnt

To gaze upon each mountain, brook and plain,

With poet's rapture ; and my soul would fain

Attempt a task for which it long has burnt

With the unquenched fire of holy zeal, -

To chaunt the beauties of my native vale,

Preserve each legend, and record each tale.

That aged grey-beards, e'en from sire to son,

Have told, of love despised, or battle won,

And add my mite unto the public weal.

Having thus been invited to see Teesside as an unnatural aberration, it is hardly surprising that so many visiting novelists were blinded by what they saw on Teesside. The consequences of this may still be seen in dialect poetry on Teesside, which is commonly rural, unlike, say, the traditionally urban dialect poetry of Lancashire or the West Riding. Even A.S. Umpleby, a school-teacher from industrial Haverton Hill, and a major voice in local dialect writing, wrote mainly about the North York Moors and the fishing villages on the Yorkshire coast. On an altogether different other level, it may also be seen in those contemporary Teesside writers - Eleanor Fairbairn, Robert Holman, Tanya Jones - whose work is located in rural Cleveland, or those who - like Jane Gardam and Barry Unsworth - have written with such distinction about the sea. (15) In Mark Adlard's 1978 novel The Greenlander, the Whitby whaling fleet passes the mouth of the Tees. The year is 1830 :

 ...here, at the mouth of the Tees, all was peace and the beauty of undisturbed nature. This gentle estuary and its neighbouring coast were remote from any kind of business enterprise or economic endeavour. Here there wasn't anything that could testify to the reshaping hand of man. The river was asleep between its sandy banks in a dream of seals and sea birds... 'I've heard of an old crossing place where the monks from Whitby used to go over on their way up to Durham. It's got a name, I think.' He pondered for a moment. 'Middleburg or Middlesburg.'

'Pooh ! Middleburg or whatever you want to call it ! Nothing but a handful of sheep and a few owld folk.' (16)

The Teesside economy - traditionally dominated by the heavy industries of mining, railways, iron and steel, ship-building, the docks (later petro-chemicals) - afforded few prospects of employment for women. The sociology of Teesside was dominated by a closed culture of aggressive, physical, masculinity (Gladstone once called Middlesbrough, admiringly, an 'Infant Hercules'). Women were, by definition therefore, excluded from the central experience of industrial Teeside - heavy, dangerous, collective, manual work in the traditional industries - as well as its labour movement and the culture of its working men's clubs. (17) And yet the overwhelming number of novelists who have tried to represent Teesside in fiction have been women. The horrified results were thus inevitably circumscribed by the reactions of writers who were outside the world about which they were writing. This is literally true of a writer like Lady Bell, whose 1907 documentary study of Middlesbrough, At the Works, was based on her investigations into the living conditions of her husband's employees, and which was in effect a form of Edwardian travel writing (significantly, none of her many plays and novels were set on Teesside). Mary Hervey, the heroine of Whitby-novelist Storm Jameson's 1930 The Voyage Home, is, also an outsider. She may be sympathetic to the conditions of the Middlesbrough poor, but her sympathy, like her vision of the town, has its limits, for she too is an Ironmaster :

The drive took an hour and a half, and though to the last half of it she was never out of sight of the town, she rarely saw it - squalid, conceived overnight in the ugly haste of industrial opportunity, without a single gracious or redeeming line. Iron works and furnaces faced it across the bleak estuary of the Tees, grey slag tips, squat sheds, monstrous gas retorts, cylinders, tall black shafts... There were children in the grime-eroded houses she was passing, but they might have been dead for any sound they made. Even the two playing languidly in the gutter were silent, scarcely moving their limbs out of the way of the wheels. Mary had opened a soup kitchen, which her daughters attended faithfully : perhaps soup every other day is little comfort to small hungry stomachs - but she had done what she could... (18)

Jenny Bastow, the main character in Kaye-Smith's Iron and Smoke, has grown up on the edge of industrial Teesside, but she moves to Sussex at the start of the novel. When she returns, she is a stranger, sharing Kaye-Smith's narrative perspective ; she is uprooted from 'from the warm, pollen-scented May of the southern fields to the thin cold May of Cleveland, where the buttercups had scarcely begun to bloom' :

The long vault of Darlington station was cold and howling with winds, and as the train ran out towards Thornaby and Middlesbrough the grey sky was smeared with scuds of evil-scented smoke. She noticed the stunted trees that could not grow in the sulphur-laden atmosphere, the cottage windows that were grimy with smoke, the cottage gardens that were starved for the smoke-hidden sun.

'Lor !' shrieked her Brighton-born nurse in fear, as an emptying truck sent a stream of molten flame down the side of the great slag heap outside Dinsdale.

The falling night seemed full of evil eyes, as flames winked from the mouths of ovens and kilns or flew from the tops of chimneys. The works of Dorman, Long and Co. just outside Middlesbrough were going full blast. (19)

Ellen Wilkinson was MP for Middlesbrough East when she wrote her 1929 novel Clash. But though it contains a highly sympathetic portrait of Middlesbrough, it is hardly any less of an outsider's view. During the General Strike the autobiographical heroine Joan Craig and her Marxist boyfriend Gerry Blain visit 'Shireport' :

The tall dark chimneys of the chemical works stood black against the red glow of the iron works across the river. These giant industries thrilled Blain. The struggle to control them seemed the biggest thing in life to him. If only this strike could take them out of the hands of men like his father, the men to whom they represented only percentages and dividends - figures in a ledger - and put the workers in control...To Blain the working class, the men crowded into his meeting that night, had become the Hidden God. (20)

Significantly, the most sustained fictional representations of Teesside contain hardly any men. In the novels of Thornaby-born Pat Barker, men are either at work or looking for work ; they have died or deserted their women who survive as best they can. Her children are fatherless and her woman are husbandless (one of her novels is called The Man Who Wasn't There). Barker's 1982 novel Union Street is set in the 1970's, when Teesside was still hailed as 'the city of the future'. But the march of industry means little to Iris King, the formidable matriarch of the street :

She hadn't always lived in a nice house. She had been born and brought up in Wharf Street, near the river. As a young woman she had battled her way out of it, but it was no use. She was no longer in Wharf Street, but Wharf Street was still in her. She remembered it, knew it, knew every brick of it. When she thought of Wharf Street, she remembered Mrs Biggs. She had lived in the end house, the one nearest the river, and the wall-paper had peeled away and hung ins trips. She had kept herself to herself. She was a clean-living, even religious woman, respected, if not much liked. Then her son, who was a big not all there, had molested and strangled a little boy and left his body on a rubbish-tip. Then nothing that Mrs Biggs could say or do would save her. On the night before they hanged her son, somebody had gone and smeared dog-shit all over her windows and all over her front door. And they had gone on doing it too, they never let up. She went loony in the end and had to be taken away. And she remembered blonde Dinah, traipsing about the room in a night-dress with blood-stains on the back. There had been men there, it hadn't been just women, but she hadn't cared. Animals. They were going to pull it down now, that was what they said, it was all coming down. Too late, too late for her. You could talk about it to people, and they would say they understood. But they didn't, not really. No-body who hadn't lived there could understand... (21)

Choosing to write about the experience of women on the economic margins has enabled Barker to write about the whole life of a declining industrial town. By the time Union Street was published, Teesside was in economic crisis, and Cannon Street, on which the novel was based, had long been demolished. This is, therefore, a kind of historical fiction. The sense of horror is still there in Barker's 1986 A Century's Daughter. But the horror is for what has been lost. The novel is an elegy for industrial Teesside. Eighty year-old Liza Jarrett is taken to see the Transporter Bridge over the once-busy Tees :

The river crawled away from them, streaked blue-purple, like cigarette smoke unfurling. The wind wrinkled its surface, a cold wind of the North Sea, and Stephen was afraid for Liza and tried to shield her body with his own.

'It's colder than I thought,' he said.

'Oh, it's always cold by the river.'

A man in a peaked cap came to collect their fare.

'Can you still walk across ?' Liza asked, craning her head back to see the walkway.

'No, love. Shut that off a few year back.' He winked at Stephen. 'Ovver many buggers topping 'emselves.'

The platform clanged to a halt : the barricades swung open. Liza got back into the car and Stephen drove a few hundred yards up the road.

High, barbed-wire fences enclosed work yards that would never work again. The wires throbbed and hummed as the wind blew through them. Bits of cloth and polythene clung to the barbs and snapped.

'Come on,' said Liza. 'I want to get out.'

She walked a few steps, holding on to the side of the car. In her mind's eye she saw this place as it had been. Tall chimneys, kilns and furnaces loomed up through the brown smoke of a winter afternoon. Trams rattled, hammers banged, furnaces roared, and always, day and night, columns of flame rose up into the sky.

'There's nothing left,' she said, and, although she'd known that it must be so, her voice was raw with loss. (22)

This Teesside is no longer defined by the horrified reactions of outsiders. The fire and smoke have gone, and in their place is revealed a place where people live and work.

The old industrial Teesside of 'fire and horror' has been replaced by a different vision of hell - a working town without work. If Teesside has at last found its novelist in Pat Barker, her subject is not work and heavy industry, but the passing of that kind of history, as though industrial Teesside could only find its fictional place in industrial decline.

 

Notes

Earlier versions of parts of this essay have appeared as 'A Hole Like That ; the Literary Representation of Cleveland' in the Cleveland and Teeside Local History Society Bulletin, no 58 Spring 1990, and as 'A Sense of Place,' broadcast on BBC Radio Four, 8 July 1991.

1 Sheila Kaye-Smith, Iron and Smoke (London, 1928) p.3.

2 For the purposes of local government the towns of Teesside, which were once part of County Durham and the North Riding, have in recent years been re-located first in Teesside and then in Cleveland ; citizens of Teesside presently belong to no county.

3 George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (London, 1936, new edition, Harmondsworth, 1962) p.90 ; Orwell later visited Teesside, staying in 1944 on his cousin's farm outside Stockton, where he began writing Nineteen Eighty Four.

4 For Aldous Huxley's visit to Teesside, see David Bradshaw (ed) The Hidden Huxley : Contempt and Compassion for the Masses (London,1994).

5 Margaret Drabble, A Writer's Britain (London, 1979) p. 233.

6 Storm Jameson, The Lovely Ship (London, 1927) p.224 ; it has been suggested that the twenty-first century Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner is based on Ridley Scott's native Teesside.

7 A. E. Tomlinson, Candour (London, 1922).

8 See also Cecil Day Lewis, 'Hail Teesside !' in The Complete Poems of C Day Lewis (London, 1992) p. 720.

9 Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils, (London, 1986, new edition, Harmondsworth,

1987) p.379.

10 Mark Adlard, Interface (London, 1971) p.108 ; Coleridge and Wordsworth

visited Stockton several times between 1804 and 1820, staying with Mary Wordsworth's family and with Thomas Hogg, Shelley's friend and first biographer ; Byron's first wife, Arrabella Millbanke, was the daughter of a Mayor of Hartlepool.

11 The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie was also born in Redcar ; Phillippa Gregory wrote the first of her best-selling Wideacre trilogy while living on Teesside in the 1980s ; Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun in Redcar ; Sir Michael Tippett's first opera, Robin Hood, was written for and performed by unemployed iron-stone miners in East Cleveland in 1934.

12 George Tweddell, Cleveland Sonnets (Stokesley, 1870) ; Tweddell edited a weekly newspaper and a quarterly journal, and published many of the Bards of Cleveland as well as his People's History of Cleveland and five separate collections of his own Cleveland Sonnets between 1870 and 1890. (Eds note. The Tweddell link leads to a new Site about the life's work of poet / historian / Chartist George Markham Tweddell with rare material from the Tweddell families own archives only recently made available 2007. Also the entire Tweddell family archives now reside in the Cleveland Archives in Middlesbrough. A new book is imminent too with the complete (and many unpublished) peotical works of George Tweddell. Already the new work is providing a new perspective on his work.)

13 The figure of James Cook is still central to the self-image of Middlesbrough (even though Cook left the area long before Middlesbrough was built) - a scale model of the Endeavour swings, somewhat bizarrely, from the roof of the main shopping centre, a museum and a primary school are named after him, while the town's most famous work of public art, Claes Oldenburg's thirty-foot metal sculpture, 'Bottle of Notes,' consists of two layers of handwriting taken from Cook's journals. Until the abolition of Cleveland County Council, drivers approaching Teesside on the A19 were welcomed to 'Captain Cook Country'.

14 According to local legend, Beowulf is buried on the Cleveland coast (a connection suggested by the Hartlepool coat of arms, a rebus which reproduces an image from Beowulf) ; an important exception to the anti-industrialism of these poets was the poet John Wilkinson, an engineer from North Ormesby, in Middlesbrough.

15 See also Jane Gardam, The Iron Coast (London, 1994).

16 Mark Adlard, The Greenlander (London, 1978, new edition, Harmondsworth,1980) p.34 ; several Teesside children's writers like Theresa Tomlinson and Julian Atterton have also set their novels in pre-industrial Cleveland.

17 Consider the almost unanimous political silence which greeted the discovery - at the height of the Cleveland Child Abuse affair - of Paris Sixty-Eight, a violent, pornographic novel written by Middlesbrough Labour MP, Stuart Bell.

18 Storm Jameson, The Voyage Home (London, 1930) p.3.

19 Sheila Kaye-Smith, Iron and Smoke, p.159.

 20 Ellen Wilkinson, Clash (London, 1929) p.83.

 21 Pat Barker, Union Street (London, 1982) p.186 ; see also Barbara Gamble, Out of Season (London, 1985) a novel about a fatherless boy set in Redcar. When Union Street was filmed (as Stanley and Iris) Jane Fonda played the part of Iris.

22 Pat Barker, A Century's Daughter (London, 1986) p.215.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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