I am old enough to remember the last slump — I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade. Most of the workers in the pot bank were women and girls, traditionally paid low wages, and now subjected to pay cuts. The men worked in the pits, if they were lucky. My mother, who came from Lancashire, and had a song for everything, used to sing:
Colliery lads make gold and silver.
Factory lads make brass.
Who would marry a hand-loom weaver,
When there’s plenty of colliery lads?
In the wasteland not far from our house, there were curious piles of stones and boulders, making a lunar landscape. They had been put there to make the roads for a big new housing-estate, planned in the prosperous 1920s, now abandoned. Unemployed men sat among them, smoking briar pipes of shag or cigarette butts, or with just an empty clay one clamped in their mouths. Lanky young men kicked aimlessly at an old football. A small private railway ran at the bottom, carrying coal trucks to the main line. At that point, there was the concrete skeleton structure of a big new Primitive Methodist church. Only one brick wall had been built. Then, I suppose, the money ran out and all work ceased. There were big pools of rainwater among the foundations, up-ended rusty iron trucks, bits of broken machinery, a forlorn pile of unused bricks. It was a haunted place, where earnest people had once hoped to pray but the Almighty had turned a deaf ear.
If you followed this little railway line in the opposite direction, into the countryside, you eventually came to the Chatterley Whitfield coal pit.
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