Newport: Home of the mole wrench
Once, it would have been the first thing you saw as you approached Newport by train from the east. The great furnaces and cooling towers belching smoke; the long blue mills which stretched for miles; 10,000 men worked here, but from the train you never saw a soul. This vast, beautiful – by night, as you passed, truly it was beautiful – industrial monstrosity seemed to run by itself, without human agency, an image of the future. And yet now it is an image of the past.
Today, I don’t even see it from the train; lose my bearings on the approach to the Newport I thought I knew so well because I do not see it. The furnaces have been flattened, much of the 600-acre site cleared, the workforce now is little more than a thousand, reduced to processing steel rather than making it, and even they are on short time. When I was growing up in Newport in the 1960s, Llanwern steelworks was the heart of the town, directly employing around a quarter of the workforce, indirectly employing most of the rest. It belched and roared and squealed, and it provided our sustenance.
In 2000, when the closure of the furnaces was announced, a friend who had seen the plant grow with extraordinary speed in the late 1950s, tearing up farmland and marshland, told me he was glad it would now in its turn be destroyed, ashes to ashes. But without it we South Welsh children of the sixties would have been lost. The boom it fed, along with the building of Severn Bridge and the opening of the Newport section of the M4, gave our fathers, our families, cash, confidence, Cortinas. OK, my father didn’t have a Cortina, he could only afford a moped, but the Cortina-isation of society was proceeding apace; jobs were taken for granted; this was a consumer-driven society at ease with itself; the working class were working. We – or do I mean they? – did not realise how fragile that state was.
As the train pulls into Newport station, it is pouring. It always rains in Newport, but this is rain on an epic scale – the sort of rain you usually only see in films, ramrod straight. I have worn shorts today as a meteorological protest – it is supposed to be summer – but now wish I hadn’t. Within seconds, just waiting for the crossing lights to change, they are soaked, the water seeping beneath my flimsy waterproof. I take refuge in a Wetherspoons close to the station. The clientele is a combination of men in suits waiting for their early-evening trains and career drinkers already a little the worse for wear and making their points with undue vehemence. Two women sit with fixed smiles and glazed eyes over a bottle of rosé; elderly couples tuck into vast fry-ups; I fret about a young couple here with their daughter and a crying child in a buggy in the way that I hate to see children in the doorways of betting shops as a parent punts, but then the baby stops crying and the child seems content and I think maybe it’s OK, and this pub is OK, and this way of life is OK. The barman tells me proudly that this is one of four Wetherspoons pubs in Newport, and I can believe it. If ever there was a community open to cheap delight – and pork faggots, chips and peas for £3.99 – this is it. I know because I was born here; my heart, despite my posh Oxford accent and my middle-class mask, still resides here.
This is the town in which I was born in 1957, when Elizabeth II was young and still ruled the remnants of an empire, when Ringland – the estate on which I grew up – was being built, and when Llanwern was still a gleam in an industrialist’s eye. Now, the old queen is 90, the empire is a distant memory, Llanwern has come and almost gone, Ringland is dismissed as a drug- and crime-ridden “sink”. I haven’t lived here for 35 years, but have returned to explore it once again, the place that bred me but which I then deserted.
I escaped not by design, but by accident. The accident of getting a decent education, being born at the right time, part of that sixties generation for whom all things seemed possible. Of course I have been back many times, but only briefly, to see my parents as they aged and hear their complaints about an estate and a town they no longer felt they knew. Occasionally, when Newport was in the news – once it was deemed by statisticians Britain’s most violent town; then Llanwern’s long-drawn-out death throes became unignorable – I would weigh in with a piece of journalism based on old experience and my parents’ prejudices. The council would invariably complain about the way I portrayed their town, sorry city.
Llanwern, the monster bemoaned by my friend, the parent hymned by me, was built on what the maps of the 1950s called “rotten land”. It was marshland, but far from uninhabitable or unfarmable. In “Monmouthshire” by Olive Phillips, a book published as part of Robert Hale’s county book series in 1951 – at the cusp of two Newports and two reigns – the author describes this soon-to-be-ploughed-over marsh-cum-farmland. “It is, I admit, a land apart, with its breath of the sea and its remoteness, and, in the winter, with a sharp, misty rain blowing, ‘the marshes’ it is. Later in the year it takes on new colour with the yellow flags growing in the green reens which drain the meadows; and the little bridges cross to the farmhouse gates and into the flat fields made brighter by the sun. Moorhens jerk their way along through the undergrowth of the reens’ banks, and there are usually a few farmhouse ducks swimming in the water.”
Here, I think, you can catch the 1950s boyhood that so captivated my put-out friend: the serenity of these marshes. Some have survived: go down to the sea wall at Goldcliff, with its views across the Bristol estuary, and in the stiff breeze you will still sense that land apart. But within 10 years most of the flat, marshy lands described in Ms Phillips’ book had made way for the steelworks and for the vast Ringland estate which supplied it workforce. The reens – a Newport word for small ditches – were still there criss-crossing the estate, and some of the old names were retained. My aunt and, in her final years, my grandmother lived on Hendre Farm Drive, tough then, tougher now, farming mostly fear and hopelessness.
Now this rotten land would be deemed an area of scientific importance, and the nesting moorhens alone would be sufficient to block the proposed development of a vast steelworks for decades. That it went, in just five years, from an idea in the mind of industrialist Henry Spencer (this was pre-nationalisation and the plant was originally called the Spencer Works) to the Queen arriving to open the plant on Friday 26 October 1962 was a remarkable achievement, if a little dispiriting for the moorhens.
I was there on that Friday in October, waving a small Union Flag (now of course it would be the ugly Welsh flag emblazoned with a dragon). My mother tells me we positioned ourselves in Commercial Road, close to the centre of town. She was in a shoe shop when the regal limousine was sighted and had to be hauled out by a friend. I admire her lack of excitement (though she is no republican), but find it a little odd that she has no recollection of where I, a five-year-old clutching a flag, was as she shopped.
On this return trip to Newport, I spent some time in the library reading all the Arguses from October 1962. The South Wales Argus then was a proud newspaper which ran to eight editions and was a fixture in every home. On 10 October it included a lengthy review of a production of Verdi’s I Lombardi at the Swansea Festival, perhaps 800 words. You would be unlikely to find 800 words on an opera in today’s shrunken Argus, which runs to early one edition and that in the morning. The Argus now majors on murder and sport. It’s ideal story would be a post-match multiple slaying, preferably with a paedophile motive.
This is not to suggest that the 1962 Argus was especially highbrow. There are plenty of ads for bingo, lots of boxing and numerous jokes about nagging wives. Industrial stories – steel, coal, pay negotiations – dominate the front pages. This is macho society in which men earn a living and women shop for shoes, with a thinly populated middle class who produce a very good newspaper and like Verdi. It also retains some of the old-style nonconformist fervour of the valleys. Even more numerous than the ads for bingo halls are the lists of chapels: the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Tabernacle Congregational Church, the Apostolic Church, the Charles Street Spriritualists, the Mountjoy Gospel Hall, the Newport Revival Centre, which “invites you to attend another glory meeting”. I like the “another”, as if such meetings were ten a penny and glory could be summoned up at the drop of a hat. It is a comforting world, one I can dimly recall across a span of almost 50 years.
Solid and secure. Ringland, the estate on which I lived, monolithically white and working class, was yet to be defaced by worklessness and drugs. At first I write the more euphonious “drugs and worklessness”, then realise that what matters is the chronology: the worklessness produced the drugs, the family breakdown, the generational desperation, workless father passing his nullity on to his children. In the 1960s, not making the trek from Ringland to Swansea to see I Lombardi, we were culturally deprived. But it didn’t matter: industry gave us confidence and ease; success in rugby gave us as much glory as in the, by the late 60s, thinning ranks of the Newport Revival Centre. When that industrial core began to be eroded – first in the mid-1970s, then again and more dramatically in the early 1990s – the society on which it was founded shook. It is still shaking.
Back in October 1962, the day before the Queen arrived, the Argus printed a 12-page supplement to mark the great occasion. And make no mistake: this was seen as a great and momentous occasion. Huge pictures of searing blast furnaces and soaring cooling towers, and a paean to the workforce that had brought it into being: “The project is said to be the largest civil engineering contract ever placed with one firm in Great Britain; it was completed, all things considered, about as quickly as it could have been by any other undertaking or any other nation in the world. About 350 contractors and subcontractors have been involved in the construction of the Spencer Works, and at the peak of the work in 1961 the main contractors could number about 6,000 people employed there.”
One of those 6,000 was my dad, who worked as a piledriver, laying the foundations for the mighty works. He would have been in his late twenties then, a fit young man who had just spent eight years in the Royal Marines. He’d been in Malaya during the insurgency, but didn’t like to talk about it much. As a boy I imagined him strangling rebels with piano-wire, a dirty, dangerous business. I thought I was the son of a paid killer. Later, I asked him to give me the grisly detail. “I went on a few patrols,” he said, “but mostly I was serving behind the bar in the officers’ mess.” A neat hand with a G&T. (As he lay dying of cancer in 2017, one of the last phrases he uttered was “Never volunteer” – I hangover, I presumed, from that military service; an underlining of his desire to stay alive.) His mother had died when he was six; his father lost his job in the Depression of the 1930s – when I knew him, an old man in his late sixties, he was commissionaire at the local cinema, so I used to tell people he was in films – and my dad and his elder brother had to more or less bring themselves up. Both went into the armed forces, my father’s brother staying for 27 years and hopelessly marooned when he left its embrace in his mid-forties.
The supplement the Argus published on the eve of the Queen’s visit in October 1962 is essentially celebratory. One article reflects on the transformation wrought by the coming of the steelworks: “A large caravan town blossomed at the edge of the Spencer site. Almost overnight Newport felt the impact of full employment and freer spending – a process that is still going on, as reflected in the changing face of the town’s shopping centre.”
There is, though, a spectre at this feast: a prophetic article headlined “Boom town, or …? “Rich, powerful and growing, that is the Newport of today and, say the experts, of the future. But the opinion is clouded by two major contradictions … that Newport could price itself into a ghost town; or with industrial prosperity as the major consideration, it could become culturally barren. Will Newport’s boom continue, or is its destiny that of a 20th-century Klondyke, with gloom replacing boom.” The subsequent 50 years have filled in the dots: the town did become culturally barren – no Newport Festival or Verdi here, no professional theatre to counter the bingo and the sport – and eventually boom did give way to gloom. Llanwern fed the town for a generation, then it began to fade.
On the Sunday of the week in which I went back to Newport, the sun shone – always an event in South Wales – and I took a walk to the highest point of Ringland. The estate, abutting the marshy coastal plain on which Llanwern was built, is hillier than I recalled: hills probably didn’t bother a teenager, but this fiftysomething’s achilles aches with all the walking up inclines. I have come on this trip armed with a map and notice that the highest point of the estate is called “the Circles”, It also has the oldest houses on the estate, built in around 1955, and I start to imagine it has some symbolic significance: perhaps this is some neolithic site with a stone circle that explains the “Ring” in Ringland.
I walk through a wood to get up to the Circles, the woodland smell so familiar to me from my childhood playing in the woods that surrounded my home on the eastern edge of the estate (much of which has now given way to new housing, or been fenced off for the benefit of the hotels which have sprung up close to the junction with the M4). When I get to the top, clutching my map, there is nothing but small, squat council houses. It strikes me how pleasant this little enclave at the top of a hill must have been in 1955: a cluster of houses arranged in a half-circle around a wood, with views across what would then still have been the marshy farmland to the sea beyond. It’s still quiet and cut off, with a fine outlook, but now a vast estate sprawls all round it and the view includes the remnants of Llanwern.
I see a man whom I assume lives here and ask him where the Circles are. “No idea,” he says suspiciously. “You’re not some kind of surveyor are you.” “No, I am a cultural historian attempting to put this wretched estate into some sort of deep chronological context,” I am tempted to reply. Then it strikes me that I am a surveyor of sorts: like the one in Kafka’s The Castle trying to make sense of this estate, this town, this country. I head back through the wood, down to the dismal Ringland Shopping Centre, beside which is the grim Friendship pub. Never has a name belied so much: this is a fearsome place and last time I visited it I noticed there were bullet holes in the door.
As I walk down through the wood, I see a red condom packet beside a tree. The tree is double-branched and would be a perfect place for one of the young girls on the estate to prop herself as she engaged in what passes for recreation here. But recreation is procreation, and the teenage pregnancy rates here are the highest in the country: one in 10 girls under 18 has given birth. Tearaways giving birth to tearaways. Most love their child, pamper it, dress it up, feel validated by and through it. But they don’t know how to bring it up, and so the cycle of ignorance and deprivation spins on.
I decide to double back and walk over to Llanwern. I had asked to pay a visit to the site, but been refused. I went once as a teenager, on a careers trip, because then all roads were seen to lead to Llanwern, but have almost no recollection of it. My father worked there for 20 years or more, often working double-shifts (“doublers” my mother called them) to keep us in shoes and small Union Jacks, but I doubt whether he had much recollection of it either. It was work – endless, mind-numbing, physically demanding work (with lots of games of cards on breaks or when the work was slow or the foreman wasn’t looking). I take a roundabout route past a patch of green on which we used to play football. Now there is a sign: “No ball games, no golf, no fly tipping.” No, no, no. And the social workers wonder why the double-branched tree is put to such hot use. Further on, I run into a small, tough-looking boy on a skateboard, chewing gum. He gives me the hardest of stares – I am the stranger, the outsider, Kafka’s K – and is still staring back at me over his shoulder as he skateboards down the hill. Skateboarding while chewing gum and staring over your right shoulder is far from easy, and he ends in a heap at the bottom.
I cross the A48, which was laid at about the same time as Ringland and Llanwern were built. We moved to Ringland in 1960 and I can remember the steamroller on the road and the smell of tar and friendly Irishmen who must have looked after me, because I don’t recall a parent there to watch me. There were fields all around us when we first moved in, and I remember one morning waking up and seeing cows through the window of our little council house, cows which (along with the moorhens) would soon be displaced by the coming of works and road and boom.
On the other side of the A48 is a marshy area beside the London to South Wales railway line that survived the coming of Llanwern. It causes me a pang of guilt to see it, because I remember once stealing some moorhen’s eggs on an expedition there with a friend who was keener on such boyish pursuits than I ever was. As if the moorhens didn’t have enough to contend with. Then this surviving bit of marshland was open ground, but now it has been fenced off, and walkways put through it. It has been countrified, conservationised. These days we look after the moorhens, though we have yet to develop so coherent a strategy for the skateboarding boys and procreating girls.
Close to this vestigial marsh is a small area of grass beside the railway line from which I and a group of friends used to spot trains: something of an obsession among schoolboys in the 1960s and 70s, now confined to middle-aged man with large cameras and limited social lives. This spot is also close to the old branch line that used to lead into the Llanwern works, which was built on the premise that raw materials could be brought in by rail and and finished steel taken out by sea. Once there were even plans for it to have its own docks, but that never came to pass, the white heat of the Wilsonian industrial-technical revolution cooling faster than anyone anticipated. In truth, the only boom years were 1962-72 – an absurdly short prime for this behemoth.
The branch line is abandoned and overgrown now, as is the old Spencer club and the surrounding football and rugby pitches. The cricket square is pockmarked, the scoreboard rusty; only the bowls lawn survives. In enclosed working-class communities such as this, the works was at the centre of everything. The employers funded social activities out of a mixture of paternalism and self-interest: keeping the workforce sweet to head off strikes and excessive wage demands. At another plant where my father worked before Llanwern, one day each summer the company would hire a train and take us all to Barry Island, a seaside town to the south-west of Cardiff. Each child was given a 10-shilling note, a king’s ransom. This is not some dewy-eyed defence of deference and paternalism; this was in many ways a myopic, misogynistic society, hidebound by class, hostile to homosexuals, black people and anyone who constituted “the other”; it’s just how it was, a candyfloss world about to be given a rude reality check first by Opec and then by Mrs Thatcher.
The report in the South Wales Argus on the Queen’s visit to open Llanwern (“pictures – pages 12, 13, 16 and 24; other royal news pages 8, 9, 17 and 24; all this when the Cuban missile crisis was coming to a head, possibly a nuclear one) had mentioned that after declaring the plant open, she “made it known that she wished the road to the works to be called the Queen’s Way”. This intrigued me. How did she make it known? Did she suddenly, after a couple of sherries, decide this on a whim, perhaps shouting the instruction at a surprised Mr Spencer. Did Prince Philip, who accompanied her on the visit, put her up to it? Either way, I’ve got some unfortunate news to relate: the Queen’s Way sign has disappeared. The road leading to the entrance to Llanwern is now signless, apart from one pointing to wetlands half a mile away. The ducks are fighting back.
Queen and consort came on the royal train, and the Argus was a little disappointed by the lack of euphoria as she arrived: “Perhaps influenced by the quietness of the train’s quick arrival and a sense of awe as the historic moment finally arrived, the crowd were almost silent as Her Majesty alighted.” I prefer to think that, like my mother, their minds were elsewhere. Newport, after all, is the town in Britain which boasts the most recent attempt at armed insurrection – the Chartist uprising of 1839 – and, in its relative impoverishment (certainly, most of my relatives are impoverished), it has no reason to love the established order. There may have been curiosity to see the Queen in 1962 and pleasure that this new works was opening, but, as with my mother – so easily diverted by shoes – it is doubtful whether the devotion was slavish.
The paper, in giving over page after page to the visit, sadly has very little to report. The mayoress presents the Queen with a bouquet of dahlias. “She seemed very thrilled,” the mayoress told the paper later, as if being handed a bunch of flowers might have been a surprising event in the daily life of a monarch. The royal couple arrived at 10am, went to the civic centre and cathedral, visited the docks, drove through the town in a glass-roofed maroon Rolls-Royce, had “luncheon” (at 1.05pm precisely) with the works management, pressed a button in the slabbing mill to declare the plant open, and at 4.30pm left, catching the royal train at the little station that serviced Llanwern Village. Or rather used to service: it had fallen victim to the Beeching axe the previous year and been reopened just for the Queen. My guess is that, despite the dahlias, this was not one of the Queen’s more memorable outings: the weather was showery, the crowd subdued, and it is doubtful that lunch at a South Welsh steelworks in 1962 – even a state-of-the-art one – would have been an epicurean delight.
I could find no physical evidence of the Queen’s visit at Llanwern, and a PR man I spoke to by phone said he knew of no official plaque inside marking the great day. Industry is careless of its history, concentrating on the annual balance sheet. Churches tend to work to a different rhythm, and there in the cathedral which used to be dedicated to St Woolas but now seems to prefer the utilitarian “Newport cathedral” is the plaque marking the royal visit. It is not the only memorial here. In the churchyard outside is one dedicated to the 20 Chartist demonstrators shot by police outside the Westgate Hotel in the high street on 4 November 1839, when an estimated 5,000 rebels marched on the town from neighbouring valleys hoping to spark a nationwide insurrection. Ten of those 20 are buried in the churchyard in unmarked graves. The memorial says simply that they died seeking “to establish democratic rights for all”.
The Chartist Rising was a fiasco, but a glorious one. The British, compared to say the French, make hopeless revolutionaries, and this botched one is all we have from the past couple of centuries. Newport is ambivalent about its famous, if obstreperous, sons. The ugly mosaics depicting the Chartist struggle for democracy which used to decorate an underpass in the centre of town have been removed. There is a group of statues close to the Westgate Hotel, commissioned for the 150th anniversary in 1989, but they are so abstract that they could represent anything: a bare-headed woman holding a child, a figure who resembles the grim reaper, a naked angel atop a pile of corpses. Teenagers rest their feet on the corpses; small children run round the statues; one fat child looks like he is going to collapse after completing a few circuits. The 20 dead demonstrators have been forgotten.
The Westgate hotel itself is closed and there is large sign outside saying: “Leasehold bar/hotel premises for let”. The bullet holes that used to be visible in the doorframe can no longer be seen. All this is depressing, but alleviated somewhat by in impromptu mural placed near the to let sign which reads: “Peace – that thinking is not treason.” Also, when I pass a few days later two men have set up a trestle table close to the statues and are handing out young communist literature, so perhaps Newport’s spirit of rebellion lives on.
There used to be a sign on the bridge as you approached Newport station on the line from London. “Newport – home of the mole wrench.” It always seemed to me an odd, though not inappropriate, claim to fame for modest, monochrome Newport. The rugby team, which defeated the New Zealand All Blacks in a famous match in 1963, would be a better definer. Some might argue for the Transporter Bridge, built on the River Usk close to the docks in 1906, and one of only eight of its type in the world. And the town’s role as host of the Ryder Cup, thanks to the patronage of Newport-born multimillionaire Terry Matthews who has built the huge Celtic Manor hotel with its array of championship gold courses, gave it a brief modern celebrity. But for me it is the Chartists who define the spirit of Newport, of what the town has been and could be again: forthright, democratic, willing to fight for what it believes to be right. That, in misty-eyed moments drinking red wine in noisy Newport pubs, is what I like to believe.
The reality of course is less euphoric. Before I leave, I meet an official involved in attempts to regenerate Newport. He has been seconded from the Welsh Assembly and is interesting on where Newport, as a town, has gone wrong over the past 50 years. He says that, despite working close by in Cardiff, he had never been into the centre of Newport until he got the regeneration job five years ago, and from that he extrapolates a thesis about why the town became a backwater with impoverished estates housing people with poor life chances and a town centre filled with poundshops and pubs selling cheap food.
“Like everybody in Monmouthshire,” he tells me, “I drove around Newport. What should happen is that everybody in Monmouthshire should regularly come into Newport. They would have done 50 years ago. This would have been the county town, but bit by bit things have been stripped away from Newport. The administrative functions were rationalised during the 1960s and 70s, when all solicitors’ offices and banking offices moved to having one head office for South Wales, based in Cardiff, rather than having one in Newport, one in Cardiff, one in Swansea. Newport started losing its commercial identity. Then, rather cruelly, they took the county hall away – it had been here for about 100 years – and stuck in up in Cwmbran, and lots of jobs went with it.” All Newport had left was heavy industry, and once that collapsed in the early 1990s it had little or nothing to fall back on.
Cardiff and Newport, the official points out, used to be similar-sized towns, though Cardiff as the capital always had the edge. But in the past half-century their fortunes have diverged widely. “Cardiff grew and grew. Newport didn’t and actually started losing its core administrative functions, but nobody noticed because there were high-paid manufacturing jobs all around the M4 corridor.” Once those jobs went, it was too late: Cardiff was entrenched as the centre of Welsh government, media and associated industries; Monmouth and Usk had taken Newport’s administrative functions and were buoyed by tourism; Cwmbran had a shiny new shopping centre; what did Newport have? Not much. It seems I got out just in time.
This is a condensed version of material I started gathering in 2010, when I was considering writing a book about Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. The idea was a series of chapters on places she had visited to open things, but as with so many of my book ideas I didn’t get beyond this first chapter, which was to cover her visit to the town in 1962 to open the vast steelworks at Llanwern that fed Newport’s relative prosperity in the 1960s and gave my generation of working-class youngsters hope and confidence.
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