3-Set Into Song Chaps 11-24.Indd
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CHAPTER 11 Another Bloody Working-Class Epic The Big Hewer Before we were half-way through the fi eld-work he confessed to feeling utterly uneducated in the presence of miners … how could one feel superior in the presence of men who appeared to have experienced everything and who could talk coherently about anything under the sun? For Charles it was a revelation and he was later to refer to it as the beginning of his education. EWAN MACCOLL, ON CHARLES PARKER, IN JOURNEYMAN, 1990 My, he was a big man. Could you imagine? He was 18 stone. No fat. No fat – 18 stone of man. What they call the County Durham Big Hewer. Like a machine when he was hewing, you could hear the pick pick pick pick as regular as this clock. Never used to seem ever to tire. THE DURHAM MINER JACK ELLIOTT, THE BIG HEWER, 1961 33-Set-Set iintonto SSongong CChapshaps 111-24.indd1081-24.indd108 110808 11/4/08/4/08 116:27:186:27:18 ANOTHER BLOODY WORKING-CLASS EPIC – THE BIG HEWER ne morning in early 1961 the Newcastle folk singer Louis Killen, the late substitute on Song of a Road, answered a knock on the door Oof his mother’s council fl at in Jesmond. Standing outside, entirely unexpected, were Charles Parker and Ewan MacColl, loaded with recording equipment. ‘Take us to some miners’ was the gist of their message, and so he did. He took them to Johnny Handle, a mining friend who had discovered Bert Lloyd’s collection of mining songs and began writing his own and sing- ing them in clubs. Handle had been a miner till recently, but had given it up for folk song. Louis Killen: I sat in on the Johnny Handle sessions … Six hours. They would just let Johnny talk … they would interject to get clarifi cation but mostly they would just let them talk on and on. Not an interview with set questions, not a BBC approach! Louis took them to see the Elliott brothers, Jack and Reece, and was there for one of the several interviews they had with them. The Elliotts were won- derful at igniting those verbal sparks. Ewan: ‘We had 12 people in the room at fi rst and metaphor would top metaphor; it’s like people fi ring proverbs at each other. It’s the kind of speech that Swift would have been quite pleased to have written down.’ Charles had got the go-ahead for the programme on miners and mining late in 1960. He and Ewan decided to delve in three areas: South Wales, the North Midlands (DH Lawrence country), and the North-East, and all threw up fascinating characters. In the North-East it was Handle and the Elliotts: ‘with Jack Elliott we got enough stories for an extra hour.’ In South Wales they were put on to soft-voiced Ben Davies, known as Sunshine, a miner with a natural fl air for language, to whom they returned for extra material, notably in the Dust section: ‘a rare man, a very conscious artist … [he gave us] tremendous passages.’ Another South Wales miner was Dick Beamish. Peggy refl ected on Charles’s response: Dick Beamish staggered Charles. It shook him how articulate he was, a littlish man who took them on a long walk underground to a pile of coal where his friend had died in a fall. He made them turn their lamps out to experience total blackness. So dark, dizzy, nauseous. You could hear the earth creaking. Walking back, he suddenly said ‘Stop’, went very still, and over on the right there was the crash of a rock fall, which he’d sensed. And walked on. Ewan elaborated: Meeting miners was, for Charles, a shattering experience. Up until this point he had managed to hold on to the somewhat Panglossian view that everything was all right (or nearly all right) in this best of all possible worlds. The coalfi elds 109 33-Set-Set iintonto SSongong CChapshaps 111-24.indd1091-24.indd109 110909 11/4/08/4/08 116:27:206:27:20 SET INTO SONG changed all that. We took our tape recorders into the pit-canteens, pithead baths, into pubs and miners’ welfares. We dragged them through the galleries of drift mines in Northumberland and West Durham, down the deep shafts of East Durham and the hardrock mines of Wales, along the wide straight roads of East Midland horizon mines … and we dragged ourselves along impossibly narrow passages into the hellish places where solitary miners lie on their sides and jab with short-bladed picks at the 18-inch coal-face. Later Peggy was able to join them for a trip underground. Just like the fi shermen, the miners would have ordered her out if they’d known, but in a pit helmet and clobber and with her hair tucked in she wasn’t discernibly female as long as she kept her mouth shut. Her worst moment was feeling the claustrophobia while ‘swimming’ on her elbows in a three-foot seam. She dared not speak, and there was no going back. Of course, Ewan and Charles were sent fi rst to the ‘characters’, natural storytellers, and one’s fi rst reaction as an outsider is to assume that they’re hardly representative. But Ewan stressed that there were many anonymous miners who became just as articulate, like the man who Charles bumped into outside Durham Cathedral. He was Ernest Black, a Nottinghamshire miner who became one of their best informants – once they’d found his lost false teeth. And as students of language, they had a fi eld day. Ewan said: If you watch the miners as they come in the morning and wait at the pit top, they’re talking and suddenly you realise you can’t understand what they are saying, their talk becomes broader and broader as they stand there, they’re enter- ing into a new language as well, ‘Pitmatic’, where you never have to complete a sentence … in its own way it’s as economic as Cant [the Travellers’ private lan- guage]. Completely different world. At the end of our fi eld-recording stint, we had taped between two and three hundred reels of mining ‘crack’, the conversation of men who can make words ring like hammer blows on a face of anthracite, who, when they talk, enrich the bloodstream of the national vocabulary with transfusions of local Pitmatic – the bold, bitter, ribald, beautiful talk of miners. It was a good job Ewan and Peggy had constructed a painstaking methodology for dealing with these tapes, for they’d come back with almost twice as many as for Singing the Fishing. In the circumstances, the programme came together remarkably quickly. So attuned was Ewan now to the process that he created the fi rst-day-down-the-pit recitative in just half a day – it had taken three days of sweat to do the equivalent in Singing the Fishing. They rehearsed and recorded in two weeks, with the same method but with a little less intensity than last time. That didn’t stop Charles throwing things, of 110 33-Set-Set iintonto SSongong CChapshaps 111-24.indd1101-24.indd110 111010 11/4/08/4/08 116:27:206:27:20 ANOTHER BLOODY WORKING-CLASS EPIC – THE BIG HEWER course. One tantrum was ended abruptly, Alan Ward said, by the new woman on ‘grams’, the stunning Diana Wright, walking up to Charles, sitting on his knee, and giving him a resounding kiss. Louis Killen was one of the solo singers who was used in the chorus, for they’d decided that folk singers would make a more malleable group than the classically voice-trained Clarion Singers. The ‘Big Hewer’ of the title was not in the original template. Louis pointed out that when they arrived in the North East they had been hoping to fi nd a heroic miner, a real person, not a mythic fi gure. But everywhere they went they found a Herculean semi- historical fi gure, recurring like some creation myth. ‘Whether he was real, or purely legendary, I never knew, even to this day’, said Jack Elliott. In the Midlands it was ‘Jackie Torr, from Derbyshire’, in South Wales ‘Isaac Lewis in the Anthracite’. This was a crucial device for Ewan, who could let his song- writing imagination loose on a super-hero: In a cradle of coal in the darkness I was laid – go down. Down in the dirt and darkness I was raised, go down. Cut me teeth on a fi ve-foot timber, Held up the roof with me little fi nger, Started me time, away in the mine – GO DOWN. And the chorus hammers in on the last Go Down. Later, Ewan and Charles were accused of naivety in using this archetypal fi gure. Dave Harker in his piece on the programmes in One for the Money says: It never seems to have occurred to Parker and MacColl that the mythic fi gure may have been a deliberate and grotesque caricature of the self-exploitative worker, the man who fi lled more tubs, dug more coal and worked more hours than any other. Doubtless a symbol of pride and virility to insiders … it could also be self-mocking caricature and an ideological stick to satirise men who undercut piece-work rates and are hence against the men’s own interest. The limitation of production is one of the pitmen’s few weapons ... Parker and MacColl had a ‘socialist-realist’ prescription … and were going to make the miner an epic fi gure whether he liked it or not.