BY ROGER WATSON
Every now and then YouTube coughs up a gem. On the verge of closing the channel down one evening, I spotted a video on the YouTube home screen, The Black Country 1969 An amazing video from the 1960’s showcasing the life.
Made by Associated Television (ATV) in the Midlands, this 30 minute documentary presents a picture of the Black Country as it was then.
The monochrome nature of the filming accentuates the blackness of the Black Country. But this could not have been made in colour as, by the time colour television became common place in British homes, most of the Black Country was gone. By the time the film was made, the last colliery in the Black Country had closed and during the film the residents of the Black Country were already lamenting the decline of the old streets and communities of brick built houses which were being replaced by concrete blocks of flats.
Perhaps, as a child of the 1950s, what made the deepest impression on me was that the lives and the conditions in which those lives were lived was ongoing for most of my childhood. The Beatles had already played together for the last time, John F Kennedy had long since been assassinated and the Cuban Missile Crisis was a fading memory.
Brought up in the rural splendour of Royal Deeside in Scotland and living in a series of farming towns in Aberdeenshire where the greatest hazards to life and limb were stingy nettles and wasps, it was beyond my wildest imaginings that other children were being brought up in the appalling conditions that prevailed in the Black Country. Indeed, had I been taken from the rural north east of Scotland and dropped into the Black Country I would, surely, have considered that I had gone to Hell.
So, where is the Black Country? That is settled early in the film, and it is related to the areas of the Midlands with exposed coal fields with towns such as Dudley and Bilston including some of the areas where the coal lies deeper, such as West Bromwich. That is not a comprehensive rundown of the towns and the exact boundaries are still disputed. According to a bearded northerner in the documentary, Wolverhampton should not be included as it was a commercial centre.
The name ‘Black Country’ derives from the blackness created in the area by the industries that existed there such as iron making which depended heavily on burning coal and coke. The buildings were coated with soot. Likewise, the lungs of the inhabitants. Life did have a ‘nasty, brutish and short’ aspect to it. While life expectancy in the Black Country today is near the national average—largely because the Black Country is no longer black—for many years and until quite recently it was considerably lower. Presumably people born into the unhealthy conditions of the Black Country in the 1960s contributed to the lower life expectancy up until early this century.
Clichés abound when describing the Black Country. Thus the ‘birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ or the ‘cradle of heavy industry’ are often applied. But the commentator in the documentary refers to the ‘caesarean birth’ of the black country inferring a kind of urgency, violence even, to its creation and existence. But without the Black Country it is doubtful that Britain could have dominated the waves or won two major wars.
However, the documentary is not about the misery of the conditions or the poor health of the inhabitants. Through the lives of a few people and with copious interviews it provides an insight into the lives they led and seemed, in fact, to love. Thus, we see two chain makers at work who start their day at 4.30 in the morning to ‘escape the heat of the day’ and we meet an elderly lady who was born, lived, loved and raised her family there. We see the seemingly interminable streets of identical two storey brick houses stretching and snaking across the landscape and the weekend singsongs in the locals clubs and pubs. Whenever the camera scans up to the sky there are palls of smoke dissolving into the atmosphere.
There are no circumstances under which I would have wanted to live in the Black Country during the time that is portrayed in the documentary, and I am very grateful that I did not have to. Yet, the film captures a genuine nostalgia amongst the residents who see their old way of life disappearing. Nostalgia, indeed, but not a word of complaint either for how it had been or what it was becoming.
I don’t know whether or not they was poor, but they did seem like they was happy.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.