Today’s song is ‘Dirty Old Town’. This song was written by Ewan MacColl in 1949 that was made popular by ‘The Dubliners’ and has been recorded by many others over the years including Rod Stewart: The Pogues: Roger Whittaker: Chad and Jeremy: among just a few.
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I was a born in 1942, and this was an age where the average man and woman who worked, literally got their hands and clothes dirty earning a living. My early years was an age where gas towers, textile factories, industrial mills, foundries, steelworks, glue factories, and all manner of manufacturing works provided employment for the working classes. Even the clothes on washing lines were pegged out and taken in off the line at certain hours of the day when the smoke was known to belch louder and dirtier from nearby chimneys.
For those people who did not live in the wide-open spaces of the countryside after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ of the early 18th century gave way to the ‘Industrial Revolution’, life changed drastically. The populace moved in their droves to the towns and cities to live, work and earn a living. Over one hundred years of industrialisation witnessed the building of huge infrastructure projects like bridges, roads, tunnels, and underground transport systems to support this mass migration from the countryside into the towns and cities. Locomotive trains and thousands of miles of rail track came into being, along with hundreds of miles of new canals to transport heavy goods on barges. New and ever-busier docks and ship-building yards launched ever-larger ships and ocean liners with rude regularity, and new pits mining much-needed coal from the face of the earth were opened up to provide fuel to advance the industrial progress and prosperity of the nation. Everything that moved which wasn’t human or animal was powered by coal, which expelled large clouds of smoke and other impurities into the atmosphere. Any coal dust which did not enter the atmosphere from the coal heaps on the pit-head were particles that had already found a new home deep inside the lungs of the miners who’d hacked it out from the pit face.
Apart from the nation’s aristocrats who occupied their country castles in splendid isolation, and the wealthy gentry who lived on large estates surrounded by thousands of acres of fresh-air land and wildlife, the country’s working classes were crowded and cramped into small houses which were fitter for demolition than dwelling in.
As the countryside became rapidly depopulated, the urban parts of England filled exponentially, and layers of muck, dust and grime lodged alongside the daily existences of the poor folk in unhealthy companionship. The average worker lived in some dirty old town, where the soot of centuries was carried through the air from the factory chimney to humble dwellings. There it lingered and coated the stone fronts of terraced hoses and nearby walls with the black evidence of its presence, ingrained with air impurities which had existed since the start of the ‘Industrial Revolution.’ Examine the stone which built the Cotswolds cottages down south with the stone that built the terraced houses of all dwellings north of Birmingham and observe the difference. Although built around the same decade, over a century earlier, the colour of the Cotswold stone resembles freshly baked bread, whereas the colour of any northern stone dwelling is as black as pitch.
Indeed, my own father who was a miner for many years of his life used to say that any coal dust which he didn’t swallow would finish up being lodged on the front of his house and wall, whereas my mother would point to the washed clothes pegged out on her washing line; remarking that they were taken off the line dirtier than when they’d been pegged there earlier in the day. My mother once told me that the origin of the saying, ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ related to the country’s geographical divide between those who lived in the North and the South. She said that the southerners lived in ‘heavenly’ countryside filled with fresh air while northerners lived in Hell surrounded by soot and dirt.
I recall that one of the most popular films located in Northern England was set in Batley, West Yorkshire. Batley was used as the location to film the fictional town of ‘Barfield’ in the 1955 film, ‘Value for Money’ starring John Gregson and Diana Dors. The most popular saying which came from a character’s mouth in that film has always remained with me, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass!”.
It is undoubtedly true that prior to the commercial melt-down of our steel mills and industrial base, the closure of the mines, the mass redundancy of workers in our factories and textile mills, and the decimation of our railway track, there was been little money for the working-class man and woman to make north of Watford. In fact, even during the heyday and the dizzy heights of the ‘Industrial Revolution’, it was the masters and the owners, and the stockholders and investors who reaped the profits, and never the front-line workers!
Nothing significant in wealth disparity between the poor and the rich has changed in modern England either in the 21st century. Indeed, if anything, the income gap widens year-upon-year and shows no sign of ever-narrowing. It is the same stocks and share investors and monied people who profit today, supported by an army of suited-and-booted white-collared middle-class managers and supervisors. Recent economic studies have shown that the greater an economic collapse that any country in the world experiences, the greater the profit margins and the more money the wealthy people of that country make! Talk about the association between muck and brass, and the rich becoming wealthier upon the poverty of the poor; it doesn’t come any ‘dirtier’ than that!
Whenever I hear today’s song, I think of England’s industrial past where a worker’s life, lungs, livelihood, soul, and house stone were blackened in their struggle for survival. As a lover of British history, and someone born in the early 1940s, I still recall the poor standard of housing and low standard of living experienced by the English working-class families from the early 1900s to the 1960s. I still remember the tin baths hung on the wall between one day and another, the food rationing which existed another five years after the ending of the Second World War in 1945, the outside privy that was shared between four neighbouring households, the darned and dreary colour of clothes one wore, and the motto which hung above every commoner’s mantlepiece of ‘Mend and Make Do’. I vividly remember my Grandmother Fanning’s favourite saying (in whose Irish house I was born) about mankind’s endless relationship with ‘dirt’. If ever she was giving me a slice of soda bread and dropped it on the floor, she would simply pick it up, pretend to brush it clean with the palm of her hand and say, “ Get that down you, Billy Forde. It won’t harm you. Before you die, you’ll eat a stone (14 pounds Imperial weight) of dirt!”
I was brought up in Liversedge, West Yorkshire, and dirt was no stranger to my daily surroundings during the 1950s or that of my immediate neighbours. I was schooled in Heckmondwike (where today’s birthday celebrant, Clare lives). The most popular place where courting couples kissed and canoodled during my teenage years in Heckmondwike or nearby Cleckheaton was either up against the wall of a baker or behind some factory or old mill chimney or gas-works tower. Many a baby started their journey into life behind an old factory wall. These were the days when we all lived in some ‘dirty old town’ where all manner of ‘dirty old things went on behind the cloak of darkness.
Love and peace Bill xxx