Clay Cross Council: ‘doing our job – and that’s to help the working class, the cream of the nation’

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1960s, 1970s

Last week’s post looked at the history of Clay Cross – its longer-term politics as well as the commitment to working-class interests and record of practical achievement of its new Labour council elected in 1963.  This post examines how housing and rents became central to that struggle and why its 1972 Rents Rebellion has been such a unique episode in Labour and local government history.

David Skinner, a still from the 1974 ITV documentary Confrontation at Clay Cross

Before 1979, housing was seen as local government’s most important role and here Clay Cross acted boldly. The Council had been quietly buying up the town’s substandard houses for some time, demolishing them or making them fit for purpose as appropriate. By 1971, over 550 slums had been cleared, 95 per cent of the total.

In July 1972, they went further by determining to buy every privately rented home in the area.  As Councillor Arthur Wellon stated: (1)

On this Council we like to think of ourselves as basic Socialists. We regard housing here as a social service, not as something the private sector can profit from.

Two hundred homes were transferred from the National Coal Board that year.  The Urban District, with a population a little under 10,000, had 1340 council homes, housing around half its population.

Post-war housing in Bestwood Park

At this point, the Council’s rents – at £1 12s including rates – were the lowest in the country.  Arrears were not pursued through the courts but by a personal visit from the chair and vice-chair of the Housing Committee.  Often they found tenants not claiming the benefits to which they were entitled and the policy proved effective as well as humane.

The ultimate test of these principles came with the passing of the Conservative Government’s Housing Finance Act in July 1972.  At a time when unemployment in the town stood at around 20 per cent, the legislation required the Council to raise rents by £1 a week.  In September, the Council formally resolved to reject all provisions of the new law.

That stance was overwhelmingly endorsed by local voters in the Council elections which followed and backed up by a rent strike called in 1973 supported by 84 per cent of tenants.  When Mr Skillington – the hapless Housing Commissioner sent in by Whitehall to collect the increased rents – arrived from Henley-on-Thames he faced complete non-cooperation, refused office space and staff.  He withdrew a few months later having failed to collect a penny of the increase.

But the law pursued its course more inexorably.  In July 1973, the courts found Clay Cross’s eleven councillors– Arthur Wellon, Charlie Bunting, Graham Smith, Eileen Wholey, George Goodfellow, Terry Asher, David Nuttall, David Percival, Roy Booker, David Skinner and Graham Skinner; working men and women, good trades unionists – guilty of ‘negligence and misconduct’ and they were fined a total of £6,985 plus £2,000 costs.

When the High Court rejected their final appeal in 1974, Charlie Bunting spoke for them all: (2)

We have one judge, not those three in there; that’s our conscience and our conscience is clear.

The eleven were disqualified from office and personally surcharged and new elections ordered. In the by-elections which followed in February, 1974, a 71.5 per cent turn-out returned ten of a ‘second eleven’ of Labour candidates pledged to pursue resistance; the other lost by just two votes.

Clay Cross Urban District Council, however, had just four weeks to run; it was abolished in 1974 – not through some proto-Thatcherite spite but by the general reorganisation of local government which took place that year.  The Housing Finance Act was implemented by North East Derbyshire District Council though Clay Cross itself continued to resist. [Please also read the comment below added by the former clerk of the Clay Cross Parish Council – the only council officer directly affected – who was fined and dismissed for his part in the struggle.]

Of 46 councils initially refusing to implement the Act, Clay Cross had been the only one to maintain its opposition to the bitter end – as Graham Skinner says, ultimately ‘a futile gesture’ but a necessary one.

In answer to the question ‘why Clay Cross?’, I hope I have provided some answers here. This was a distinct and close-knit town; some outsiders even call it isolated though I’m sure that’s not a local perception.  Its mining and manufacturing heritage runs deep – a history of hardship and resistance, of trades unionism and working-class politics rooted deep in its community.

From this – and through the ideals and activism of its elected members – emerged a council understood not as a distant, administrative body but as the heart and (in the very best sense) vanguard of its community: (3)

The men and women who were elected to serve on the council were not remote figures who did what the bureaucrats told them to do, but representatives of the working people of the town who kept faith with their electors. It was as simple as that.

All this, of course, is hard to replicate: unusual enough then and another world now as, from the 80s, we have witnessed working-class communities up and down the country ravaged by de-industrialisation and mass unemployment and the collateral damage these have wrought.

The days of steady, secure employment and strong trade unions forthright in its defence seem distant; the possibility of work and politics as proud and progressive badges of local identity long gone; a simple respect for working people (and for those, through no fault of their own, without work) as the backbone of our nation disappeared, sometimes derided.

And, to prevent this becoming a pointless exercise in sepia-tinted nostalgia, let’s acknowledge positive changes too – more people better educated, new opportunities and higher living standards for some (even as many of those advances have ground to a halt in recent years).

Marx Court, Clay Cross, housing for older people, opened by North East Derbyshire District Council in 1982: a nod to a radical past?

At any rate, Clay Cross will be hard to repeat. But it does hold lessons.  I don’t knock councillors, nor am I cynical about the energy and good intentions they generally bring to their work but Labour councils have become too willing to work with the contemporary grain of neo-liberal politics, scrapping within its interstices to wrest such small progressive victories as it allows.

This is seen most powerfully in the housing field where a proud council housing legacy is being squandered and ‘regeneration’ has become a tool to destroy communities in order to build ‘affordable’ homes which are nothing of the kind.

There remains a lesson from Clay Cross, not of an old politics but of a renewed politics where politicians are not technocratic figures managing the agenda of the day but true representatives of their communities spearheading a politics from below – a politics of, from and for the extraordinary ‘ordinary’ people who constitute the mass of our country.

Let’s leave the last word with Charlie Bunting again: (4)

I don’t think for one bloody minute we are heroes.  I think we are doing our job – and that’s to help the working class, the cream of the nation.

 Sources

(1) Michael Ewing, ‘The Home Truths: a Special Investigation into Housing’, Daily Mirror, 6 July 1972

(2) David Skinner and Julia Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross (1974)

(3) Skinner and Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross

(4) Paula James and Jill Evans, ‘Working-class Rebels with a Cause’, Daily Mirror, 3 December 1973

The 1974 ITV documentary Confrontation at Clay Cross is on YouTube.

For  more on the Clay Cross Rents Rebellion, the best source is the book by David Skinner and Julia Langdon.  Online accounts can be found on the Dronfield Blather blog and, from a more revolutionary perspective, ‘How Clay Cross Fought the Tories‘ on the website of the Socialist Party.

Neil Barnett, ‘Local Government and the local state; from crisis to crisis’, a paper for the panel Austerity, the Local State and Public Services at the PSA Annual Conference, 2013 also tackles the question of why Clay Cross’s resistance has proved so unique.

Clay Cross Council: ‘an expression of the will of the people’

Tags

1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Pre-1914

Clay Cross takes its place – alongside Poplar – as a hallowed place in the Labour pantheon: a site of struggle and resistance, a town where a Labour-led council fought valiantly for its people, whose socialism was less an abstract ideal than part of its living fabric.  All that came to a head in the famous 1972 Rents Rebellion.  But it was rooted in a history, community and politics of much longer vintage. This post will look at that at that longer story and try to answer the question why there, why then – and, by extension, why not here and why not now.

In the early nineteenth century Clay Cross was little more than a hamlet at a crossroads.  A cross stood at the intersection of Clay Lane and Thanet Street and from that it is said to have derived its name.  But its history begins in 1837 when George Stephenson drove a tunnel under the village and discovered iron and steel in the process.  Stephenson set up a company to exploit its potential which, after his death in 1848, became the Clay Cross Company.

Clay Cross works, 1929

The population of Clay Cross itself had tripled – to 1478 by 1841.  It was a company town and the Clay Cross Company was said to be a paternalistic employer, generous even – its workers’ housing comprised four rooms rather than the two which were typical.

In the mining industry, that paternalism didn’t amount to much.  In November 1882, an explosion of firedamp in the town’s Parkhouse No. 7 pit killed 45 men and boys.  An inquest jury, comprised of the local middle classes, found no negligence on the part of the Company but recommended that safety lamps be used in future.  It naturally also expressed its ‘deep sympathy with all the bereaved ones who had suffered in this calamity’.

Sympathy, however, was in short supply during the Great Lock-out of 1893 when local miners – resisting a 25 per cent wage cut – were laid off for nine months. Nor was it evident in 1910 when John Renshaw led the colliers of Parkhouse in a 14-week strike against the pittance paid for abnormal work.  Renshaw was dismissed; his comrades bought him a hawker’s cart so he could somehow continue to make a living.

James Haslam, commemorated in Chesterfield

Politically, resistance was also stirring. Labour representatives held a majority on the Clay Cross Urban District Council from its formation in 1894 to 1906. James Haslam, Clay Cross-born in 1842 and Secretary of the Derbyshire Miners’ Association, was elected as the local MP in 1906 and became its Labour MP when the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain affiliated to the party in 1909.  In 1919, John Renshaw, now described as a greengrocer, was elected a Labour councillor.  There was much to do.

Although, by 1919, some of the worst slums had been demolished, some back-to-backs knocked through, a small municipal scheme had been built in Broadleys, of 1800 houses in the town only 130 had baths and only 500 had WCs. (2)  The Council responded by purchasing an additional five acres of land for a £57,000 scheme to extend its Broadleys estate.

Early housing in Broadleys

Rents proved to be controversial, however.  The Ministry of Health demanded rents of 14s, 11s 6d and 9s (exclusive of rates) which the Council criticised as excessive.  In 1922, exactly fifty years before its much more famous rents protest and at a time when miners’ wages were being cut once more, the Council voted unanimously to reduce them. (3)

How Clay Cross miners survived during the nine-month coal strike four years later can only be guessed – their strike pay was exhausted after ten weeks – but poignant evidence is provided below in the image of Brannigan’s Jazz Band: twenty local miners, who toured the district in fancy dress raising money from well-wishers. (4)

Brannigan’s Jazz Band, 1926 © Fionn Taylor and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In 1931, plans for 16 new council houses on land at Clay Lane were announced.  Against those who were critical of such expenditure at a time of austerity, Councillor Renshaw made the essential ethical case for council housing (in the language of his day), as true now as it was then: (4)

If Capitalism has found some easier and better method of investing money other than building houses, then it must devolve itself upon the State and local authorities to provide them and give the working classes that share of comfort which should be theirs by right in a Christian country.

Moreover, because the financial case is just as strong, the Council pointed out that the houses, costing £300 17s to build (‘a great credit to the surveyor and the clerk’), would cost the ratepayer nothing and could be let at an inclusive rent of just 8s 6d. (5)

Council houses on Holmgate Road

As slum clearance took off in the mid-1930s, 63 houses were demolished under the 1930 Housing Act, displacing 229 people, and 14 houses built in Holmgate Road for some of those displaced.  One year later, in 1936, plans were announced for the construction of 64 houses and 14 bungalows for elderly people on the newly-acquired Angel Fields site.

Houses and bungalows on The Crescent, the Angel Estate

Thirty new houses would be built on the Estate after 1945 and by 1950 the Council had completed 290 new homes in all.  Much very poor property remained – Elbow Row was a terrace of one-up, one-down houses with ‘blind backs’,  ‘improved’ in 1960 by the Clay Cross Company by the addition of a single-brick lean-to at the rear. (6)  It was demolished in 1973 at the height of the Council’s ambition and radicalism.

This later chapter begins in 1960 when Dennis Skinner (brought up in a council semi on Meadow Lane, Holmgate) was elected to the Council.  Local Labour, it is said, had grown moribund in the 1950s when Skinner and others, less celebrated, revived the party.  Three years later, in 1963, Labour took all eleven seats on the Council and it would win every contest thereafter until 1974.

Dennis Skinner with brothers David and Graham (all Clay Cross councillors) and Gary and their parents © Daily Mirror, 1974

Crucially, although tribal voting can be conservative and established councils with a monopoly of power complacent, this Labour success was active and politicised, rooted in its community.  In the words of David Skinner:  (7)

The council as a unit was strong because it had developed its policies as an expression of the will of the people it served.  It knew those policies were right because of the growing political awareness in the town, because it was clear that people had learned to care what happened there, because  –  unlike in many local authority areas – between 65 and 75 per cent of them bothered to turn out and vote whenever there were elections.

This wasn’t the stuff of revolution.  For example, three ‘Darby and Joan Clubs’ were opened in the 1960s for the town’s senior citizens who were also (alongside those with disabilities) given free bus travel in 1971 and free TV licences in 1973.

When Margaret Thatcher abolished free school milk in 1973, the Council kept supplying its primary school children through a penny rate and the diversion of an increased chairman’s allowance.  It ran playgroups too and provided (with some help from the Sports Council) a brand-new Olympic-sized swimming pool to replace the near-obsolete one at the Miners’ Welfare and a pitch-and-putt course on a former slag heap.

The Victoria Buildings, former council offices in the High Street © Alan Heardman and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The opening of new council offices in an old building, a former hotel, on the town’s High Street was a deliberate symbol of the Council’s place at the heart of its community.  When Dennis Skinner performed the opening ceremony in July 1965 he declared that the public ‘will be the openers of the new offices. If public service is presented properly, the people will take an interest.’ (8)  And they did.

We’ll follow this story to its climax in the famous rents rebellion of 1972 in next week’s post and attempt to understand why Clay Cross has been so unique and distinct in its resistance to unjust laws and a hostile politics.

Sources

(1) Fionn Taylor, Parkhouse No. 7

(2) ‘Clay Cross Housing. Prospects in an Old Mining Town’’, Derbyshire Courier, 1 February 1919

(3) Derbyshire Courier, 11 February 1922

(4) John Renshaw, letter to Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, 19 March 1932

(5) ‘£300 Houses at Clay Cross’, Nottingham Evening Post, 8 June 1932

(6) Cliff Williams, Clay Cross and the Clay Cross Company (2005)

(7) David Skinner and Julia Langdon, The Story of Clay Cross (1974)

(8) Dennis Skinner, Sailing Close to the Wind: Reminiscences (2014)