Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 10905 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| A WORLD OF MY OWN: EMANUEL SHINWELL | 1969 | 1969-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 23 mins 34 secs Credits: Tyne Tees Television Individuals: Manny Shinwell Genre: TV Documentary Subject: Working Life Urban Life Seaside Politics Industry Coal Architecture |
| Summary An edition of the Tyne Tees Television programme A World of My Own first broadcast on 3 January 1969 in which the Easington MP Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell reflects on his 35 years career in politics as he prepares for retirement and travels around his County Durham constituency. |
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Description
An edition of the Tyne Tees Television programme A World of My Own first broadcast on 3 January 1969 in which the Easington MP Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell reflects on his 35 years career in politics as he prepares for retirement and travels around his County Durham constituency.
The documentary opens with a Manny Shinwell piece to camera in front of Easington Colliery pithead, County Durham, where he talks about his lack of formal education, his work amongst the dockers in Glasgow, the seamen...
An edition of the Tyne Tees Television programme A World of My Own first broadcast on 3 January 1969 in which the Easington MP Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell reflects on his 35 years career in politics as he prepares for retirement and travels around his County Durham constituency.
The documentary opens with a Manny Shinwell piece to camera in front of Easington Colliery pithead, County Durham, where he talks about his lack of formal education, his work amongst the dockers in Glasgow, the seamen in South Shields, and the miners in Easington and Blackhall, in Horden and in Southend.
He gets into the back of a Vauxhall car with his colleague driving, a woman holding a baby peering over her back wall. They drive off and Shinwell looks out as they travel down a high street with big Co-operative and Woolworth stores, probably Easington. Two huge pylons straddle the road as the car heads out of town. General misty view of the line of pylons leading to Easington Colliery in the landscape. The car passes villages and a sign to Easington Colliery. Shinwell and his colleague get out at Easington Infants School in Seaside Lane (opened in 1915), Easington, which has served as a polling station for many local elections that Shinwell has won. Jeff’s driven him to every one since the Second World War. Shinwell talks about the past elections, but his colleague wasn’t there for the 1935 election. British Pathé newsreel footage of the schoolyard crowded with cheering people in 1935 after Shinwell defeated the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald at Seaham in the general election. Shinwell is carried on the shoulders of the people.
He sits together in a garden to discuss the political past with a former colleague who says he thought MacDonald was a great orator, talks about the influence of television on politics and the loss of the personal touch.
Shinwell walks around a colliery yard, the pit recently closed (Craghead?), and talks to miners’ wives in the village about what their husbands are doing now. In voice-over, Shinwell talks about his achievements including nationalisation of the coal industry in 1946.
Shinwell sits with another colleague who talks about the past socialist ideals of the Independent Labour Party, the poor conditions living in a County Durham pit village when he worked as a miner 40 years ago. He went down the pit in 1905, working for a pittance. Shinwell asks what he thinks about the nationalisation of the mines, since a lot of pits have closed down. He says he would have closed them long ago because it was ‘never intended that a man should get his living underground’. He says men are still getting killed down the mines. As long as you have pits, you will have accidents.
At the Durham Miners’ Gala, the Easington Lodge banner, draped in black cloth, is held amongst the crowd as they pause before the County Hotel to hear the Gresford played by brass band. In voice-over, Shinwell says the event was overshadowed by the death of miner Robert (Billy) Challoner in July that year, killed by a fall of stone while moving a stage loader at Easington Colliery. Shinwell stands in the crowd listening to the sad music. The procession continues. Shinwell chats to a colleague in the crowd. A group of young men and women dance down the street, arms linked. Harold Wilson and other special guests stand on the balcony of the County Hotel watching the parade, filmed by a TV cameraman.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson makes his speech at the Old Racecourse. Shinwell smokes his pipe in the crowd, smiling. A huge crowd listens to the speeches, seated behind a rope barrier manned by policemen. He claps after the speech. In voice-over, he muses that fine words are nothing if you don’t have a job to go to the following week. Harold and Mary Wilson wave to the crowd from the platform.
Coal buckets from Easington colliery move along an aerial ropeway, tipping coal waste on the foreshore. A bucket tips its load in the North Sea. A father and his son are fishing further up the beach. Shinwell hates the practice and says whenthe collieries were forced to clear up the beaches, they started dumping it in the sea. It is then washed up onto the beach by the tide. As a result all the sand has disappeared and left the beach blackened. He thinks that a beautiful part of the Durham coastline has been spoilt. A dumper truck shifts other mining waste down the side of the cliff.
Shinwell still thinks Durham County is beautiful. Four lads hike down a trail in the countryside. General views of a picturesque village.
Shinwell stands on the cliff top at Crimdon Dene looking over the busy beach towards Tees mouth and the Hartlepool power station in the far distance. Crimdon Dene was purchased by the council despite opposition to the idea of creating a ‘workers’ playground’. The council rate was increased. Shinwell says he supported the move and became unpopular because of this. A family heads from the caravan park at Crimdon Dene past the railway viaduct. Children play ball games at the camp. Children head down to the beach. Families settle onto the sand dunes, one woman in a bikini and wearing a bouffant hairstyle. Shinwell says that now it’s turned out to be one of the most popular workers’ seaside resorts in the country. Lots of people paddle in the sea in the sunshine, make sandcastles, bury each other in the sand and fly kites. Holidaymakers head to the self-service cafeteria to eat. Children and their parents have fun at the fairground, riding on the dodgems and waltzer. Two boys and a pet dog head back to their caravan at the huge site.
Shinwell talks to the general manager, Mr Reynolds, who says it’s probably the fourth largest caravan site in the country with around 1300 caravans. Children play a skipping game, lounge on the grass reading, play cricket. A woman hoes the soil around her caravan. A woman relaxes in a deckchair and strokes her pet dog. The manager says that now the resort contributes to the rates, rather than being a burden on rate payers.
General view of a colliery beside a slag heap, and a derelict Miners Hall. A group of miners are relaxing together outside an old tin hut. General view down the back road of the village. Shinwell says that industrialists from the south were not attracted by old villages, particularly when there was too much squalor. Washing lines are hung across a patch of wasteland, the mine shaft pithead in the background. Shinwell talks about the mining industry contracting, that he expected a new era of prosperity for the industry instead of which it’s all being closed down. A rag and bone cart drives by.
A modern sign for Peterlee stands outside the new town. Various shots record the modern buildings in the town, including some cantilevered houses. Children walk along paths in the town leading down to the concrete Apollo Pavilion, Oakerside Drive, (also known as Pasmore Pavilion), public art (part brutalist architecture, part Constructivist sculpture) that was designed by Victor Pasmore and completed in 1969. General view of Our Lady of the Rosary (RC) church on West Way. A young girl, hair in bunches, walks on the Apolllo Pavilion, standing at the eastern end of a small lake. General view of the Pavilion with the Pasmore abstract mural visible on one wall. Shinwell recalls the decision to make the new town of Peterlee, which ‘met with harsh criticism all over the area’, mainly as they feared it would attract all the industries. A lorry passes the Dewhirst factory outlet. Crudens, who built houses in the town, is also located on the industrial estate. Groups of women come out of Dewhirst after their shift. A woman looks out over the new town from the balcony of her home.
Shinwell looks out from a pedestrian walkway in Peterlee’s busy shopping centre. He then conducts a vox pops with different people about how they like living in Peterlee. There are differing opinions. He is driven around some of the earlier housing in Peterlee, more conventional than those designed by Pasmore, and into the headquarters of Peterlee Development Corporation at Shotton Hall. He speaks to the General Manager, Peter Williams, about some of the grievances of the people of Peterlee.
Various shots of workers follow: men working in engineering workshops, women on industrial Singer sewing machines and on ironing boards working in the clothing industry. Miners walk in a line down a shaft and work on a seam underground. In the Walkers crisps factory in Peterlee, women work on both a conveyor belt quality checking individual crisps as they pass and on the packing production line.
In a local pub, or working man’s club, men and women have a drink, smoke, chat and play dominoes. Shinwell chats to a group of ex-miners at the club. They talk about the time they asked the Prime Minister to come and open the club, he couldn’t come and George Brown came instead. They joke about the plaque to Brown (the British Labour politician who served as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1960 to 1970) having been moved to the foyer, demoted. Shinwell tells stories about speaking in Westminster, about being distracted from thinking up a speech because of mini-skirted women on the London tube. One of the men asks him why he is retiring from being MP for Easington. He says that at his time of life, 85, one is looking for pastures new.
General view of Easington colliery and the rows of terraced houses. Shinwell piece to camera explaining that he’s decided not to stand at the next general election. He thinks he should leave the job for someone else to do. He says that he has become something of a ‘household word’ in the area – Wheatley Hill, Thornley, South Heddon, Peterlee, Blackhall and the rest. He says he will always remember with affection the people in the Easington constituency, and he won’t abandon his political activity. He puffs on his pipe as he looks with affection at the village of Easington.
General views of some of the places he has served as MP follows including Peterlee, Crimdon Dene and Easington.
[During Clement Attlee’s Labour government Shinwell served as minister of fuel and power (1945–47), beginning the nationalization of British mines and giving miners a five-day workweek; he later served as Attlee’s minister of defence (1950-51). During Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 Labour administration, Shinwell, in his 80s, was three times elected chairman of the parliamentary Labour Party. Though he strenuously enforced party discipline in support of Wilson, he bitterly fought British membership in the European Economic Community. Shinwell was made a life peer in 1970 and served actively in the House of Lords, where beginning in 1982 he sat with the independents, though remaining a Labourite, in protest against what he considered left-wing militancy. He continued to serve in Parliament until his death, at the age of 101.]
Context
Independent TV finally reached the north east of England when Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5.00pm on January 15th 1959, broadcast from a disused warehouse in City Road on Newcastle’s historic quayside, transformed into state-of-the-art studios. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. They broadcast from this base for more than 45 years until the studios shut down in 2005.
In time, the station aimed to create a portrait of the north-east, “a land of wide skies, bent...
Independent TV finally reached the north east of England when Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5.00pm on January 15th 1959, broadcast from a disused warehouse in City Road on Newcastle’s historic quayside, transformed into state-of-the-art studios. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. They broadcast from this base for more than 45 years until the studios shut down in 2005.
In time, the station aimed to create a portrait of the north-east, “a land of wide skies, bent vowels, saints, footballers, shipyards and an inventive tradition which has produced the finest engineers in England: its landscape swings from wild moorland to industrial cities and back again to the sea-fretted coast of Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire” as author Antony Brown eulogizes in his book Tyne Tees Television: the first 20 years, a portrait (1978) “The north-east is as far as you can go from the centres of power in southern England.” Many of the Tyne Tees documentaries sprang from these regional roots. In the first live interview transmitted from the station, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan probably endeared himself to at least half the region’s viewers when he told the studio announcer: “Men are rather like fish. The farther north you go, the better they get.” By all accounts, the early years at Tyne Tees were ‘cheerfully haphazard’, seat-of-the-pants television that ranged from local talent on live variety shows, with a shade of the ‘end-of-the-pier’ about them, to serious politics, history and sports. One old City Road hand described the experience as hectic, like ‘being on a switchback ride’. Programming could swing from slick to amateurish in one night. Show business may have been the backbone of Tyne Tees TV production in those first years but the screens buzzed with imaginative regional documentaries that reflected a growing sense of identity between the station and the north-east communities it served. One outstanding series, A World of My Own, travelled back to the home towns, or places of significant influence in their early careers, with celebrated north east writers, sportsmen and political figures. The eldest son in an immigrant family of 13 children, born in Spitalfields in the East End of London, Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell was a socialist who cut his political teeth in the turbulent politics of Scottish trades unionism in the early 20th century. He supported intervention with the Republican Army against Franco’s Fascists in the Spanish Civil War along with the likes of Ellen Wilkinson, Jack Lawson, George Strauss and Aneurin Bevan. He became a Labour Party MP and member of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s cabinet in the 1920s and 30s, which coincided with an economic depression and rising unemployment. His path to politics started when given a pamphlet in 1903 by Karl Marx entitled Wages, Labour and Capital. Shinwell missed out on an education in his early years as he left school at age 11 to work for his father, a Polish Jew who had a clothing shop in London before moving the family to Glasgow, where they lived in the Gorbals. Instead, he resorted to self-education in the Glasgow Public Library and Kelvingrove Art Gallery at any opportunity. His long connection with County Durham mining communities began when he returned to the House of Commons after defeating Ramsay MacDonald at Seaham during a general election in 1935, an event which he recalls with pride in this autobiographical documentary as he returns to the old school and polling station where he celebrated victory with locals. After the Labour Party won the 1945 General Election, he held a series of Cabinet positions under the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, including Minister of Fuel and Power (July 1945 - October 1947). Shinwell is best remembered for nationalising coal mining in 1946, something he also discusses with an old Easington miner and colleague in this Tyne Tees TV programme, who points out that mining is inherently a dangerous profession and nationalisation did not change this fact. Shinwell served as MP for Seaham Harbour from 1935 to 1950 and for the Easington constituency from 1950 to 1970, by which time he was in his eighties. He would begin to see the signs of coal mining’s demise as pits began to close throughout the country despite Labour being in power. The danger endured by miners working down the pit is underlined as Manny Shinwell visits the iconic Durham Miners Gala in 1969, and the Easington colliery banner is draped in black. The melancholy ‘Gresford’, the Miners Hymn composed by Robert Saint, is played by a brass band outside the County Hotel in memory of miner Robert (Billy) Challoner. In July that year, he was killed by a fall of stone while moving a stage loader at Easington Colliery. The former Sunday Times journalist Peter Crookston has called this solemn music the ‘pitmen’s requiem’ in his book of the same name, an elegy and tribute to the miners who worked in the Great Northern Coalfield, its decline and demise (along with the network of strong working-class communities) following the miners’ strike of 1984. Robert Saint was born on 20 November 1905 at Hebburn Colliery, and followed his father and grandfather down the mines where he witnessed many accidents in a pit notorious for being ‘gassy’ and ‘accident-prone’. Music and campaigning for animal welfare (particularly pit ponies) were his passions and sustained his morale when he became unemployed at the age of 27 following the closure in 1932 of Hebburn Colliery. The horrific mine disaster at Gresford Colliery in North Wales on the morning of 22 September 1934, when 265 men and boys were trapped underground by an explosion and subsequent fire, with no hope of rescue, was the catalyst for Saint’s musical lament, an emotional piece written from the heart. The Gresford has since been played at countless funerals of miners and at pit villages throughout County Durham in memory of the dead. As Robert Colls, professor of cultural history at De Montford University in Leicester, states in his biography of Saint for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “Saint’s slow, elegiac, deep rolling crescendo, written for brass, is played when words are not enough.” In 2010 US experimental film-maker Bill Morrison and Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson collaborated on a tribute to Britain’s colliery culture of brass bands, banners and the Durham Miners Gala in a live performance for Durham Cathedral called The Miners’ Hymns. The new brass band score subtly weaves in Robert Saint’s Gresford to a montage of archival film as industrial archaeology, digging through the lives and landscape of mining in the Durham coalfield that has now been virtually erased. Manny Shinwell would have approved of one erasure from the beautiful Durham coastline. The coal detritus from Easington colliery was dumped unceremonially over the cliff and onto the beach, or later moved out to sea in buckets on aerial flight conveyors, only to flow back with the tides, creating blackened beaches only poular with sea coalers. In addition to Easington, conveyors were located at Ryhope, Dawdon, Horden and Blackhall. In 1971, Blackhall colliery’s conveyor and black beach featured in the bleak ending to Mike Hodge’s British crime thriller Get Carter. It was a location that the director described in his commentary as ‘a vision of hell’. After a £10 million pound clean-up following pit closures, funded by the Millenium Commission, One North East, British Coal and the EU, the beaches are gradually returning to the beauty of their pre-industrial state. Further down the coastline at Crimdon Dene the beach and sand dunes were considered a mine workers’ paradise in the 1950s and 60s. In this documentary the caravan park stretches along the cliffs, a home from home, and families snack in the Crimdon Pavilion, completed in 1954. The Dene was also full of beehive-shaped tin huts in the 50s and early 60s (some glimpsed in this film), surplus stock originally made for peanut growers in Tanzania and used by holiday makers as beach huts. The seaside resort held an annual beauty contest, which was hugely popular with young women from County Durham pit villages such as Wingate, South Hetton, Blackhall, Horden, Easington and Thornley. Manny Shinwell was frequently invited to the event as a judge. As he explains in the documentary, he was unpopular when he campaigned for the resort to stay in Easington District Council hands for the benefit of low-income workers, against the commercial interest of Butlins, for one. On 17th April 1946 the newly elected Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, passed the New Towns Act and launched the great post war re-housing experiment. Labour’s visionary 1945 manifesto “Let Us Face the Future” captured the public mood for change at the first election for 10 years, promising, amongst the many welfare initiatives, a national building programme using “modern methods, modern materials”. New homes were to rise from the ruins of the Second World War. The origin of the new town lay with the ”garden cities” of town planner Ebenezer Howard, his urban theories partly influenced by Edward Bellamy’s utopian science fiction novel “Looking Backward” (1888). Whilst offering a modernist future, the new towns were intended to be self-contained communities combining the convenience of town life with the clean air and green spaces of the countryside. Art and design was to play a key role in this new era of urban regeneration. Of the 11 new towns planned between 1946 and 1955, two were proposed in the North East to help attract new jobs to a region suffering the decline of coal, steel and shipbuilding industries: Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee, “designed for spacious living in a modern environment”. Newton Aycliffe was designated a future new town on 19th April 1947 with plans to re-purpose a once top secret Royal Ordnance Factory that had employed close to 16,000 women munitions workers during World War II, who became known as the “Aycliffe Angels”. The Peterlee Development Corporation was founded in 1948, and named after celebrated Durham Miners’ leader, Peter Lee. The town was the dream of C. W. Clarke, the Engineer and Surveyor to the Easington Rural District Council, who believed a new town could improve the deplorable conditions of the pit villages. The Council of miners and ex-miners were supportive. Clarke elaborated his ideas in a persuasive book defiantly titled Farewell Squalor, published in 1946 and submitted to Lord Reith’s New Town Committee. Plans for the construction of Peterlee New Town began promisingly in 1948 with the appointment of radical Russian modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin, who had designed the inventive penguin pool at London Zoo. But Lubetkin’s designs for an innovative environment of high-rise buildings were rejected due to the likelihood of subsidence in an area situated over working mines. Lubetkin would not compromise and resigned. George Grenfell-Baines then submitted new plans of conservative, red-brick low-rise housing along “wriggly roads”, which a critic on the Architectural Review later in 1967 described as being of “the dreariest kind”. In a unique experiment for town planning, the abstract artist Victor Pasmore, then teaching in Newcastle, was invited to collaborate with the architectural team to add a creative edge to the project. Pasmore’s contribution was the imaginative, cubist Sunny Blunts estate in a colour scheme of black, white and ochre linking to the area’s mining industry. Pasmore also designed a centre piece that was integral to the estate’s design. Named after the first manned mission to the moon with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong the first men to step foot on the moon's surface on July 20, 1969, – the year the structure was built – the Apollo Pavilion is an iconic example of 1960s public art, which spans a lake created by damming the Blunts stream. Despite problems with the practical execution of Pasmore’s designs in Peterlee, they still attract international acclaim. After a long period of neglect, the constructivist Pavilion was restored in 2009, and was granted the prestigious award of Grade II* listed building status in 2011. The “New Town” is again on the agenda for politicians today looking to ease themselves out of the housing crisis. References: For further context on the 1969 Durham Miners’ Gala attended by Manny Shinwell MP, see Durham Miners Gala July 1969 on the NEFA website https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/09/obituaries/lord-shinwell-a-fiery-figure-in-british-politics-dies-at-101.html https://spartacus-educational.com/TUshinwell.htm https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01blj2b https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/composer-miners-hymn-joins-great-10071809 Crookston, Peter, The Pitmen’s Requiem (Northumbria Press, 2010) http://www.durhamheritagecoast.org/our-story/history/turning-the-tide/ http://www.hhtandn.org/relatedimages/12168/crimdon-beauty-contest http://durhambookfestival.com/read/lucie-brownlee-the-world-above/ http://www.peterlee.gov.uk/about-peterlee-town/culture-and-heritage/the-new-towns-act/ https://www.somethingconcreteandmodern.co.uk/building/peterlee-new-town/ https://www.somethingconcreteandmodern.co.uk/building/apollo-pavilion/ http://www.apollopavilion.info/history/ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/dec/15/apollo-pavillion-peterlee-listed-building |
