We are not the sort of people in Stoke to have time for racists ...They like to come and have a go but we send them packing
I went to hear him speak. He was sympathetic to Hitler JACK HOOD ON THE OSWALD MOSLEY RALLY
IF the collapse of UKIP started anywhere it was on the Bentilee estate in Stoke-on-Trent, a scheme built by a visionary postwar Labour government on top of disused collieries.
UKIP leader Paul Nuttall proclaimed Bentilee, once the largest council estate in Europe, the “Brexit capital of the country” as he stopped for Staffordshire oatcakes at a shop on Beverley Drive during his failed campaign to be MP for Stoke Central.
Mr Nuttall is the latest in a string of right-wing leaders to try it on in Stoke.
Oswald Mosley made it the launch pad for his New Party before forming the British Union of Fascists.
Nick Griffin used to call Stoke-on-Trent the “jewel in the BNP’s crown”.
Over in nearby Wolstanton, 102-year-old Jack Hood remembers how the city saw off Mosley.
Jack was 23 when he saw the fascist leader hold a rally at the Victoria Hall in Hanley, one of the six towns that make up Stoke-on-Trent, in 1938.
“I went with my lady-friend to hear him speak. The man was a fascist. He was sympathetic to Hitler. I interrupted him with questions. You weren’t allowed to ask hostile questions, so we were thrown out.” The Blackshirts, he recalls, were “very aggressive. Big, burly men”.
We are in Stoke-on-Trent as part of the Daily Mirror’s Wigan Pier Project, retracing George Orwell’s steps on the 80th anniversary of the publication of The Road To Wigan Pier, listening to the echoes of 1930s Britain in 2017. Jack says: “History always repeats itself.” Orwell missed Mosley in Stoke, but caught him in Barnsley, where he wrote that men who tried to ask questions were thrown out with “quite unnecessary violence” by Blackshirts.
Jack worked at the pot banks, or pottery factories, before becoming a building site foreman.
He was the Labour council’s clerk of works for 30 years, and may be the party’s longest-serving member, having joined at age 16, 86 years ago.
Unconsciously, after returning to the memories of 80 years ago, Jack refers to UKIP as “the New Party”, the name under which Mosley targeted Stoke, where he gave cash and clothes to workers in the Depression.
Mosley knew the town because his first wife Lady Cynthia had been the Labour MP in Longton. In 1931, he
UKIP had its chance here. They didn’t win. They are finished TIM RICHES OWNER OF A VAPING SHOP
fought the Longton seat himself under the New Party banner and polled 10,534 votes, but still finished in third place.
Two years later, he formed the British Union of Fascists. He never won in Stoke, or in any election again.
After Mosley came Griffin’s BNP, which at one time had nine councillors in Stoke-on-Trent. Yet the year after 2009, when Griffin called the city the BNP’s jewel, the party imploded.
Last week, after Stoke Central roundly humiliated UKIP’s leader, the party received what may have been a fatal wounding in the local elections. What Nuttall misunderstood was that Stokeon-Trent is not in decline but on the up – so much so that it is bidding to be City of Culture 2021. Back on the Bentilee, Tim Riches, 38, who runs a vaping shop, tells me UKIP are finished. He says: “They had their chance here, they didn’t win, it’s finished. “Most people round here aren’t like that. They’re fed up with the lack of jobs, lack of a future. It doesn’t mean they think everything’s about immigration.” Walking through the estate, trainee nurse Irene Mugwara, 39, says UKIP and the Tories have forgotten one thing: “United we stand, divided we fall.” Labour’s big threat here is UKIP voters, many ex-Labour, going to the Tories. Tim Riches says: “There’s the ones who vote Labour like their grandads did, and the young ones who don’t vote at all.” Two young women working in the betting shop aren’t voting. One says: “However I vote nothing will change. If the hospital is going to close, it’s going to close. They’ll do what they’re going to do.” At the baker’s, shop assistant Diane Carr, 52, will vote Labour “because that’s what we’ve always done, my family, but I don’t really know why”. We find only one likely UKIP voter, and two new Tory voters, including warehouse worker Peter Lewis, 55. He says: “I work with all sorts of people, who have come to Stoke for lots of different reasons, and I don’t have a problem with that. They do the job. So UKIP’s not for me.”
Orwell wasn’t kind about Stoke, dismissing “the rows of tiny blackened houses… the ‘pot banks’… belching their smoke almost in your face”.
Pot banks went with the Clean Air Act of 1952, and he would have approved of the Bentilee, built a year later, with its lovely views across the countryside.
Social history lecturer Fred Hughes, 79, says: “The first tenants were so stunned by the brightness from two living room windows they called them sunshine houses.” Six decades later, Labour built the estate’s £10million neighbourhood centre. On June 8, the party risks losing two seats in Stoke-on-Trent to the Tories, or the city may confound expectations yet again. Either way, its future is no longer with UKIP.
Jack Hood says: “We’re not the sort of people they think we are.
“These parties like to come and have a go but we like to send them packing.” ros.wynne-jones@trinitymirror.com