His communist grandad and gipsy granny
KEN Clarke is not the sort to trade his ‘poor-boy’ origins, but his classically working-class upbringing was neither privileged nor entirely conventional, his new memoir reveals.
Home was the Derbyshire pit village of Langley Mill surrounded by coal tips and smoky air. Both his parents left school at 13; his father was never offered a secondary education and his mother was refused one on the basis that it would be wasted on a girl, but this didn’t hold them back. Ken Sr became an electrician, cinema manager and, later, watchmaker and jeweller and, despite his wife’s on/off battles with depression, the family managed to live largely happily and in considerable style, in a pleasant semi-detached house with their own car.
Ken’s grandparents, on both sides, were rather more colourful.
Grandfather Clarke ran away to sea as a boy, travelled the world, occasionally dabbled as a house painter and had an arresting effect on the ladies.
His first wife fled on their wedding night, to be replaced by Ken’s grandmother — a gipsy, according to Clarke family legend. Her ‘sister’ (more likely, her daughter) came as part of the package and for years, all three lived very happily together.
So much so, that when Ken’s gipsy granny died, her sister/daughter promptly married his grandfather.
On the other side of the family, his maternal grandfather was a toolmaker at the Raleigh bicycle factory, an obsessive enterer of magazine competitions and a communist — forever telling his grandson to read the Daily Worker, while Ken far preferred the Daily Mail.
Indeed, from the tender age of five, young Ken read the Daily Mail avidly, absorbing every detail of the Attlee government elected in 1945.
He became utterly bewitched by unfolding political events and, with the help of the Daily Mail and endless homemade political scrapbooks, astonishingly well-informed.
By the time he was seven, he was following Chancellor Stafford Cripps’ robust economic policies and rejoicing at the demise of Baron Shinwell, the minister for fuel and power whom he (and the Daily Mail) held responsible for the great coal shortage of 1947 and endless power cuts. At about the same time, he stood up in class and announced he would one day be a politician, not a train driver or coal miners like most of his peers.
Twenty-three years later, he became true to his word as Conservative Member for Rushcliffe, Notts.
His trajectory had been aided by a full scholarship to Nottingham High School — thanks to Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act (something he insists transformed his whole life) and his uncannily ability to sail through exams.
Meanwhile, Ken’s enthusiasm for pubs, clubs, bars and jazz took off the minute some of Nottingham’s more tolerant barmen turned a blind eye.