Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Orwell made Wigan out to be a nightmare but working at the pit was the best days of my life ...I’d go back tomorrow
On the Monday after her 15th birthday, Rita Culshaw started work at Wigan Junction Colliery. “I was only a little thing, 4ft 10in and about five stone, but I was strong enough for the pit brew,” Rita says.
Her eyes rest on the pair of battered but beloved clogs on the table in front of us, as she goes on: “My sister took me at 6am, we walked two miles from home.
“I still remember the sparks my clogs made when I walked on the cobbles.
“We got changed at the new baths – you put on your shawl and an old man’s jacket with your clogs and in you went.
“They used to put Vaseline on your eyelashes to stop the coal dust sticking.”
From 1948 to 1951, Rita was a “pit brew lass”, chosen because her hands were small and nimble enough to sort coal from dirt as it ran along a conveyor belt at the “brew”, or brow, of the pit.
Rita, now an 83-year-old grandmother, says: “People write about it like it were a nightmare, George Orwell did. But it weren’t like that. They were the best years of my life.” We’ve come to see Rita as we retrace Orwell’s steps on The Road to Wigan Pier on the 80th anniversary of his book about the industrial North.
Orwell’s trip did not actually end in Wigan, but the title made the town a byword for a grotesque form of poverty.
At a commemorative event at the town’s Sunshine House community centre, a woman tells how she set up a Facebook group to discuss the book locally. She says: “The group became an argument about what part of people’s anatomy they’d wipe the book on.”
Wiganers resent the fact Old Etonian Orwell chose to stay at the Brooker’s tripe shop, when there were plenty of more sanitary lodgings available.
Louise Fazackerley, a Wigan poet, says: “Mrs Brooker is basically on the sick. It’s like Benefits Street choosing families to show the worst of people.”
Orwell himself admitted “though it’s not worse than 50 other places, Wigan has always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas”.
As a modern-day correction, Louise takes us to the beautifully restored Mesnes Park, and to the new arts centre where she works, The Courthouse. She says: “Unlike Orwell, I grew up never believing writing could possibly be a job. This place is about challenging that.”
She laughs about the “pier” in Orwell’s title, a “tumble down wooden jetty”.
Louise says: “‘Do you live on the coast in Wigan?’ The number of times you get asked that. Orwell was trying to speak up for common people – but as a town we have suffered the full weight of that famous book, the full stigma.”
Perhaps that’s why Orwell’s visit is damned with faint commemoration – a plaque on a grass verge where the tripe shop used to stand.
Rita says for 80 years the book made the town want to distance itself from its coal-mining past. Now, the
Wigan Heritage and Mining Monument is raising funds for a statue honouring the miners and pit brew lasses.
Rita says: “Wiganers’ sweat
helped power the industrial revolution and make Britain one of the richest countries in the world. It’s time that we remembered that.”
There is a sense here that
Wigan is starting a new chapter. Part of the Leeds-liverpool canal is now earmarked as “The Wigan Pier Quarter”, a new “retail and leisure destination”.
Wigan North Western has recently been confirmed as the North West’s gateway to the HS2 high-speed rail link.
Local Labour MP, Lisa Nandy, talks of how the future lies with places like Wigan, where “tightly knit communities and a strong sense of identity and shared JOIN us virtually on the road to Wigan Pier. Online: mirror.co.uk/wiganpier2017
Twitter: @wiganpier2017. Or email us your Wigan Pier story at wiganpier@mirror. co. uk or write to Wigan Pier Project, Daily Mirror, 1 Canada Square, London. E14 5AP. history offer a vision the future far preferab faceless globalisation
Rita is reading Road to Wigan Pier on Kindle and admits: descriptions of mining very accurate. But look at us now, w foodbanks. I think it’s actually wor never, ever went hungry as a child.”
People who battled for years to b a new future after the end of Lancas coal mining now face austerity cuts insecure work. Where in Orwell’s Wiganers sought help from the Pu Assistance Committee, today they a battle with Universal Credit.
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