BlindBoyGrunt
Well-known member
Redwurzel, in your first post you commented about a survey had Teesside as the third most prosperous region in the UK. However, it wasn’t a survey, it was a study, carried out by the Universities of Leeds, Teesside and Glasgow. In the conclusion they contrasted the poverty rates of Middlesbrough and Glasgow now, with how they were in more prosperous times.
“For the most of the years since the 1980s, Middlesbrough has had more or less twice the national average level of unemployment. It is now regularly described as one of the poorest and least economically resilient towns in England. Yet in the early 1970s, because of its low rates of unemployment and high skilled and well-paying jobs, Teesside was estimated to be the third most prosperous local economy in the UK (after London and Aberdeen) (Tees Valley Unlimited 2010). “
I mentioned earlier that I left school in 1973 and in those days, just about everybody who I knocked about with took up an apprenticeship, and those who didn’t ether went to college or found a different kind of work. At the time there were two shipyards on the Tees, RDL had three fabrication yards at Britannia, Teesside Bridge and Warrenby, and there was ICI at Wilton and Billingham and also offshore yards including Laings. The trunk Rd opposite Wilton was lined with steelworks from Middlesbrough to Lackenby. Between them, all of these enterprises took on literally hundreds of apprentices a year, and they all ran their own onsite training schools.
At this time too, construction was just beginning on Redcar Steel Complex which would be home to the second biggest blast furnace in Europe. There was also a lot of construction work going on at Seal Sands. Teesside was a hive of industry and all of these places were filled with well paid tradesmen and process operators. Working class kids earning very good money. When I worked at RDL Warrenby and later at Redcar Complex, British Steel and ICI day shifts had to have staggered start/finish times so that the local infrastructure could cope with the thousands of people traveling to and from work.
Chris Kamara is a school year older than me so would have left in 1972 or 71 (fifth year wasn’t compulsory in those days) and I don’t know why he took the route that he did but it certainly wasn’t because there were no work opportunities. Yes there will have been poverty in those days; there always is. London is still the most prosperous city but it still has pockets of extreme poverty.
