Midlands Notebook
To get by train to Walsall, North, where a Parliamentary by-election is to be held on 4 November, you change first at Birmingham New Street station, not to be muddled with Birmingham International station, which serves the grandiose Conference Centre that has been thrown up on some waste land outside the city. Walking along the train,you soon get a good idea of who is going to New Street and who is going to International : the first class Pullman coaches contain a handful of Arabs, Germans and Americans While there is standing room only for native English, Asians and West Indians in the dingy second class carriages. At least this IS not one of the fearsome high-speed trains that British Rail have inflicted on some westward routes, but even at sixty miles an hour the train sways alarmingly on its ancient, warped, narrow-gauge track.
On my way to the West Midlands I and local newspapers looked to find what was happening there. The Birmingham travel and Property company David Charles had crashed; a divorce court judge had ruled that the Birmingham suburb of Solihull was a reasonable place to live', in rejecting the Plea by a London-born wife that joining her husband there was intolerable; there had been sixty-five arrests at a 'friendly' match between Aston Villa and Glasgow Rangers.
In fact, my train had a fair number of football supporters, wearing the scarves of a London club and heavy boots, which was Odd, for there was no match that day. 'I can't make it out,' said the restaurant car waiter, 'I suppose we're going to get hooligans now every day of the week. It was terrible at Aston Villa last weekend. They had to stop the match but at least that Denis Howell was in the crowd, that Minister of Sport. At least he knows what it 'S like now. They should use dogs. There's not a peep out of them when they see the dogs.' He paused to break up a couple of girls who were kissing each other at the far end of the corridor. 'Could you go to the next carriage, where you can have more Privacy,' he asked them most politely, then turning to me, said: 'And that's a thing I've not seen on this train before. Two blokes, Yes. But two girls Travelling to Walsall from Birmingham.
Passenger points out the Aston Villa ground, scene of the latest football vandalism. 'I'm an old man', he says, 'and I may be an Edwardian but when I look at this generation, I'm glad I'm on the downhill Side.' Everywhere in the West Midlands, soccer hooligans are the main topic of Conversation, far more than inflation, unemployment or race.
While waiting to change trains at Birmingham I went to a pub at the base of an office block in the infamous Bull Ring development. There were uniformed guards at the door for this was one of the two pubs bombed by the IRA two years ago causing the deaths of twenty people. 'People stayed away fora few weeks afterwards:sa id the man next to me at the bar. 'They come for a quick drink, out of curiosity, then nip out again smartish. Now it's more crowded than ever!
Walsall is unattractive even compared to the rest of the Black Country. Giant pylons march with the motorway over grey fields crossed by stagnant canals. There are row after row of terraced cottages, deserted and waiting for demolition, still containing the grates and pieces of furniture that have not been worth stealing. The air is acrid, which explains why the marble statue of Sister Dora, a Walsall nurse in the nineteenth century, corroded and had to be replaced by a bronze replica twenty years ago. I had not heard of Sister Dora or any of Walsall's famous citizens. It was the home of Mrs Siddons's husband but not otherwise a theatrical town ; when Edmund Kean played here the Staffordshire Advertiser critic said he had 'never seen a man less gifted as a tragedian'.
Today Walsall is best known for the 'Black Panther', a murderer, and for John Stonehouse, the financier and former Postmaster-General, whose imprisonment is the cause of this by-election. He is not much talked about now, and neither of his self-justificatory books is to be found in Walsall library between the autobiographies of Mary Stocks and Mary Stott, but it is possible to see Stonehouse's point of view that he was no worse than other politicians.
At his trial he claimed that both Harold Wilson and Edward Short had asked him to put work in the way of friends of theirs: Joe Kagan and T. Dan Smith. In his book My Trial he acknowledges the help he received from Peter Walker, the former partner of Jim Slater. 'The man Stonehouse most admired,' I was told by one who knows him well, was Reginald Maudling. He admired Maudling for having done well in business. He liked the good life. When Stonehouse was attacked in the press, his wife was rung up by Beryl Maudling who said they were doing to John what they'd tried to do to Reggie'.
Stonehouse, for a time at any rate, really cared about Africa, Asia and other poor parts of the earth. He has described how touched he was during the trial when a Ugandan law student told him that his 'efforts for Africa had not been completely forgotten or wholly obscured by the trial'. Those Asians who invested in Stonehouse's bank may not think of him with affection but I heard him spoken of generously by a West Indian in Walsall. 'In Jamaica we say that if a man sees something and grabs it, good luck to him, as long as as he doesn't get caught. Mr Stonehouse was caught.' This Jamaican, who introduced me to Walsall's pub fare of mild beer and scratchings (or poi k crackling) said that he was not worried about the National Front, who have entered a candidate for the coming byelection. Indeed one gets the impression that race relations are better in the West Midlands, in spite of its being Enoch Powell's stamping ground, than they are in London. This may be because the immigrants tend to be spread out among the whites rather than concentrated in large ghettoes like Southall or Brixton.
The Labour candidate in the by-election, David Winnick, is well qualified to deal with the problems of coloured constituents since he works for the UK Immigrants Advisory Service. But the job may not be altogether an electoral asset since the UK [AS and its head, John Ennals, have been much attacked in the press. The acerbic John Junor of the Sunday Express even accused Ennals of running a 'harem' at the taxpayers' expense. I asked Mr Winnick if he had been involved in the recent row when part of the UK IAS staff tried to get rid of Ennals. He said, no, he was not, but he cannot be too unhappy about it, since Ennals, before he was first attacked in Private Eye, had been a hot favourite for the Walsall North seat.
I was told that Mr Winnick had not at first wanted to talk to anyone from the Spectator because he is 'left-wing'. In fact, he graciously consented to see me because, in his own words, 'I haven't agreed with many things you've written over the years but I agreed with you about Vietnam'. Thank you very much. He has a prissy voice, a thin smile and a way of appearing to walk without moving his legs above the knee.
Richard West
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