Another voice
A glorious kedgeree
Auberon Waugh
All human life seemed to wander through the Lime Grove studio of Breakfast Television when I sat there for two and a half hours last week in one of those occasional moments of glory which illuminate a scribbler's life, chatting non- chalantly with the beautiful, sweet-natured Selina Scott and her pleasantly masculine colleague, Frank Bough. First, Selina asked me to do my bit about the North of . England, the young and the general prob- lem of unemployability in Britain; then, with no suggestion of irony, they wheeled on four unemployed young persons from Merseyside. They were from a party of 25 who had come down in a bus to see the Prime Minister, who spent an hour and a half with them, to be roundly insulted for her pains.
They had also been seeing a few people about jobs, but it was hard to imagine any prospective employer in the South jumping at the opportunity, at any rate so far as these four were concerned. One said that yes, he had once had a job for six weeks but the pay was only £40 a week, for which he was expected to work 65 hours, or so he said. Under examination from Frank Bough, he agreed that he also received full board and lodgings, so the £40 a week was more or less pocket money. I should have thought there were not all that many people of his age in the South of England who had £40 a week pocket money to spend — anybody who has to find his own lodgings and keep in the London area will need to be earning at least £125 a week before achieving such a _level after tax, insurance and transport costs have been added to the cost of a bedsitter, food and heat. But this young man from Merseyside was bitter and angry that such terms should even be offered to him. Next a young woman complained that it was all very well for people to offer her jobs away from home, but this would mean her leaving home. She, too, was deeply insulted by any such suggestion. And Mrs Thatcher had promised her nothing?
Perhaps some bloated industrialist watching the programme decided on the spot to build a factory in this young woman's back garden, but that would not have been my reaction. To my jaundiced southern eyes, there seemed nothing poig- nant in the plight of these young people, nothing remotely sympathetic in their approach to it.
These unlovely victims of Thatcherism, southern prejudice etc (who, in a juster world, would have been hired on the spot to present Blue Peter) took over from an official of the NUM who had come to explain the result of the miners' ballot which unmistakably repudiated any sug- gestion that miners should accept a com- pulsory levy of 50p a week to help out their colleagues who had been sacked in the strike. Mr John Burrows was treasurer of the North Derbyshire area; unlike South Derbyshire which boycotted the ballot, North Derbyshire urged its members to support the levy and was among the areas identified in the Guardian next day as having voted against it. Mr Burrows said that the reason for this apparently callous, uncaring vote was that his members, now back at work, were so poor they simply could not afford the 50p a week.
Mr Peter Heathfield, general secretary of the NUM, had a rather more sophisti- cated explanation for the adverse result. He thought that his members might have feared that a national levy could be misin- terpreted by the National Coal Board as a. sign of the NUM's backing down from its demand that all its sacked members should be reinstated and a general amnesty de- clared. On the contrary, he told the Guar- dian, `our members and their families' saw reinstatement as a crucial campaigning issue which required the total support of the labour movement.
Gracious, how I laughed when I read that! One does not like to gloat, of course, but it seems to me that in our determina- tion not to gloat we may be missing one of the best jokes of modern times. Whichever way one looks at it, the result of this miners' ballot was supremely comical. The fact that Arthur Scargill was away in Moscow at the time makes it even funnier, of course, but the central joke is in the egg it leaves all over the faces of those vener- able people who have been claiming to understand all about the miners ever since the strike began. Even Kit Fraser, who has written what I suspect is the only worth- while study of the contemporary mining industry (Toff Down Mine, Quartet £8.95),
I'm getting quite a quiche belly.' assures us that for all their brutal appetites and gross behaviour miners are fierce in their loyalty to each other, rock-like in their solidarity, and would never fail to support a colleague in trouble. It was reasonable enough to be told to wipe the smirk off one's face when the miners' strike collapsed: perhaps, indeed, chill penury had forced a proud and valiant race to submit. Perhaps their struggle had been glorious in its refusal to come to terms with the modern world and in its hopelessness.
But there can be nothing glorious or hopeless in the miners' refusal to contri- bute 50p a week towards their comrades who had been sacked. It is just terribly, terribly funny.
Talking to Mr Burrows during an inter- mission, I questioned the arithmetic of the proposed levy. If 186,000 members of the NUM each contributed 50p a week, this would produce £93,000 a week. Estimates of the number of beneficiaries vary.
According to the Daily Star (which is usually quite good on trade union matters), 800 men were dismissed by the NCB during the course of the strike. According to the Guardian, 900 were dismissed but 280 have since been reinstated. According to the Times, only 300-400 are still un- employed. If the Times is right, this would have given them between £232 and £310 a week each — considerably more than any except coalface workers could possibly have earned. When I put this to Mr Burrows, he said that the sums proved how the NUM concerned itself with more than just the problem of the sacked miners.
After these matters had been dealt with, the programme moved to other matters. Viewers saw the Chef of the Year and the Waiter of the Year being interviewed by Mr Robert Carrier. The Chef of the Year, Mr Roger Narbett, of the Bell Inn, Bell Broughton, Worcestershire, then prepared us a most delicious kedgeree. It was produced with all the usual ingredients rice, smoked haddock and hard-boiled eggs — except that the rice was cooked in saffron and an excellent sauce was made from the liquor in which the smoked haddock was cooked (presumably milk) with butter, flour and cream. This came with a champagne from Perrier Jouet its 'prestige' brand, in pretty painted bottles, which I have noticed seems to be taking over from Roederer's Crystal and Moet's Dom Perignon in show business circles — served by the Waiter of the Year to Selina, Frank and me.
As we sipped the champagne and nib- bled the smoked haddock, it occurred to me that there is indeed much to celebrate in modern Britain. I do not envy Mrs Thatcher her job, dealing with all these unpleasant and useless people in the North of England. Wedgwood Benn and others can take comfort that over a quarter — in fact 27.1 per cent — of the NUM's total membership actually voted for the levy. But I feel that Mrs Thatcher is doing rather well.
Previous page
