Twenty years on

Richard West

Warrington The Editor-in-Chief of the Warrington Guardian, Trevor Buckley, writes on the front page of the current issue: 'Only Week Two of the preliminaries to the pending Warrington Parliamentary by-election, widely regarded as the most important political poll of the century, and the town already has a couple of black eyes and a trickle of blood from the community nose. Bruisers from Fleet Street have skipped up and down the motorway or rail line. Some have previous fame, others are still trying to achieve fame but apart from one or two notable exceptions, most have failed to find newsworthy facts and so have introduced colour in the form of personal sneers at the environment and the community. .

As one palsied bruiser who long since abandoned the hope of fame, I still have to admit the justice of Mr Buckley's complaint. Nothing has happened yet in the Warrington by-election; even its date has not yet been fixed and I could not find anyone at the offices of the Social Democrat Party, whose intervention here makes this the 'by-election of the century' — which I doubt it will prove. But if instead write of Warrington, 'the environment and the community', I can at least claim to have some terms of reference; for I wrote just such an article 20 years ago, in fact just before the by-election which brought in Tom Williams as Labour MP, the pan whose appointment as judge causes the present excitement. My article at the time (which appeared in Time and Tide) failed to mention even the names of the candidates but was much concerned with the environment and the community, and I think offers points of comparison with today. (The 1961 extracts appear in italics.) The first impressions of Warrington come through the nose. Within a minute of leaving Bank Quay Station, I found myself coughing savagely . . . as the smoke crept down my tongue and throat towards the lungs. The road downwind of the station gets the worst of it. A chemical works adds flavour to the belching smoke from the trains; Crosfields, the Persil people, contribute a flavour of soap. . . A galvanising plant to the north-east adds the strongest stench of all, and at one time stained the curtains mauve in many surrounding houses. . . Coal fires in the home account for most of the dirt, they [Warrington councillors] tell you. One councillor told me this in front of his own coal fire.

That was no exaggeration. In fact, that visit to Warrington caused me to stop smoking for good. But now the Warrington air is pure, or at any rate odourless. Some of this must be due to the money spent on cutting pollution — Crosfield's alone have spent El. million — but I think that the Warrington councillors got it right. Domestic coal fires accounted for most of the poisonous air. The only real hotel in Warrington is the Patten Arms, which is friendly and serves very good food by any standards.

The Patten Arms is still the only real hotel. It is still friendly. Further than that, I could not go. In fact, if the Social Democrat candidate, Mr Roy Jenkins, is really the gourmet of repute, his decision to stand at Warrington and stay at the Patten Arms should earn him political martyrdom.

Several depressed but dirty towns disprove the saying that 'Where there's muck there's brass'. But Warrington is remarkably prosperous, and one of the few towns in Britain that have not experienced a set-back since the war. The locals have coined a phrase for Warrington, the 'town of varied industry'.

Warrington remains a 'town of varied industry'. Besides the soap, galvanising and chemical factories mentioned already, the town has a wire factory, a paper box works, several breweries and the distillery making the vodka, whose very funny advertisements please even those who do not drink it. Most of these industries have in the last three years suffered contraction but no closure. The New Town industrial estate, which is outside the constituency, has managed to gain factories during the same difficult years, including those of 20 multinational companies.

Warrington's excellent labour relations are due in part to being a 'town of varied industries'. Even if one factory has a strike, and few of them do, it does not spread through the town. A Socialist shop steward told me: 'We have very few hotheads in the town. You get a few in the Electrical Trades Union and they might influence their mates. And of course there are some among the railwaymen. . .'. A Conservative businessman said: The workpeopk here are good citizens. .

Exactly the same could be said of the town today, though the few union hotheads tend to be found now in the AEU and the local government unions. 'Warrington people are very level-headed', I was told. This is all the more strange since Warrington lies on the outskirts of Merseyside, whose militant, bloody-minded and suicidal trade union leaders have wrecked the local economy. The level-headedness of Warrington is matched by most of the south-east Lancashire towns. The peculiar madness of Liverpool is often, perhaps unfairly, blamed on the Irish. 'What's wrong with Merseyside?', I recently asked one of its Tory MPs who gave me that answer — 'the Irish'. The Warrington work force is local, and most of the migrants to Warrington come from western Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The town also enjoys an ethnic unity. There are few immigrants from the rest of the British Isles to disturb the peaceable social pattern. There are very few coloured people and those West Indians I saw seemed to mix easily with the English. The largest foreign community consists of six Adeni Arabs.

There are now a small number of Asians in Warrington; virtually no West Indians. This latter fact may or may not relate to the very low level of violent crimes. The rate of car theft and burglary has increased but law and order' is not an issue in Warrington, as it is in most parts of Britain today.

Engels wrote in the 1840's that 'if it were possible for this furious expansion of industry to continue unchecked for another century, every manufacturing district in England would become a single large factory town. Manchester and Liverpool, for example, would meet at Warrington or Newton-leWillows.'

Both Manchester and Liverpool are dying of inanition. Towns like Warrington have avoided merging into one of the two great conurbations. Indeed it has gained a new sense of local pride.

In Warrington one can seldom judge a man's class by his accent. Amost all speak the same soft, flat and attractive Lancashire. . Most of Warrington's middle classes have long since moved 'over the water', that is over the Ship Canal into Cheshire, where they enjoy purer air and the illusion of country life.

Thanks to the infamous county boundary changes of the abominable Heath-Walker regime, the whole of Warrington, Lancs is now Warrington, Cheshire. For this reason alone, I hope that the Tory loses his deposit in the forthcoming by-election. Apparently Roy Jenkins still sometimes refers to Warrington, Lancs. He should make it part of his platform. However, it must be said that the change is not so sudden here as in the rest of England. The dividing line between Cheshire and Lancashire was slightly altered in 1894 when the Ship Canal was cut beside the Mersey. However the Victorians did not accompany boundary changes with gross bureaucratic 'tiers' of local government.

The town's only newspaper, the weeklY Warrington Guardian. . might do more to promote concern about local affairs. In Warrington, as in so many parts of England today, the local paper is now much livelier than the slack, overstaffed giants of Fleet Street. A recent leader in the Warrington Guardian called on the town to take advantage of forthcoming publicity: qt would be a great pity if after the hu-ha of the . . . election, the only lasting picture of Warrington is the place where non-Russian vodka is made'.