Children of Coal: A Migrant's Story

By Judith White

In a memoir spanning a century of family life, Judith White reflects on the pain inflicted on lives in Britain and Australia by an empire built on coal.
Born in the North of England, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, she rekindles childhood memories to tell the stories of the remarkable women and men who struggled through two world wars and the Depression.
Fleeing Britain in the Thatcher years she learned, from the First Nations people and the writers and artists of Australia, what a university education had never taught her about the devastating impact of colonisation.
Children of Coal adds a singular voice to the rising chorus calling for the public reckoning with history that is needed to free society from the shackles of the empire of the mind.

"An engaging family tapestry of lives influenced by a country's dependence on coal. Written with astute political economy perspectives and in elegant prose, this insightful and gutsy truth telling shows Judith's lifetime commitment to social justice and her timely hopes for a post Covid social revolution." – Professor Stuart Rees, founder of the Sydney Peace Prize

"Judith White writes with great affection, understanding and humour about her upbringing in the north of England and the heritage which did so much to shape her character and her direction in life. A book alive with people you would like to have known." – Sandra Hall, film critic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781649698391

Judith White

Judith White is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Centenary Award, and twice winner of the Auckland Star Short Story Competition. A collection of short stories, Visiting Ghosts, was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards, and her first novel, Across the Dreaming Night, was shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book of the Year. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Book preview

For Janet

for our sons

Scott and Chris

and for the Mitchell clan

Life is not simply what you lived through 

but what you remember and how, in remembering, 

you are able to tell the story.

Gabriel García Márquez

Principal characters

     THE YORKSHIRE FAMILY

Willie Sutton, Grandpa

Minnie Sutton, Grandma

Joan White née Sutton, Mum, Ma

Jeffrey Sutton, Uncle Jeff

Dorothy Allen née Sutton, Dorf, Dorfie

Bill Allen, Uncle Bill

Leslie Sutton, Uncle Leslie

Lilian Harcourt, Great-Aunt Lilian aka Florrie

Florence Sutton, Great-Aunt Florrie aka Flo

THE LANCASHIRE FAMILY

William White, Grandpa White

Winifred White née Slater, Nana White

Donald White, Pa

Bernard White, Uncle Bernard

Richard White, Uncle Dick

Janet Fyffe née White, The Voice of Reason

THE FRENCH FAMILY

Suzanne Lallement née Sureau, Tante Suzanne

Pierre Lallement, Hero of the Resistance

François Büttner, Joan’s ex-fiancé

THE AUSTRALIAN FAMILY

Bill and Joe Broes Donald's cousins

Alex Mitchell partner of the author

Scott Donald Mitchell son of the author

I THE SHADOW OF WAR

1 The sands of memory

Dig, said my friend from our street. Keep digging. If we keep digging we’ll get to Australia.

It was summer of a kind, and we had taken off our cardigans and were sitting with our spades and buckets on the narrow, windswept stretch of fine pale sand between the grass-spiked dunes and the mud flats that reached far out into the estuary.

My big sister Janet was there, the budding scientist and Voice of Reason, and she put us straight. Well, she said, the middle of the earth is molten rock and fire, all the stuff that comes up when a volcano erupts, so you can never get through it. 

We dug on stubbornly for a while, down through the dry sand, and came to wet sand and mud and then darker, wetter mud and didn’t even reach the bit where it was supposed to get hotter so we soon gave up, going off to play among the dunes instead.

In my mind Australia was a golden place, the glowing colour of the cans of peach jam and slabs of butter that came in food parcels sent, in those days of post-war rationing, by my fathers’ cousins in distant Mildura. Our parents unpacked the parcels with great ceremony on the dining room table. The peach jam was a shiny, intense orange and tasted of sunshine, of a place far from the Lancashire seaside.

In our coastal town the trees behind the dunes grew horizontally and the rain fell sideways and grey clouds hung low over the estuary. When the south-westerlies came they sent sand whirling across the road, scraping bare legs raw, drifting into every crevice of kerbs and pavements, and piling up against the low red-brick walls that barricaded the front gardens with their patches of lawn and valiant flower beds.

Light from the sea penetrated every corner of the town, stealing across the train tracks and down our street and in through the curtains. It came off the water that rushed in across the long flats from the Irish Sea, and there was a shine to it, even on dark and rainy days when we could barely see across the estuary. It was a pale lemony light that filtered through the low grey clouds like a watercolour wash and lit the waves far out in the channel. It was a far cry from the intense sunlight of the land of peach jam but it had its own strange beauty. It spoke of the sea, and of faraway places.

It was through the channel, beyond the mud flats, that the cargo ships came in from the Caribbean. They were headed for Preston, escorted by pilot boats whose captains drank with my seagoing uncles, when they were home on leave, at the local pub. 

The channel entrance was marked by the offshore lighthouse known as Pete’s Light. From there the tide raced in at gathering speed. Every summer some chancer of a holidaymaker who thought it fun to walk out across the flats to Pete’s Light would get caught and have to be rescued by the Lytham lifeboat crew. Sometimes they drowned. 

I didn’t dream, back then, that three decades later I would come to live in the golden land, going round the planet on a plane in the conventional way rather than through it, although the journey did involve fire and brimstone of a kind. 

I couldn’t imagine that I would end up on a very different shore, where the light is bright and whales rise to the call of the didgeridoo and ospreys soar on the wind.

I had no idea, as a child on that chilly beach, that in the second half of my life I would see the world turned upside down and the chickens of empire come home to roost. Or that memories of our vanished past would become so closely entangled with living through the unfolding crisis of the planet itself.

We were the last children of the age of steam, born after World War Two, at the end of a time when coal still ruled and cotton was king. To us the north of England was the centre of the world, as it had been for two hundred years and as we presumed it would go on being. At primary school Miss Moss, grey-haired, heavily built and dressed year round in tweed skirt and woollen cardigan, presided benignly over Standard Five from a raised desk behind which there hung a big map of the world. Impossibly vast tracts of it were coloured in red for an empire that no longer existed, except in the mind. We must call it the Commonwealth now, Miss Moss told us, with a hint of regret in the mellifluous voice that read to us in the afternoons from Rudyard Kipling and Enid Blyton.

More real to me were the maps of the North of England that I learned to draw at grammar school under the kindly guidance of fair-haired, pink-cheeked Miss Horsfall. They were centred on Manchester and Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, the cities surrounded by black dots for the pits and different coloured dots and triangles for the cotton mills, wool factories, steelworks, chemical plants and shipyards. Liverpool was where my uncles’ ships came in, and we tracked in blue the routes for bringing in oil and taking manufactured goods across the globe. London was an abstraction. This, the North, was where we were grounded; this was the engine room; this was the home of the Industrial Revolution, the first place in the world that lives on coal.

Smog from coal-fired factories had chased us, when I was three, from my native Manchester to the coast, to rescue us from the chronic bronchitis of my infancy. Our new town, Lytham St Annes, straggled along the north shore of the Ribble estuary. Lytham was the older suburb, much of it dating from Georgian times, while St Annes was largely built in Edwardian days when seaside resorts became fashionable. In between was the suburb of Ansdell where we lived. The train line ran from Manchester via the Ribble port of Preston and then stopped at the three stations – Lytham, Ansdell and St Annes – before ending up in Blackpool, holiday mecca of the north with its piers and Tower and Pleasure Beach, its boarding houses and penny arcades and miles of kitsch. 

Blackpool was the destination of choice for working-class holidaymakers from all over the North and even from Scotland. In those days you could tell which town was on Wakes Week – the annual shutdown of mills and factories – by the accents in town: Warrington or Huddersfield, Paisley or Bolton. Every September crowds descended from across the North for the Illuminations, the lights show that ran for miles along the front. It was an annual ritual for to walk the length of it with three penn’orth of chips and watch all the holidaymakers in their Kiss Me Quick hats. Blackpool was brash, noisy and cheap as the very chips. Ansdell was positively genteel by comparison.

Our house was a couple of minutes’ walk from Ansdell station. Coal powered the steam trains that ran past the end of our street, parallel to the coast, taking my father to work in Salford each day. Just round the corner from us there was a footbridge over the line. We would stand on it waiting for the trains to pass underneath and engulf us in a cloud of smoke and steam. Below it lay the shunting yard, the source of the noises that rocked me to sleep from the time I was three. Years later, when I came back as an adult, it was the night-time sound of shunting, the puff of steam from the engine and the squeal of brakes, that awoke my earliest memories. 

Even in our new home at the seaside, where clean air blew in on the south-westerly winds, coal dust from the railway line and the house fires still blanketed the windowsills. Coal and coke kept us warm in winter, delivered each month to the bunker behind the house by men with blackened faces and stud-backed leather waistcoats that cushioned the load as they hoisted the heavy sacks across their shoulders. The coal scuttle on the hearth was refilled each day, the ashes raked and the fire made up with firelighters twisted from sheets of newspaper, and on damp days a sprinkling of sugar to help them catch alight. At new year a lump of coal always arrived along with the new shilling, the loaf and the bottle of whisky that the first footer, usually the most presentable uncle, brought to the door after midnight – a Scottish custom adopted throughout the North.

Every family had a connection to the mines or the mills, the railways or the ships. My parents were Lancashire and Yorkshire through and through. My father was the Lancastrian, a chemistry teacher who had worked in steam-driven Manchester factories; his brothers, like their father, were engineering workers. My mother was from Yorkshire and she was a French teacher; her father was a Leeds railway guard, her mother the daughter of a village stationmaster in the heyday of the steam age. Of my uncles on that side one was a postman, another a ship’s radio officer, their brother-in-law a marine engineer from Sunderland. 

The 1926 General Strike against savage wage cuts for miners was still a living memory. My mother Joan was nine at the time. Not for the first time, there was no food in the Leeds house. After years of unemployment and casual labour in the railway yards, her father Willie had a job back on the trains. He was a dyed-in-the-wool King and Country man, a hard-drinking Yorkshire working-class Tory who had fought for the full duration of the Great War, but he would no sooner cross a picket line than leave a comrade behind in No Man’s Land. Country aunts gave the family food. When the leaders of the Trades Union Congress – to be rewarded later with peerages – called off the strike and abandoned the miners to fight on alone, a miner who lived over the back hung himself. My mother never forgot. 

I grew up with her stories of those years, told over interminable pots of tea with her sister Dorothy. We called my aunt Dorfie, often shortened to Dorf, the name my sister had given her as soon as she could speak. Petite, pretty and lively, she was a second mother to me. Married to a long-haul ship’s engineer and childless, she had moved from Leeds to be near us and soon brought her parents Willie and Minnie – my Grandpa and Grandma – to join her, since they could barely scrape by on the pension after he finished up on the railways. They lived together a few streets further down the railway line, just round the corner from our primary school, and most days found us there at some point. We would often go at midday, when Grandma’s stew was a far better option than school dinners, and at weekends when the sideboard was laden with her baking. In their house the welcome was always unreserved, the warmth unconditional, the coal fire in the back room always lit except at the height of summer. 

The train line that took our father to teach at Salford Tech each day also took my mother and sister and me on an annual trip to the Kendal Milne department store in Manchester to buy a new coat and dress apiece, and a pair of shoes. We would have lunch there, Janet remembers, with a white piano playing and a big fish tank. When we were both in grammar school Mum went back to teaching, and by the time Janet – a year ahead of me – was in sixth form, we were judged old enough to make the trip to the city on our own. We’d reached a stage when we didn’t talk to each other all the time, so I took a book. It was Zola’s Germinal, which must have been my mother’s suggestion. As the train made its way under leaden skies through the East Lancashire coalfield, an endless vista of mountainous slag-heaps and forbidding winding gear, the story of 19th century mineworkers reached its confrontational climax. I was 15 and I had just encountered socialism. 

The East Lancs coalfield is no more – not a pit left. The one million British miners of the 1920s, the men who dug the coal that fuelled the steam engines and power stations, the trains and the factories, have been reduced to a few thousand. 

Coal, we now know, is an environmental disaster, but that was not why the pits were closed down. The Thatcher government of 1979 to 1990 had set out to smash the power of the trade union movement, and that meant crushing the miners. I didn’t like to admit it at the time, but to a large degree they succeeded. The great miners’ strike of 1984-1985 was the turning point, and my life falls into two halves on either side of it.

Since university I had been working as a political activist, publishing socialist books, but a year after the 1984-5 strike ended our organisation was in pieces, I had no money and no prospect of employment and the outlook was bleak. For six months we lived out of the back of a borrowed car, sleeping on the sofas of sympathisers all over south London. Come with me, said my partner Alex Mitchell, a journalist who had given up his career in mainstream media to become the editor of our daily paper News Line. I’m going back to Australia, he said. I was torn, but in the end the choice was clear. I went to tell my mother. She gave me the fare without hesitation.

I hadn’t thought much about Australia after those early years. There were only glimpses throughout my childhood: a visit from the Mildura cousins, my father’s fascination with the language known as Strine, his delight when a young Aboriginal soccer player called Charlie Perkins – he of the Freedom Ride – joined the Everton team, the time Pa took my sister and me to Old Trafford to see strangely tall, bronzed cricketers playing against England in an Ashes match.

As an adult, after years of living in London with Alex and meeting the fearless Aussie journalists he counted among his closest friends, I still had no notion of what his country was like. But once we arrived, I never looked back. We landed with no money – not a razoo – but mine was still a privileged migration in a world where countless desperate millions are now migrants. I was granted permanent residence and later citizenship. When I applied for a job no one asked me why I had come, who my father was, what I had been doing for the past fifteen years or where I’d gone to school – just, could I do the job? Start on Monday. Come and have a drink after work. 

Sydney was beautiful, people were friendly and in 1986 there was a great energy to the place. The arts scene was bursting with talent and there was still open talk of Australia becoming a republic. Thatcherite neoliberalism hadn’t yet won the day. I stayed, found work I loved, had the child I’d longed for but thought I’d never have.

So I was in Australia, where politicians of both major parties had become addicted to coal, when we began to learn just what fossil fuels were doing to the planet. And it was here, from the First Nations peoples and the scholars who had begun to unpick the colonial history, that I really learned what lay behind the swathes of red on that old map of the world.

Time and again the past returns, unbidden and unexpected. It ebbed away in the crowded years of early adulthood, and later, as I grew older, came rushing back in waves like the tide in the estuary. 

Memories are slippery things. Fallible, the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks called them, after the faltering retrieval of his own childhood experiences. 

I have looked back from many vantage points over the years, and found memories that weren’t even mine. My aunt and mother remembered many things differently; my sister and I are the same. Mum romanticised – understandably, given the life she’d led – and my sister, the researcher and Voice of Reason, has found holes in her stories and mine. But you sift and sift the sands of memory, and what remains has the ring of truth.

The compulsion to tell this story began with remembering, and remembering began unannounced three decades ago. It took me by surprise in a labour ward overlooking Sydney Harbour. Surfacing from the first lungfuls of gas, I glimpsed a garden and a back street and uttered, to kind but uncomprehending eyes, the name of the first friend I ever had – long-lost Jean, who lived down our street and dug sand with me on the beach. I knew instantly that I needed two things, more such surprises and more anaesthetic. The memories could wait, but the epidural couldn’t. So the pull of the past gave way, for the first but not the last time, to the insistent demands of a new life.

My father had died three years before I left England, but while Mum and Dorothy were still alive I went back when I could, taking the long-haul flight every couple of years. That was when they gave me the fragments of family letters and diaries that I boxed up and avoided looking at until now. But above all, they told me more of their stories. Slowly, I learned to listen to them all over again, even towards the end, when reason was failing them and only certain memories remained. 

Listen carefully to the ramblings of the very old. If you have troubled old people in your life, try to listen to them. Here among the shattered fragments of their dreams and hopes may be their final gifts to you. These arms that once held you will not let you comfort them. The hands that reached out to catch you as you took your first steps now flutter helpless in their laps. Their words come at you like insect wings beating at a window pane, finding no way out. But listen, listen. Love, love, always love, calls my feisty little aunt as she lies dying in the fading light from the Irish Sea. You are wicked. Go away, hisses my gentle, patient mother on a grey London morning.

They live miles apart by this time, but they both see their own parents, long dead. Mother and father were here yesterday, they each say. For a moment I see them too. My grandparents were the cornerstones of my childhood, one at either side of the hearth in my aunt’s house. Their hands looked frail but when they held you the strength of their grip was always surprising. Their daughters’ hands are the same.

Look at these hands that have done a lifetime’s work. The bones are unyielding, the veins blue and swollen beneath thinning skin, the long fingers never at rest. Feel the warmth in these hands, the softness of this wrinkled cheek. Look at the eyes that see far beyond you and into the past, to things barely spoken.

The last time I fly back to see my mother, she is in the nursing home. She is the eldest and sole survivor of four siblings. She has lived to be 95. When I arrive she is asleep in her wheelchair in the lounge, lined up alongside the other residents, those who are awake staring into space, beyond the incessant flicker of the television, waiting for the day to go by. I sit and watch her. She has my grandfather’s dewlap under her right eye, in just the same place. Her hair is completely white now and thinning, but still springy above the pink scalp just as my grandmother’s was. She has the same down on her cheek. I reach out to touch the hands in her lap. It’s a mistake. Her eyes fly open. She is startled, confused. Don’t you dare touch me, you demon, she shouts. Then more quietly, You are a very wicked person. Get out of here. Go away, go back to your own mother.

Strangely, it feels like an absolution. I do as she says. I go away and think about her life – our lives. Next time I go and hold her hands again and she knows me. The connection is still there, back through the years to the old people. They remain a presence, I realise, for me as they are for her. They were working-class people, born in the Victorian era. Theirs was the age of industry, the age of empire, the age of wars. They fought those wars, and lived to count the cost. 

Our family was one of the lucky ones. We had people who nearly died, but no immediate relative was killed in action. The women watched as the dreaded telegrams – Deeply regret inform you… – were delivered down the street, but the boy always cycled past their own front door. Yet even so we grew up, my sister and I, in the shadow of the two world wars. Our people were the walking wounded. They were victims of the empire they were taught to believe in. Their stories are there inside us, however far away we go, however changed our lives. They belong to our children too.

2 Two houses on the coast

I have few memories of my first three years in Manchester. I can still see the redcurrant stakes and rhubarb stalks towering above my head in the garden of our house in the suburb of Monton. Of the city I remember only paving stones running wet with rain below my little Wellington boots, and peeking through the rails of a bridge at the River Irwell, black as coal.

But I do remember the day we moved from there to the coast. Pa was at work, as always, and we went on the coach, Mum and my sister Janet and me and Auntie Dorfie, who had come from Leeds to help. All I recall of the journey is the oddness of seeing our old kettle with its whistle spout cap hanging in the string-net luggage rack above my head. The coach dropped us in Ansdell at the White Church, the oddly mosque-like Congregationalist structure that sat on Clifton Drive, the road running parallel to the coast, between Granny’s Bay on the estuary and the train tracks. Mum and Dorf must have struggled with us and the bags and the kettle down the side road and over the railway footbridge to our new house in Kensington Road – home for the next ten years.

By the time we opened the front door I had a boil in my nose so painful I can almost feel it today. It must have come from the stress of moving house, something I got used to by doing it more than 30 times in the following years, but this was a first. So after the kettle had been put on, while my mother waited for it to whistle and for the removal van to arrive, Dorf took me by the hand and walked me up to the chemist on the corner of Woodlands Road, the road that led up to Ansdell station, and we got something for it. Dorf knew how to get something for any ailment you could name. I felt better after that.

Downstairs the new house, at one end of a small terrace, had a front room with a bay window. The big old sofa where we read our books went in near the window. I would crawl behind it pretending to be the tiger in William Blake’s poem. Mum’s piano was set up in the back part of the room, beyond the door which she hung with a green velvet curtain to keep out the draught. It was the room for visitors, family gatherings and birthday parties for my sister and me, when our friends came round and there was jelly and musical chairs and pass-the-parcel. But most of our time in the ten years we lived there was spent in the living room. It had a gate-leg dining table that we pulled out for meals and swept around and underneath with