WEEKEND COLUMNISTS  |
| Apprentice Grant Dickinson outside the Devonshire Dock Hall |
Barrow is Nowheresville, UK, tucked away at a dead end nearly an hour off the M6: a place no one passes through and hardly anyone visits. “We’re on our own out here,” as one local put it. “The arse-end of the Lake District,” said another.
And yet the world impinges on Barrow, fundamentally and uniquely. One business has been at the town’s heart since its foundation: the shipyard, still known to everyone by the name of its old owner, Vickers. The yard has made submarines since 1886. It built other ships too – including aircraft carriers and passenger liners. In thin times, it even resorted to making equipment for soap factories. Now ownership has passed to British Aerospace, and the division is known as BAE Submarine Solutions, as if any one of us might look in Yellow Pages and ring up to say our sub has sprung a leak and could they pop round?
It builds nothing but submarines. There is only one customer – the Royal Navy, which in turn has one supplier. No other yard in Britain can do this work, and it is hardly a job to outsource to China. The Devonshire Dock Hall – 51m high, 268m long – dominates Barrow’s skyline, and inside are three nuclear-powered (as opposed to nuclear-armed) submarines in various stages of completion: HMS Artful, Ambush and Audacious.
The yard dominates the town’s thinking too. This is still by far Barrow’s leading employer: 5,000 people work here – not quite the wartime peak of 30,000 but up from a low below 3,000. This figure gauges the state of the world more precisely than the Doomsday Clock. If Britain feels threatened, the yard and Barrow thrive. The arrival of world peace would be a disaster.
Now the British government is contemplating an updated version of the £20bn-plus Trident nuclear missile system. “If Trident were to go ahead, it would sustain work in Barrow into the 2040s,” according to Terry Waiting, chairman of Kofac – Barrow’s Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign. Indeed, there seem to be two main arguments for renewing Trident. It would not deter any enemy actually likely to attack: the geopolitical objective would be to maintain Britain’s place on the Security Council and to counter the oldest enemy of all; Britain does not want France to be the only nuclear power in western Europe. The other argument is to keep Barrow in business. “The spin-off across the town from the yard is quite incredible,” said Jack Richardson, the leader of the council.
Perhaps nowhere in the country is still so in thrall to its traditional industry. It is not so extreme now, of course – male Barrovians (never to be confused with Harrovians) used to work in the shipyard as a matter of course. There was a job for just about everyone. “When I said I wanted to be a journalist, they just laughed at me,” said Jim Mossop, who grew up in Barrow after the war – before becoming a successful Fleet Street sports writer. “Even among us grammar-school boys, most went into the white-collar jobs in the yard.”
In those days, Barrow really did have a rush hour – four in fact. The buzzer sounding the 7.30am start time at the yard could be heard all over town. Then it would go again at 12, when the workers would mass by the gates to cycle home for lunch (and maybe something else if they were very quick) and race back again before the 1pm buzzer. “It was quite cut-throat,” Waiting recalled. “They didn’t have any time for pedestrians who might get in the way.”
“I didn’t want my life ruled by a bloody buzzer,” said Mossop the escapee.
All this was possible because of Barrow’s compact layout. Wandering down dozy Abbey Road, I was reminded of those small American towns, full of redundant Victorian buildings, where all the life has fled to the malls and the suburbs. But in a way Barrow is the reverse of that: just five minutes’ walk from the town centre is Hindpool, full of terraced houses – now with satellite dishes and double glazing and new front doors, but essentially little changed since the buzzer and the midday Tour de France start.
Hartington Street has little front gardens, and every one I saw was lovingly tended.
The paper girl was walking down nearby Anson Street (the North-West Evening Mail still commands loyalty, a sure sign of a stable community), and everyone she passed said hello. The ice-cream van trilled by, drawing attention from eight-year-old boys wandering around with plastic machine guns (a sign of innocence not guilt). It felt like a 50-year-old episode of Coronation Street. Maureen Whidborne, who runs the Neighbourhood Watch, admits she is not overworked: “We hardly get any trouble, and we all know our neighbours. This is a lovely area.”
Barrow has its problems of course – it can get rough outside the clubs on a Saturday night – but this is not a high-crime town. Community worker Derek Brook holds meetings to receive complaints from residents: “We get things like ‘I can’t park outside my house’ and dogshit and noise at night. I’ve got friends in cities who can’t let their lads play outside because they might get shot.”
This is the upside of Barrow’s downbeat image. It has no appeal to incomers or visitors of any kind – hence the lack of traffic: the town centre is tatty and dreary. Bizarrely, occasional cruise liners stop by, but the buses rush the passengers off to Furness Abbey and the Lakes.
There is a theory, which no one refuted, that Trident would not change much: the extra skills BAE would need would have to be brought in – using short-term contract workers. Great for the pubs, of course, but the ripples of prosperity would be limited. Terry Waiting insisted that was fine: Barrow needed stability, not a brief bonanza.
And there is something awe-inspiring about seeing a town still going about its ancient business. The Devonshire Dock Hall is the holy of holies: as crucial, as sacred and as inaccessible to outsiders as the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. BAE did hold an open weekend in 2006. But it is a rare privilege for outsiders to be admitted, just to glimpse these strange submarines, with their smiley dolphin-like faces and their nameless, brutal, unsmiling secrets. It felt so much like a cathedral that my instinct was to remove my hat – entirely contrary to safety regulations.
Lose the yard, and Barrow will become even more remote and forgotten. Already, it seems to occupy its own world. On the long train journey back to the other Britain, I was reading a story in the Evening Mail about recycling and the BBC. This made no sense whatever, until I realised that, in these parts, the initials stand for Barrow Borough Council.
Matthew Engel’s dispatch appears fortnightly
