Notes on a time and a place

I will tell you a story of a factory, a very special place.

It was a long time ago but for me it’s just as though it were yesterday.

We’re in the mid-nineteen-sixties. The last age of post-war innocence: the dawn of the age of celebrity.

Further afield, Africa is throwing off our colonial yoke and ordinary Americans are getting a better deal from Lyndon B Johnson, even if they are being sucked into the escalating war in Vietnam.

These world-changing affairs seem very far away in Grafton, a small ex-mining and ironworking town in an area studded with woodlands and set in green hills. Despite the Sixties swinging elsewhere, Grafton is an old- fashioned kind of place. Some boys still join their fathers to watch football, race dogs and keep pigeons. Men still drink in clubs where women are banned. Labour-intensive Sunday dinners still keep the womenfolk out of mischief on Sundays.

At the Gaiety Dancehall they play Beatles songs but remember times when dancing Rock’n’Roll was only permitted if you confined your excesses behind the sateen rope that divided you from the ‘proper’ dancers. The memory of bopping in the cinema aisles to Bill Hailey’s Rock Around the Clock is the new nostalgia.

The contraceptive pill is nudging Grafton women into a new way of looking at things. Even so the dynamism of the ‘sexual revolution’ centres more around the rootless universities in the North, than here at its working class core.  On the bright side, more working class children than ever before are climbing the new rickety ladders into higher education, to new-build colleges and polytechnics, working-class Meccas.

Grafton relies on its big factory, Marvell Domestic Appliances. for its income and prosperity. Marvell’s two and a half thousand workers - mostly women - support eighty percent of the households in the town. Some of these women are third generation workers, their mothers and grandmothers having worked on the Marvell site in WW2 to assist in the making of bombs to drop on Hitler.

My name is Cassandra Fox and in the summer of 1965 I am one of these workers. My own mother works at Marvell’s, so it is allegedly my good fortune to work here on the production lines in that summer in the week when Sandie Shaw – that thrillingly iconic singer – is flown in at great expense to present the millionth Marvell cooker to their millionth customer.  

At Marvell’s popular music – a weird echo of the wartime Worker’s Playtime -  blares out from the factory tannoy, punctuating and sometimes overlaying the industrial clamour. These days, rather than the old swing bands we have Bill Hailey. Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry.  Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers. And now The Beatles. The girls sing along from time to time as a favourite track catches their ear.

The week I start at Marvell’s the tannoy is blaring out Sandie Shaw’s Always Someone There To Remind Me instead of Yellow Submarine and Imagine – much to the disgust of youngest workers who think their taste is far more sophisticated than this.  After all  the Rolling Stones are  where it’s at these days.

My own tale of the Sandie Shaw visit to is only one of many stories, told and untold, that fuse together to make that week in 1965 so very extraordinary.