Tony Corcoran

Breaking all records – the play that puts the miners’ case

From Socialist Worker, No. 92, 12 October 1968, p. 2
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

NOW IN ITS SECOND run at the Newcastle Playhouse, Close the Coalhouse Door – a play which tells the history of the miners of Durham and Northumberland – is breaking all records for any play in the North.

On October 9 it moves to the Nottingham Playhouse and then probably to the Royal Court theatre in London. It is due to be televised in the BBC Wednesday Play series in the autumn. Don’t miss it!

This is the play with everything – humour and song, drama and pathos, and satirical barbs which go straight to the heart of the hypocrisy of the miners’ last exploiters – the Labour government.

‘Real Soil’

Sid Chaplin, novelist and ex-pitman who wrote the original story, sums it up like this:

‘The real difference between this play and so many others produced these days is that Close the Coalhouse Door was not prefabricated but grew out of the real soil and strata of the history it celebrates. The true authors (Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow) knew it in their bones and the marrow of their bones and they tell just what they felt.’

Here is one of Alex Glasgow’s fine songs. It is sung in the play by Jackie, the Union man (Alan Browning).

*

The Socialist ABC

When that I was and a little tiny boy
Me daddy said to me
‘The time has come me bonny, bonny bairn
To learn your ABC.’

Now daddy was a Lodge Chairman
In the coalfield of the Tyne
And that ABC was different
From the Enid Blyton kind.

He sang:

A is Alienation that made me the man that I am
and B’s for the boss who’s a bastard
a bourgeois who don’t give a damn
C is for Capitalism, the boss’s reactionary creed
and D’s for dictatorship; laddie,
but the best proletarian breed.

E is for exploitation
that the workers have suffered so long,
and F is for old Ludwig Feuerbach,
the first one to see it was wrong.

G is for all Gerrymanders
like Lord Muck and Sir Whatsisname
and H is the Hell that they’ll go to
when the workers have kindled the flame.

I’s for Imperialism
and America’s kind is the worst
and J is for sweet Jingoism
that the Tories all think of first,
K is for good old Keir Hardie
who fought out the working class fight
and L is for Vladimir Lenin
who showed him the left was all right
M is of course for Karl Marx
the daddy and mammy of ’em all
and N is for Nationalisation –
without it we’d crumble and fall.

O is for Overproduction
that capitalist economy brings
and P is for all private property –
the greatest of all of the sins
Q is for Quid pro quo
that we’ll deal out so well and so soon
when R for Revolution is shouted
and the Red Flag becomes the top tune.

S is for Stalinism
that gave us all such a bad name
and T is for Trotsky the hero
who had to take all of the blame
U’s for the union of workers,
the Union will stand to the end
and V is for Vodka, yes Vodka,
the von drink that don’t bring the bends.

W is all willing workers,
and that’s where the memory fades
for X, Y and Z, me dear daddy said,
will be written on the street barricades.

But now that I’m not a little tiny boy
Me daddy says to me
‘Please try to forget the things I said
Especially the ABC.’

For Daddy’s no longer a Union man
And he’s had to change his plea
His alphabet is different now
Since they made him a Labour MP.

Copyright Alex Glasgow 1968

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