I have driven the 200 miles between east London and the West Riding so often, I can recite M1 service stations in order: Watford Gap after Toddington, Tibshelf before Trowell. I know after which bend the massive Sheffield cooling towers will appear, and when to expect the first Gouranga bridge (near Junction 37), and upon which hillside Emley Moor television mast will come into view, practical and beautiful only to some eyes, somewhat like the place I’m heading for.
Dewsbury, a middle-sized mill town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was my home for 17 years, before I left it as soon as possible. Thereafter, though I come back often to see my family, it was only ever a backdrop. When people asked where I was from, I’d say it was a place called Nearleeds, because no-one had heard of it, unless they’d read Betty Boothroyd’s biography or remembered who Eddie Waring was. But then the headlines started coming: the attempted hanging of a small boy; a July 7 bomber from Thornhill; the highest BNP vote in the country. Each a surprise, and yet not. Each providing the realisation that I knew the route home better than the town at its end. I headed home again. This time, I was going to leave the house.
My Yorkshireness, and entitlement to Dewsburyness, was skewed from the beginning, by the inconvenience of being born in Sunderland. My family arrived here six months later, but that means nothing in the eyes of true tykes and – until they were forced to change their xenophobic Yorkshire-only selection policy - the Yorkshire Cricket Selection Board. My father was a vicar and diocesan director of education; my mother the head of a primary church school. (This means that when she reads news of arrests of local burglars from Dewsbury Moor estate, up over the hill, she can usually say, “I taught him.”)
It also meant that our official residence was a beautiful and large house, but largely unheated. It was on a gracious street, up safe on the “posh” side of the valley, where the mill-owners built their fine houses away from the soot and fibres of the mills along the valley floor. Later, we moved next door, carrying our belongings through a gap in the hedge, before my father died one day in the back yard. The Church of England then contributed to the precariousness of my Yorkshireness by providing a free boarding school place in Hertfordshire, where my Yorkshire accent lasted little more than a month, and when I returned to Dewsbury two years later, it was with the longer posher vowels of my mother, born and brought up in Surrey. Actually, I’d had Yorkshire blood all along, because my mother finally told me that Grandad Wallace, who I remember in his house in Ashtead with his magnificent cigarette-rolling machine, had been a miner in Barnsley. One day, the story goes, he just got on his bicycle and cycled to Surrey. He reached Ashtead, saw a pretty lane overhung with trees, and said he was never going back after having seen that.
But my mother the southerner still ended up in Yorkshire, and not in its beauty of hills and dales either, but in the centre of the Heavy Woollen District, whose mills were mighty but never pretty. The old pre-Saxon settlement of Dewsbury – “Dewi’s fortification”, whoever Dewi was – became the shoddy capital of the world, after the rag-grinding machine was invented in 1813, and Dewsbury entrepreneurs realised they could spin cloth from ground rags, and that the resulting “shoddy” made good enough cloth for blankets, druggets and shirts. During the First World War, Mark Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills produced 10 million square yards of cloth and employed 2000 people. Millions of First World War Soldiers wore Dewsbury-made shirts and spent frightened nights under Spinkwell Mills blankets. In The Official Guide To Dewsbury 1957 (which a Dewsbury librarian shows me in a fluster, because the police have just phoned to say a gang of book thieves is on the way and the Stephen Kings are unprotected) the author can still write that “one can stand in certain parts of Dewsbury and see upwards of 60 mill chimneys at a time.”
My mother remarried into the cloth, but this time to the mills, to a Yorkshireman who started work at 16 by sweeping the floors at a small mill specialising in cashmere and high-end wool. He became chief textile designer and sales director. I have never wanted for love or scarves. I started at the private school in Wakefield, now we could afford it, but still managed to ignore Dewsbury. There were better shops in Leeds and better clubs in Wakefield. With Dewsbury smack in the middle of a massive conurbation, you can head out of town in any direction and hit a city: Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Huddersfield. There was no call to hang out in Dewsbury, and nowhere much to go, either. It was a dump, we thought, and it got worse when the mills started closing, and unemployment started rising. My father’s mill survived, buoyed by its luxury cloths that were big in Japan, and my parents stayed in Dewsbury when I and all my peers left. I think I chose Oxford for my university because it was pretty in a way Dewsbury never seemed. All those spires and cute cobbled streets. There were cobbled streets in my home town, too – on Daisy Hill, or in the front yards of the mills – but the chimneys, Dewsbury’s spires, were hardly dreaming, and the cobbles weren’t cute. Even the tower of Dewsbury Minister, a church founded in 627, when St. Paulinus turned up to preach, is workmanlike, and the façade less romantic than its history.
There are nice bits, though, which accounts for the semi in “semi-urban.” Even near the most troubled estates, there is green stuff. Even near Chickenley, where the 12-year-old girl tried to hang a five-year-old boy in a patch of woods. Many voices in Dewsbury now concur that there was press overkill. A police officer says, “the press wanted to make it another James Bulger.” The CPS reduced the charge from attempted murder to assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, which is what the girl will be charged with at her trial this month. Still, it was still horrible, and still not a surprise, to watch the clever TV graphics on the news bulletins, as they slowly zeroed in on Dewsbury as the location of the crime, then on Earlsheaton, then Chickenley. Everyone knows that anything goes in Chick. It was lower than the low. A boy at the grammar school linked with mine was always, always the boy from Chick.
The hanging incident was in June. A month later, the press arrived again, when on Tuesday 13 July, the Metropolitan Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly-Asian Savile Town and mostly-white Thornhill Edge. Mohamed Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombers, had lived there only a few months, but his wife Hasina and his mother-in-law Farida Patel were local. “99% of the community had never heard of Khan,” a Savile Town councillor tells me. But everyone knew Farida and Hasina from their work in Dewsbury schools. “Farida did a lot for Dewsbury,” says my mother, who knew her well. She was one of the first Asian women invited to Buckingham Palace, for her work in bilingual education. Her daughter Hasina worked at my mother’s school too, and she remembers a “quiet, sweet girl” who once hand-made a pair of earrings for a colleague. “It’s trivial,” she says, “but I just remember that, and that she was nice.” They’re now in hiding, because Sidique Khan will always be the Dewsbury bomber now, and questions will always be asked about how much the women knew. The general consensus is that they knew nothing, probably. There is sympathy for them in most people I speak to. But their houses are boarded up, and they’ll never come home.
Chick and Khan are partly the reason for my curiosity in Dewsbury, but not the only part. Last year, my father’s mill left the mill buildings. Some jobs went, and as when the other mills closed, many mill workers found jobs in Dewsbury’s huge bedding industry (my father had already retired). Dewsbury’ mills are now shops or flats. On the site of my dad’s mill, there now arises – though the mill chimney is intact – a development of luxury apartments. I am not nostalgic about the remodelling of the mills: They were grimy and grim before, and now they’re sandblasted and used and attractive. The first to be taken over was Machell’s mill overlooking the ring-road, with its fabulous Shoddy & Mungo painted sign along the top. The council bought it for a pittance, “because everyone just saw the mills as places of drudgery,” says Margaret Watson, deputy editor of the Dewsbury Reporter, the best local historian around and the child and niece of mill-workers. “They were blackened, ugly – who wanted them?”
Bed manufacturers and businessmen, mostly. The indomitable local businessman Stephen Battye followed the council, though without using public money, when he turned Joseph Newsome’s redbrick mill into the classy Redbrick Mill “lifestyle” (shopping) complex. He then convinced locals to buy £150,000 flats in the former Dewsbury Infirmary, then sold all the luxury flats in Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mills, now Sprinkwell Mills (the need for the extra ‘r’ is a mystery) to young urban professionals who work in Leeds and don’t mind the 15 minute commute. And the beds! They are everywhere. On the other side of the ring-road, as if squaring up to Machell’s, there is the enormous and unmissable redbrick expanse of Highgate Beds: Sleeping Comfort for Everybody. Along Bradford Road, Huddersfield Road, Leeds Road, there are bed factories: Kozee Sleep, HSL, Sleepeezee, Dream Weaver. There are adverts for beds in the papers, on the back of parking tickets, on the side of buses. Without me noticing, Dewsbury turned into the European centre of the bed manufacturing industry, astonishingly quickly. The Heavy Woollen District now has a new nickname: Sleepy Valley.
Plenty of Dewsbury people wish it were sleepier. Two days into my trip, a man in Ravensthorpe drives his car into the next door haulier’s, knifes one man to death and critically injures another. It turns out to be over a disputed strip of land, hedge rivalry gone mad. But it doesn’t help the battered ego of a small market town. “Where’s it all going to end?” says Trish Makepeace, who sits on the Dewsbury Chamber of Trade and is a well-known Dewsbury figure. “The headlines look so bad on TV. But it’s a minority making it bad for the rest of us.” Like the BNP. When BNP leader Nick Griffin spoke recently at a meeting in Heckmondwike, which boasts the boastful BNP councillor David Exley, he called it “the jewel in the BNP crown.” A local reporter tells me there were 7000 votes cast for the BNP in the local elections, and only 5500 this year in the general election. He says they’re obviously “dead in the water.” But those 5500 were still an embarrassment. What were they thinking?
There was always a significant Asian population in Dewsbury in my lifetime. They arrived in the 1950s and 60s, called by ads in papers in Gujarat and Pakistan to jobs in the mills. Councillor Karam Hussein, who represents Dewsbury South, says his father arrived in 1956 and didn’t see daylight for five years, he was working that hard. “They were young men,” remembers Margaret Watson, “and there was nothing for them here – no mosques, no halal food, no wives. But they were welcomed, and they stayed.” By the usual benchmarks of multi or biculturalism, Dewsbury’s “visible ethnic minority”, as policespeak goes, and its visible ethnic majority got on alright. When Burnley had its riots, Dewsbury’s Chief Inspector Keith Hallas was asked what he was going to do about it. “I said, they’re nothing to do with Dewsbury. We’ve no problems here.” Bradford had riots in 2001, but there were no ripples in Dewsbury. There have been difficult moments: When the National Front threatened a march through the town centre two years ago, the market traders made a plan for the traders with lockable units to hide the Asian traders “out of the firing line.” When David Exley was elected BNP councillor last year, tensions apparently rose. But no moment has yet been more difficult than July 13. In the words of local newspaper The Press, “When Terrorism Came To Town.”
In the days after the raid in Lees Holm, people expected the worst. I expected the worst. But nothing happened. The owner of one of Dewsbury’s three-strong crop of cappuccino coffee shops says you could feel the shock. “One Asian lad came in to get his latte, and out of the blue started saying how he totally disagreed with the bombers, and they were outrageous. He shouldn’t have to say that.” The police and local councillors, by all accounts, put their community cohesion hats on. For two weeks, Councillor Khizar Iqbal was out and about, listening. “Keeping an eye on things.” There was a special number “community leaders” could call. And still nothing happened. Not even from the BNP? “No,” says Iqbal. “I have to give them credit. I still think they’re right-wing extremists, but I have to give them credit. Nothing happened.”
In some ways, that nothing was too much. Dewsbury’s brand-new MP is a Burnley lad, Shahid Malik. For the weeks after the bombing, he was rarely off TV, and he was rarely off-key, either. Asians should confront extremism, he said, not just condemn it. But at that point the imams in Dewsbury hadn’t even condemned it. Savile Town, an overwhelming Asian neighbourhood, houses the Markazi Mosque, one of the biggest in Europe. It’s run by the Tablighi Jamaat sect, whose “back-to-basics” Islamism and evangelism makes it of particular concern to authorities (shoe-bomber Richard Reid was in TJ before Al-Qaeda; so was convicted terrorist Djamel Beghal from Leicester). Markazi is a secretive place. The media aren’t allowed in, and a sign on the mosque prohibits photography. (This didn’t stop Danny Lockwood, the Press’s editor, from taking pictures of it on the grounds that, “if I can photograph Buckingham Palace, I can photograph a mosque.”) It wasn’t for weeks that senior Markazi figures bothered to deny the rumour that Sharzad Tanweer, who Sidique Khan recruited in Beeston, had worshipped there.
Still, the frantic community-building seems to have worked. Police figures reported a rise of 7 or 8 race hate incidents in the month, on top of a usual total of 30 or so. These are only the reported ones, but neither councillor has heard of many incidents on the ground either. Some verbal abuse, perhaps – “that’s normal,” says Iqbal. “Black bastard, Paki – that’s the everyday stuff.” Some tugging of burqas, according to a group of Asian women who planned a peace march to protest at their difficulty in walking unharrassed down the street. But the husbands protested and the march didn’t materialise.
It is good news, seemingly. A validation of the frantic multicultural obsessions of Kirklees Council, the type of local authority that once sent round a memo suggesting that the term “black coffee” should be replaced by “coffee without milk.”
In my ventures around town, I end up on a bench near Percy Jubb’s fish stall in Dewsbury Market, marvelling at the bustle. Dewsbury’s market is still famous enough to get coach trips. I never quite believed this, but I see one luxury coach arrive and shoppers pour out into the market. A market trader tells me there are 350 stalls here on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and there’s a waiting list for spaces. The Hayes family tripe stall still operates, as it has for 100 years, though now they have a fridge, where once the cow’s stomach linings and heels – already cooked, just add vinegar – were brought in barrels packed with ice. The people at the stall are either mouths agape with disgust or actually buying the stuff. Toffee Smith’s sweet stall is still open and busy, as is the stall of the man who sells biscuits singly, if you want, out of big boxes. But the market has changed, nonetheless. There are more Asians selling, and more Asians shopping. Dewsbury’s Asian population is now over 30%, but when Ramadan is on, the trader tells me, takings drop by more than that. They don’t keep the market going, but they’re essential. The market seems to be what Dewsbury is: two distinct populations, getting along.
But then I have lunch with a local newspaperman in the West Riding, part of Dewsbury station and the best pub in the country. The day’s guest beer is Absolution, and the newspaperman is making his confession. Dewsbury is a mess, he says. He is not optimistic about its future. I ask him what’s wrong with it. I tell him it seems successful, as societies go, and particularly one with two different peoples trying to share the same town. He shakes his head. What’s wrong with Dewsbury? Race, political correctness, drugs. He’s got over 100 members of his family here. He grew up here. He’s well-known, well-respected. But now he wants to leave. The next day, over another pint, a local pharmacist says much the same thing. “There is a veneer of culture here,” he says, “But underneath there’s criminality. A lot of it.”
I suppose I could have guessed that. Over the last ten years, my parents’ house has been burgled with increasing frequency. Recently, they’ve started finding the odd used syringe in the garden, thrown over the wall from where deals are now done on the next street. When I left Dewsbury, there was virtually no heroin. Now, there is as much as you need, and more. Dewsbury has more addicts than the bigger nearby town of Huddersfield, and they are younger. A former heroin user says they’re doing it at the age of 12, now, and that even he finds that shocking.
The pharmacist is one of two in town who treats addicts with methadone, and he has seen their numbers increase. “When the Taliban released their stockpiles in the early 1990s, that’s when it started. Now, it’s £10 a bag. The kids who used to get blotto on alcohol now don’t bother – it’s cheaper to get heroin.” He has 40 ex-users taking his “fairy liquid”, as he calls the green methadone he doles out in varying doses. Some doses would kill three grown men, but only just pacify some addicts’ cravings. Anecdotally at least, it’s everywhere and in every part of Dewsbury fabric. In their house in Ravensthorpe, half a mile from Dewsbury, a woman I’ll call J, who runs a drop-in centre for addicts and their parents, must bring up her addict children’s children, because her son, D, and daughter are both addicts. In the Victorian town hall one day, I go to the tail end of a launch of the Luke & Marcus Trust, set up by two white, middle-class women whose sons overdosed. “It’s all sorts,” says the chemist. “From A1s to Cs, Ds, and Fs.” A white-collar worker tells me her niece buys her two sons a bag each a day, rather than having them robbing to get it.
Still, the prices are so low, now, robberies have decreased. You don’t need to rob so much when it’s only £10 a bag. The dealers keep price down to keep demand up. J’s son turns up and happily chats about his habit, though he’s now on methadone and hoping to come off it. He tells me all those fireworks going off in all months and all times of day, that I attributed to an odd fetish for daylight fireworks, signify that a shipment of heroin has arrived. He says ten years ago, the heroin would arrive with cotton fibres embedded in it, at the same time as the bedding industry kicked off. (I hear this rumour from plenty of non-drug-users, too.) He says he’s not surprised my parents find syringes now, because 3 of the biggest dealers live a couple of streets away from their house. They are organised, he says, and competitive. They compete over who has the best laminated calling cards. One pair call themselves William and Harry. I am a bit dazed by this point. What, really? “No,” says D. “They’re Asian, aren’t they? Nearly all of them are.” You could get your E and whiz and draw and coke from whites, Jamaicans. But heroin comes from Asia, and so do its Dewsbury dealers. Reportedly.
I ask one of the Asian councillors about it. “Young people in our community are involved in this terrible addiction and business,” he says, but uncomfortably. “We have a collective role to be open about it.” I ask the pharmacist about it. “I did a straw poll of my clients. Out of 40, only one didn’t have a dealer who was Asian.” I ask the chief of police about it. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Dealers are all sorts. You are totally, totally wrong.” He frowns. “You’re coming at this from the race angle, aren’t you?” He warns me not to ruin months, years, of careful community cohesion-building. He doesn’t say it, but I know that saying such things also plays into the not-true and not-quite-untrue rantings of the BNP, who enjoy scaremongering around “Asian narco-terrorists.” (Nick Griffin also said on his Heckmondwike trip that Asian women’s bones were crumbling under their burqas for lack of sunlight.)
The policeman’s dismay disturbs me, though my mother laughs aloud at the kneejerk liberal in the family being thought racist. But the volume of anecdotal evidence is disturbing, too. So are the impossibly flash cars – BMWs, Porsches driven around Dewsbury centre on market days by impossibly young men whose sources of income are less visible than their ethnicity. Dealers may be all sorts, and these sorts may not be dealers, but the rumours at least give pause.
“You think I’m racist, don’t you?” says D, after he has just told me of young Asian lads he knows whose starting cars are Lexuses, but who have no obvious jobs. “ I can see you’re thinking that. But it’s not about racism. I used to go on Rock against Racism marches. I used to hang out with Jamaicans, no problem. My best friend is an Asian lad called Bashir. It’s not the race, it’s this generation. They are full of hate. When I think of those marches, and now I go to my doctor’s in Savile Town and get called a white bastard.”
D’s mother has lived in Ravensthorpe for 33 years. “We never had any problems. We lived quite happily side by side. It’s not the community, it’s this generation.” She says, “I love it here,” and stops. “I did love it here.” She says there is unfair distribution. She says they feel neglected, and if they complain, they get called racist. “They spent millions on this area,” she says, “but on one street of privately-owned houses. Not a single English-owned house, and when someone tried to get a dormer window, they were refused.”
Such resentment may be unfounded, but it’s corrosive. Councillor Khizar Iqbal prides himself on not ignoring it, and on speaking publicly about the council’s culture of political correctness, a phrase I mostly hear delivered in Dewsbury with curdled lip and contempt. “ I have spoken out” says Iqbal, “about politically correct policies which promote negative perceptions. One perception is that there is an unfair distribution of funding. That is not a fact. The council doesn’t spend millions on Asian estates and nothing on white ones. But it is too busy promoting black and Asian issues. We need that, but they also have a responsibility not to encourage these negative perceptions.”
In another council meeting, when regeneration money was voted for an overwhelmingly Asian estate, Iqbal said it created a damaging impression. “I was called a racist!” he laughs. “But they applauded me.” He is tired, he says, of the council reinforcing prejudices that Savile Town, for example, “is dole-dependent. We have doctors, businessmen, professionals. There are millionaires living here!” He wants everyone – “black, Asian, white, whatever” – to be dealt with on merit. The Dewsbury Reporter’s Margaret Watson has impeccable community-cohesion-building credentials. But she says, “Things changed when the council started interfering. Positive discrimination. People say they’re the most deprived and all that but then there’s all this positive discrimination.” This, she thinks, is the reason for most of those 5500 BNP votes. Because “you wouldn’t believe who voted BNP. People you would never expect. They are so sick of everything. It was a protest vote.” There were bigots in those five thousand, says the newspaperman, but most of it was a two fingers at Kirklees Council, at Labour, at everything. Still, I think, there must be better ways to stick it to the establishment than voting for holocaust deniers. Even if it means the Liberal Democrats.
It’s all getting a bit dispiriting. I go for lunch at a large primary school, where the “ethnicity factor,” as education calls it, is 87%. I get cheese quiche, something called tutti-frutti sponge pudding, and an education. “People think a high ethnicity factor means a lot of problems,” says its head teacher. There are problems – children who have to struggle to learn English while they’re learning in English, 7-year-olds who are their parents’ translators – but less than you’d think. The head teacher’s previous school was a large inner-city one. “I was told to fuck off on my first day. By the parents. Here, I’ve never heard that. It’s the first place I’ve worked where parents ask me how I am, and actually want to know.” He gives me a tour of the school, to prove that it’s a quiet, hardworking place. It is. I lose count of the bilingual support workers, mentors and learning assistants. This, in fact, is also where Mohammed Sidique Khan’s mother and young wife Hasina both worked, though the press didn’t figure it out. “Hasina was lovely with the children, lovely with the challenges of this school.”
After the bombings, the Asian parents were shocked, says the head teacher. But he thought things had settled down, until three sets of parents – indigenous whites, in ethnicity parlance - said they were moving their children elsewhere. He was surprised: the school has had good inspections, is well-rated and harmonious. There are no children sitting in assembly with their hands over the ears, as happens elsewhere. No-one has chosen to exclude their children from assembly or RE lessons. Christmas is celebrated – though Jesus is referred to as a prophet, not the Son of God – but so is Ramadan. Nonetheless, the three families turned up, somewhat embarrassed, and said their kids were transferring to St. Paulinus, the local Catholic school. J’s 14-strong family are all Protestants except her youngest. “She’s Catholic,” J tells me, as the lass saunters past. “So she can go to St. Paulinus.” It’s almost funny that Paulinus, so long identified with Dewsbury – in the Minster and the Town Hall, there are inscriptions saying “Paulinus taught here” and he is an icon as much as the Dewsbury Ram – is now a symbol of how to escape it.
Meanwhile, my own escape urge has strangely lessened. On my last day, I call in at the marketing suite on the site of my dad’s mill. They’ve kept the chimney but not the name, and the projected buildings look quite nice. I’m tempted to buy, and not only by the thought of living in the weaving shed where I folded scarves one long summer, correctly (the fringe arrangement is vital). But because my Dewsbury days have almost persuaded me to agree with the words of Sir Thomas Clifford Albitt, who arrived in 1812, descending the escarpment from Wakefield, to a pleasant surprise. “The appearance of the town is as beautiful as it is interesting,” he wrote. It might not be a pretty beauty, and the interest may be that of interesting times, and times not to everyone’s liking. But still, I realise that Sir Thomas isn’t wrong, as I take the escarpment in the other direction, out of my better-known and better-loved valley, back to the M1 and away.
Versions of this story were published in the London Review of Books and the Guardian