The Pommy Town Years. (Love and Works).

The Pommy Town Years, by William Claridge, Edited by Helen Macallan; William Michael Press (University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW), 2000, $19.80.

NOTHING COULD be more old-hat," wrote the conservative economist Edward Luttwak in a brilliant and bitter essay in 1994, "than to worry about the travails of steelworkers, miner or welders, obsolete leftovers of the hopelessly passe white/male industrial working class."

Working-class men are now being liquidated, though not of course in the crude old mass-grave style. The new technique is to trash the victim's job, wreck his marriage, alienate his kids, and atomise his community. Above all it is to keep up a relentless denigration which paints him as a dumb, boozing, violent, reactionary shithead whose passing no one will mourn. With a bit of luck he will at this point start to self-destruct, either by suicide or by falling foul of an increasingly terroristic system of laws geared to putting him away on any pretext. To borrow the jargon of the enemy, he is being constructed as the excluded Other.

In such a climate the publication of this book at all seems a minor miracle. It is the early recollections of Bill Claridge, for fifty years an ironworker in Newcastle. Born in Bristol in 1909, he emigrated with his parents and brothers and sisters in 1921, part of a group of several dozen skilled workers and their families recruited by the Lysaght company to settle in a Newcastle suburb nicknamed "Pommy Town".

The broad facts of the rest of his life are simple. He went to the iron mill at fourteen, married Hilda at the outset of the Great Depression, raised a family, and died at ninety. He could be said to have exemplified Freud's dictum that love and work are the two touchstones of a human life.

The manuscript, written in pencil, was handed to Dr Helen Macallan of Newcastle University's English department. Dr Macallan saw that she'd been given something important and set about gaining support for the work's publication under university auspices. She has also edited the material with notable tact and skill. The result is a gem of a book and a model of what grass-roots history and literature can be.

First of all, Bill Claridge's prose is a pleasure to read. His natural flair leaps out of the opening paragraph and never slackens: