My Beginnings in Britain before the NHS.

I was born on February 25th, 1923. I am told the winter of my birth was harsh and that the night my mum went into labour with me, a fierce rain slashed against my parent’s rented domicile, located in a slum on the outskirts of Barnsley. We were poor folk because we were working class. Had I been given a choice, I would not have picked either the era or the economic circumstances I was born into. But none of us chooses to whom and where we are born.

It was a fearful, unstable, and melancholic time to come into existence. Grief over the dead from the First Great War was still as sharp as broken glass because the end of that conflict was just five years old. A hundred million were slaughtered in that war. They died for nothing except the vanity of the monarchs who ruled Europe in that era and the greed of their munitions makers. World War One’s start and ending dissolved empires into revolutions that first brought hope and then tyranny. No revolution came to Britain after the war. That wasn’t because it didn’t need one. It was because we were still a mighty empire, and the entitled who ruled over us kept the ordinary worker in a firm yoke of patriotism and poverty.  

The working class was on the back foot in 1923 because if the war hadn’t made them aware of the brevity of their existence, the plague known as the Spanish Flu that came after the 1918 armistice certainly did. The virus was a modern-day Black Death, and it collected the living and put them in their graves with medieval haste. It brought death everywhere in the world, including Yorkshire, and then in 1922; it petered out like a forest fire that burnt down all the trees. 

It is little wonder why my mother was in labour with me for hours. I just didn’t want to budge from my safe harbour inside her womb and meet a world full of threats, harm, and caution. I would not be coaxed out with either gentle words or harsh curses. But I eventually did come into the world in the early morning hours. I let all around me know I wasn’t pleased by hollering at the top of my lungs after a midwife who loved gin and shag cigarettes slapped my arse. I mewled like a runt of the litter for milk from my mum’s breast because I was underweight. Me being born malnourished was normal for my class in 1923. My dad earned his grub as a miner, and like all workers then, no matter how hard they laboured never had enough money to pay the rent and feed their families. We were capitalism’s beasts of burden and treated accordingly. 

Working at the coal face is what my folk did since our time began. It’s all they knew, which is why even before the Industrial revolution, my folk were miners, except then it wasn’t coal we dug but tin. I am sure, in ancient times, my ancestors probably dug for the metals that were smelted into bronze. For generations, my family’s labours and the millions like us made the entitled wealthy and us their humble servants. Had my working-class world not been changed by the Great Depression, I too would have kept hearth and home by hacking coal in its rich seams of Yorkshire like all my kind through our recorded history.  

In the year of my birth, my parents were relatively new settlers to Barnsley. They had come to this spot of Yorkshire because the pits here promised a better wage than up in Wakefield or Barley Hole; and Barnsley was far enough away from my dad’s siblings, who despised my mother.

When I was older, and my mum was soured by the hunger created by the Great Depression, revealed to me my father’s family were a little bit more than colliers. They were “better folk” according to my mum. My dad, she said in her many moments of acrimony during the 1930s, had let a family pub slip through his hands. “It could have kept us in clover until we all breathed our last.” 

On the day of my birth, my father was not glad-handed down at his local pub by neighbours in our village of Hoyland Common. No one slapped his back or shook his hand in congratulations because; when I was born, my dad was in his late fifties, and my mum was 27 years his junior. She had foolishly fallen in love with him in 1913. He had the gift of the gab and an optimism that was infectious. My mother attached her wagon to my dad's destiny ten years before my birth because she believed, despite his advanced age; he could guarantee her a secure future. My mum lived until the day of her death feeling cursed by the creed: marry in haste and repent in leisure. 

It wasn’t her fault that when my mum first met my dad, she wanted to marry him. No one else she knew had his prospects. His father was the innkeeper of a public house that stood on the fringe of a colliery in the decrepit village of Barley Hole, located in the nether regions between Sheffield and Barnsley. So, when my granddad died in 1914, my parents assumed my father would become the master of the New Inn and his days as a coal miner would be over. My parents married on that expectation. But my parents’ dreams for financial stability were as hopeful as believing a sandcastle will stand after the eventide comes ashore. Life always has other plans for us rather than happiness and a pocket full of cash. 

My father didn’t inherit the publican license after my granddad died instead it transferred over to his uncle Larrat ensuring my dad would die a miner rather than a business owner. The machinations Larrat employed to accomplish this were as pernicious and preposterous as any subplot from a Dicken’s novel or at least that is how it seemed to me when my mother during the 1930s ranted about our “lost legacy.”   

After my grandad died my parents moved on from Barley Hole with few possessions except a portrait of my granddad and an upright piano that was once played by my dad to entertain off-shift miners with seaside songs from Blackpool. 

According to my mum, bad luck followed our family with the persistence of a stray dog looking for a master because of my dad’s tender heart. He wasn’t “rough and ready,” even after decades at the coal face. Poor dad, he was probably the toughest of us all because he took the misfortunes to come in the years after my birth with stoicism and good humour. But none of his family recognised it because we were too busy trying to escape our own destruction. 

Nine years had passed since the time of my parent’s marriage to my wails of life and the intervening time was a series of disappointments and defeats for my parents. Their relationship in 1923 was shorn of most of its lustre. My mum then was only 28 but she felt like a broad mare when I was born having already given birth to my two elder sisters, Marion in 1915 and Alberta in 1920. Whereas my dad was 56 whose physical strength was in decline and therefore his ability to earn a living kept us away from the poor house in jeopardy.  

The worry, the daily struggle to stretch my dad's impecunious wages to both make the rent and put food on the table had by the time of my birth worn my mother down to a nub of anger, outrage and cunning that she hoped would outwit whatever calamity was intent on knocking on our front door demanding entry. My mum’s acerbic vigilance was understandable because besides having to battle the rent collector for arrears, she also battled the grim reaper that waited impatiently for my eldest sister Marion to die, who had contracted spinal tuberculosis as a young child. By the time of my birth, Marion was gravely ill from it. TB terrified my mother because her older brother Eddie died from it in 1918 after doing a stint in the Veterinary Corps in France. She knew what awaited Marion, but my mother would do everything to forestall my sister’s early reservation with death. The problem was a mother's love for her child isn't a currency that can be exchanged for proper healthcare in a society designed to make a profit for the few.

Up until my dad Harry Leslie Smith's death in November 2018, he was revising two of the books he wrote at the beginning of his Harry's Last Stand mission. The chapter you have just read is from his book about his beginnings in Barnsley, Bradford and Halifax before the Second World War. I hope to get a new editions of these books printed for 2023 as it is the centenary of his birth. Your subscriptions to my substack are always appreciated because what I am attempting to do is keep my dad's legacy alive and also the legacy of the working class struggle to achieve dignity, good health, love and purpose in societies that value the entitled too much for their own good. Your subscriptions also keep me housed. Take care, John