browseWorkington and Maryport
John Rigby (Photographer)
Introduction to the original Side Gallery exhibition text, 1987:
An exhibition by West Cumbrian photographer John Rigby of pictures made in and around Maryport Docks, and featuring the local summer carnivals.
From its development in 1769 until about 1900 Maryport harbour, and the town, experienced a thriving export trade of coal, iron ore, and iron products. During the last 60 years, following the decline of the port, the site has stood almost derelict. Despite this the harbour and foreshore has always played host to an itinerant population of fishermen, dog walkers, golfers, horse riders, bikers, coal pickers, beach combers, sailors, travellers, bathers, and children. These are the people who inhabit John Rigby’s pictures, making their various uses of the dock waste land. But a change may be in the air. Recently, redevelopment plans, expected to cost at least £12 million, have been reproduced. It is envisaged that the revitalisation will, in the main, be tourist orientated, but provision has been made for commercial fishing, small workshops and a supermarket!
The traditional summer carnivals were revived in the early 1970s and take place in most towns and villages in West Cumbria during the summer months. Carnival day is the manifestation of many months of effort on behalf of the tableaux makers, foot characters and comedy acts, and the year long activities of the carnival committees: selecting carnival queens, fund raising, and organising. The day is a unique opportunity for everyone, actors and spectators alike, to take part in a celebration which unites and strengthens the community.
The photographs in this exhibition were made between 1983 and 1986.
Essay by William Pearson for original Side Gallery exhibition, 1987:
Every town has its own reasons for existing and its own reasons for surviving. Some towns also have their own reasons for declining. The small West Cumbrian town of Maryport is a collection of these latter reasons, a collection of absences looking for a new reason to continue.
As such it is symptomatic of the wider area of West Cumbria, an area built on the old industries of coal mining and iron and steel, prospering largely because of its geographical closeness to Ireland, which was the recipient of almost all of the exported coal. The Irish connection is repeated today, though the terms of the relationship have altered beyond recognition. Today the export’s the radioactive plutonium which washes the shores of the lands bordering the Irish sea, a present from Sellafield, a present which it donates equally to all the small communities in this area.
These communities accept this in a way which is sometimes difficult for an ‘off-comer’ to understand but their stoical attitude is in many ways typical of the history of the area. To understand this attitude it is necessary to know the isolation of West Cumbria and the way that this simple factor has contributed to its development. Not only is West Cumbria physically cut off from the rest of the country, the individual communities within it are isolated from one another. This gives a strong individual flavour to the separate towns and divides them distinctively from the places outside the old industrial coastal area in the tourism dominated Lake District, the ‘posh-end’ of Cumbria which has become the dialectical opposite of the West Coast.
But the tourists who go away having spent the weeks strolling in the mountains haven’t really seen Cumbria at all. The locals know that the Lake District is only half of the story and to get the whole one it is necessary to go beyond the hills, down to the coast and into the past. Only by going into the past do you know that the small hills you pass going down the West Coast are the cleaned up and grassed over colliery slag heaps, or that the golf links down by Workington are on the site of Siddick St Helens Pit which once employed about a thousand miners, or that the hill with the ski slope is the old spoil heap of Workington Iron and Steel Works - the major employer in the area - now closed, or that the empty (except for the fishermen's cooperative) silt filled harbours of Maryport used to be filled with the ships taking the coal to Ireland from the local collieries. Harbours not only filled with ships but shipbuilding yards where, in an almost impossible fashion, large ships were launched sideways into the River Ellen, which flows into the harbour here. It was these docks which were Maryport’s original reason for existing and their decline the reason for Maryport’s decline.
In the boom times of the coal exporting trade, when Whitehaven, some 14 miles down the coast, was the third busiest port in England, one of the local land owning families, the Senhouses, decided to cash in on the coal success and build, from scratch, the port of Maryport (named after Mary Senhouse the wife of Sir Humphrey). The harbour had a fortuitous beginning and provided a stimulus to the local economy leading to the building of the shipyards, the construction of an ironworks and the development of the Main band coal seam along the Ellen valley as far as Aspatria.
This boom in turn eventually led to the formation of the Maryport to Carlisle Railway and for the first time some of the regional isolation was eased. As the industries boomed the towns prospered and new docks, including the first non-tidal dock in the county, were added onto the harbour. By the late 19th century Maryport was reaching the peak of its development, as the West Cumbrian coal industry - by now employing over 11,000 people - flourished. The flowering was brief and by the 1920s, with the falling off of the Irish coal trade, industrial decline was setting in. The population, which had moved into Maryport with the success of the boom, now had to suffer the decline. From the late 19th century onwards the large mining population was in regular dispute with the coal owners as the demand fell and the local mines closed down. The early years of the century were a catalogue of disputes, strikes, wage reductions, lock outs and closures. The solidarity of the local communities was severely compromised by their isolation from each other and from the rest of the country and while the battle was being lost and the local industry closed down, this sense of isolation was knitting the community tighter together.
The sense of community could be almost infectious. A well known local story tells how during the 1926 strike, when the miners were still out after the General Strike ended, the Scottish Communist Party sent one of their activists down to Maryport to try and organise the West Coast miners. Constantly frustrated in this end by the natural anarchistic tendencies of the locals he found the hospitality of the town and the area impossible to leave again. He gave up the agitation which had produced few results and stayed on to open up a cafe, mixing an amount of discussion and agitation with cheap and free food for the locals during the hard times of the 1930s, when Maryport was suffering 80% unemployment. The café collapsed (literally) a few years ago and has been replaced by a betting shop.
The town never really recovered from the hard times of the 20s and 30s. Like most of West Cumbria the reasons for its industrial success, the reasons for its existence, were no longer valid. The town, like the area, grew shabbier. There was some attempt to build small industries there during the 40s, 50s and 60s but the national de-industrialisation of the 70s and 80s has seen most of these off. The only active remainder of the coal mining heritage is the coal washing plant on the Flimby road – ‘Well, you can’t expect people to burn dirty coal, these days.’
The sense of community, though, remains, its most visual manifestation being in the annual carnival which occurs in Maryport, and in most of the other small communities around here. The festival atmosphere is mediated by the dry comment of many of the floats and costumes: the Reagan and Thatcher look-alikes pratting around; the group dressed up as a BNFL de-contamination unit busily de-contaminating the watching crowd; the radioactive lamb costume; the copied Greenpeace ship being dragged around the town; and most poignantly, the small kid dressed up as ‘The Last Miner in West Cumbria’, after Haig pit closed in 1986 - the community making its gesture to the wider social order; what Levi Strauss referred to as ‘the process of the objective becoming subjectivised’; or perhaps just the people with no power dealing with their own powerlessness.
Still an area of high unemployment Maryport is now on the northern edge of the Sellafield catchment area. Not close enough to have the total reliance that places like Whitehaven and Egremont do, it does not suffer as much from the strange, twisted loyalty that these places have towards their domineering neighbour (a loyalty which has been bought and not earned). Rather it has a more stoical acceptance which comes out of the well-remembered unemployment of the past and the knowledge of its own shortage of possibilities for the future. Not that Sellafield isn’t intent on buying more loyalty here too. The long awaited for harbour development will include a substantial amount of Sellafield money: as one local said to me ‘Guilt money for the polluted harbour’. But whether this strategy will work with the local fishermen and the people who live on the edge of ‘the world's most radioactive sea’ is open to question. The graffiti which appeared on the sea wall (the sea wall built by the unemployed during the 30s) a few years ago – ‘Maryport, part of BNFL’s experimentation laboratory’ - seems to suggest that it will not.
October 1987