So I most remember being seven years old. I would have been around about seven years old. And I'd be in bed and kind of tucked with the blankets and you would see what I felt was always like a permanent sunset. And it was just, you know, a hue of kind of red kind of amber (...) and that's kind of what I remember. But even if it was dark, it was almost like you could still see that kind of reddy sort of tinge with the odd kind of thunderclap and like, you know, that resonance kind of felt, you know, and I really feel as though that I felt that kind of resonance of noise coming through to the bedroom and everything felt like, you know, and also having like the kind of images in my head of it, it was like, you know, a big leviathan and it was just monstrous. And so all of that kind of added to, the whole kind of like scary kind of notion of the steel works for me.

And with background to that, you know, also my grandad, he had had an accident there and had fallen like 40 foot. And so I have like, you know, memories of lots of people talking about, you know, certain people falling and injuring themselves quite badly.

And so, you know, that collectively kind of fitted into this kind of monstrous kind of beast that kind of, yeah, was on the edge of town. And it was like thunderous claps that you could, you know, that obviously wasn't thunder, but it was just something that you kind of felt the vibrations of. It was so loud. And you would always be thinking, oh, something's happened or something's going to happen. And, you know, almost very ominously.

And, you know, and the way the sky looked, you know, the sky did look like, you know, there was kind of, you know, redness and, you know, like danger.

It was kind of all of that really, that added to kind of my very young experience of the steel works. So it was really, I think, you know, knowing that, you know, the work that was going on in the steel works with a lot of kind of dust and smoke and fire and furnaces and all of that just kind of, you know, really fed into the idea that this was why the sky looked how it did.

My name is William Ferguson. I was born in Corby, North Ants, the 8th of April 1954. When the steel work shut in 1980 I immigrated to Canada. I lived in Canada for five years but I returned because my wife couldn't, you know, the weather was really cold so we’ve come back here.

Well, when over that time I was just got here. I actually worked in the mines and minerals as an engineer and some of the quarries around Corby, especially called Shortley at near Haringworth, we discovered iron age furnaces with archaeologists there, you know, for a long time. So that's when I knew that, you know, obviously iron age was around this area.

And I've got all the books on the steel works and how it's progressed, you know, through the 40s and 50s and 60s, 70s until the vegetable closer, 1970, 1980. My connection, I served my time as a mechanical fitter, I don't know, for your apprenticeship with a year improvement on top of that, in the training centre for 18 months and then I went out to the mines and minerals where I went to the main workshop which is at Pangreen where all the lathes and mill machines were and all the fitting were everything from large Rolls Royce locomotives, diggers were stripped down, rebuilt, fixed, repaired and then I went to different sections within the engineering.

There was the mobile machine section which covered bulldozers, scrapers, small diggers, mainly diesel powered and a mobile machine section. Then we went to the major machine section which was the large draglines, the Ranson Rapios 1800s, Busaira series, 1150s and then I went to the welding shop for six months to do welding and fabrication and then back to the machine shop for doing engineering and turning and at the same time we went to college for one day a week in two nights, received a really good apprenticeship. Because it was out of the mines and minerals, it was probably, we had jobs in really adverse weather. It had to be done. Changing the tracks on a D8 caterpillar tractor at Haringway at the Fairdrum in November and December was hard work but generally it was really good, you know. Some of it was heavy work, a lot of it was fine engineering but it was mostly enjoyable.

The best part was working with people and learning, you know, working on different environments, different machinery and it really gave me a good footing, you know. I could have worked after, that's the train I got, I could work almost anywhere in a mechanical sense. It depends where I was working, I went different factions but a typical day we're going to the engineering workshop and you might be stripping down a compressor, stripping down a small digger right back to the last nut and bolt and fitting new parts, repairing old parts, reassembling it, testing it and sending it out. I don't know, right, really.

Fourth year of my apprenticeship I got an apprentice of the year which was quite an achievement in British Steel about, you know, three or four hundred apprentices. The thing about the mines and minerals, a lot of people were employed from the local villages as opposed to the steelworks where the mainly Scottish people had come down.

But the mines and minerals was unique because the quarrys were located all around Corby.(...) A lot of the local villages worked there, you know, and that was sort of kind of different. But it was good. We found it easier because in the minerals you're dropped off somewhere and you've got to fix it, you know, you haven't got a workshop nearby in that. And we went to the blast furnace. We found that it was big heavy work but, you know, it was not a bad environment really because we're mainly in a workshop there. It was different but the mechanics were more or less the same.

Well, it's funny, when I ever go to, like say I went to the train museum in New York, as soon as I walk in that and you can smell, it just brings me back to the workshop I was in. So, you know, you have the smell of grease, you have coolant from the lathes and that kind of earthy engineering smell that you get in workshops. So, you know, it's just, you know, the environment you were in, you know, it was an engineering industrial environment. It's not like working, you know, in a food factory or anywhere else in office.

You know, in them days, well, it was really hard working. And I had a bit of a reputation where the works was easy and there was people lying around and not doing much and there might have been that but there wasn't certainly a mind button.

And you think that you got rot from a ground and turned it into steel tubes, high precision. There's a lot of skill and a lot of engineering involved. It was some achievement, really. Well, I was involved in engineering but the process I knew, just out of pure interest, you know, I knew that the rocks, crushed, they had to know which iron ore they were using because the blast furnace had to know. And as you know, iron ore is crushed with limestone and coke, which is also manufactured in the steel side, and then put into the blast furnace and melted at high temperature. Then the furnace was tapped, went into ladles, and it was carried off to add the boss plant to be turned into steel. And then from steel, the ingots were turned into, rolled in the roller mills of the strip. And then the strip was off to the tubeworks to be turned into different types of tube.

And if I remember writing the tubeworks walking through, there was the CW, which was, no, the ERW, which was electric weld resistance, which is a very high quality, lovely finished tube, blue finish, for chemical and, it was a very strong tube, chemical works, power stations, that. Next to that was the CW continuous weld, which was basically plain pipe that was used for scaffold and general use. And there was the plug mill, which was seamless, which was used for north oil casing and drilling rods, very strong tube. Then there was the extended surface,(...) which made finned tube that you see in power stations and that. There was the EWSR, which was the biggest mill electric weld stretch, which was general box section, made in industry all over the place.

And at my time, there was also a place called the Langson Corby, which made very highly polished, thin plate that was used in other industries. I had a friend who used the Liverpool matches with who used Keteram. And he was in one of the quarries in Keteram, Glendon, and he was killed. He was actually cut in half. What happened was they were blasting. So the siren went off. So he was walking backwards and there was a compressor running. And at the same time, there was shunting in wagons to be loaded for I&O. And he tripped over the sleeper and fell across the railway line. And all the wagons now went over him. And I knew him quite well.

But yeah, there was lots of injuries. Minor ones, you know, not too serious. That was a serious one, but back strains, cuts, knocks, falls, steel side with, you know, when there was hot metal and different machinery. There was,(...) I think I can remember three or four fatalities when I was there. Well, I suppose you have to be really careful. I mean,(...) they did run a lot of health and safety programs that too. And it's not like today. I mean, I used to go up the dragline jibs and walk up them. And all it was was see through steps. And the handrail to hold on. There was no safety lines and nothing. And you go right up to the top of the dragline. And if you're above the cut, you know, you could be about, you know, 250, 300 feet above the ground.

But generally, it was pretty safety. Because I used to know about villages, like I said, but my father, he was kind of a rough, rough Irishman. But he had a couple of old English original family, Dixon's original Corby's, for him and that. And they used to tell me that the impact, you know, Corby went from a small village and Stuart's and Lloyd's had a lot of building houses. And they call that the Stuart's and Lloyd's estate.

You know, you had a big impact, a lot come down from Scotland, a lot from Ireland, Wales, everywhere, the northeast. And it grew really quick. Now, I suppose it's like today, you see people coming from everywhere and you get, oh, look what's going to happen. But my parents were the same at that time, you know. So it had a massive impact, I would have thought. I believe that Corby, there was a choice between Corby and Rothwell to build the steel works and they decided on Corby. Rothwell could have been, you know, the town instead of Corby.

But there was a good mix, you know.(...) I was a apprentice and it was the best years of my life. You meet people from all over the town, you're getting trained, you're getting a bit of money. It was good and people were so thankful of a house. I remember my mum and dad, you know, the grass out the front had to be kept short. The council had people come round in spectrum and they were so pleased to get a house. And then, you know, there was a lot of kind of clubs in Corby then, like the Welfare, the Labour Club, you know, different clubs. There was a lot of community spirit. So, well, things changed, you know, as it is now. So that fostered a community just living in that grove, but also it was safe for kids to play out in,(...) you know. And then there was usually a community pub around the town.

We're blessed with the woods. There's not another town in Britain that has woodland like this in the centre of the town. It was very green. I remember playing as a kid, I was really happy, you know. Nothing to really worry about.

Well, students and lawyers was great because, what I remember when we were kids, it was a fair every year. We call it Stewart's and Loyds Fair. We used to get these tickets, three free rights, and then you had a mineral which is pop, sweets and an ice cream. Everybody looked forward to Stewart's and Lloyds’ Fair because in them days we didn't have big massive fun fairs and that you know you have now. It was just such a treat and it always seemed to be in June and it was always good weather. So psychologically you noticed it but, yeah, Stewart's and Lloyds, they gave a lot of people a good living. I mean the wages were high compared to a lot of, and that was basically when I was a kid. There was Stewart and Lloyds, then into British Steel, it was British Steel, but there was only a small factory estate in Satsit, Marks Road, where there was snack pack that made crisps and there was Golden Wonder. British Steel beams that made headlamps for cars and a few small clothes factories.

There was a company called KC that made duffel coats. My mother used to work there sometimes. So really the Steelworks was the nerve centre. Without that, things couldn't be as good. I think the people expected that you had a lot of guys from Scotland that, you know, they wanted work in a wage. They would have done anything, really, you know. They came from poor areas in Scotland.

My parents came from Ireland, mainly far-known areas and they were just grateful for it. My mother actually, God bless her, worked out in the land, picking potatoes. And she used to take us,(...) because she could take the kids to work with them. We used to play around the fields and that was hard work. I mean, how has she done it, I don't know. And then once she got a bit older, she worked on various jobs, cleaning the college, not so much, you know,(...) up at the face and doing the hard, heavy work, but definitely cleaning in secretarial work. There was no, I can't remember any lady managers, women managers at them days, like there is today. But definitely, you know, in engineering jobs and production jobs, there was not many women. There was definitely, in the offices, there were massive offices and mainly secretarial administration, they would have thought they'd done them days. Me personally, well, Ken you've given me, I was, I've actually offered a couple of jobs around in Peterborough in that, in engineering jobs.

But I applied to go to Canada and I was accepted. So like a lot of my friends, a lot went to South Africa, a lot went to Canada, New Zeland and Australia. I applied for Canada with a couple of mates and I got a job when I was working in Edmonton, Alberta. Got a job working for Texaco,(...) which I really enjoyed. But so really the impact, you know,(...) I kind of avoided because I went abroad. But I heard that it was really tough for the times. A lot of people who got jobs in the North Sea, oil rigs and they had to travel, some got to travel to London, little big companies came, you know, I know guys that work in the London Underground, mainly night shift and coming back. But they seemed to weather the storm.

And of course, when I came back in 84, there was a lot of new factories, it was an enterprise zone then. I remember it was Michael Hesselty, that was the king. And they promised a lot of investment. And, you know,(...) there was a lot of politics because we were on a steel strike just before we shut down, you know. And I used to be a shop steward in the mines for the engineers. And really it was silly because we were shutting down and we were having a strike, didn't make sense. But you say they come good, you know, it really diversified.(...) I think when the steel works was going, they absorbed all the labour, manual, you know, mainly, you know, the manual labour. But when they shut, with the diversification of different factories, you know, RS components came in, Oxford University Press. Loads of factories. So it diversified. So they weren't putting all the rigs in one basket. And a lot of good firms came in. Well, I think companies benefit if there's a lot of unemployment, you know, they can pick and choose, you know, who they want and it's available for them. I don't know if benefits are right or why, but yes, it was, you know, I guess some of these people did benefit. But generally, they're not. I think it was tough for them. The reason I closed the book, they weren't... The iron all around Corby is about 28% iron. If you go to Norway or Australia,(...) it's 75, 80%. You can almost weld the rocks together. So the process, using a lot of energy and using it to get a certain amount of steel and iron out. And it was just, it was economics, really. I mean, we're still spending money and we're putting in new systems. But there were inefficiencies. I mean, I was part of a work measurement incentive scheme. So I'd go out and time engineer how to do this. They were trying to bring in cost saving things, you know, make people more efficient. But I suppose it's down to the process, the equipment, the new big blast furnace, they should have maybe another one. And the more automation there is in steelworks now, I mean, years ago, a rolling mill would have hundreds of guys doing different jobs. And now you might have five guys in a control room. It's really happening now, especially with AI and things that have been reading so much about it. And then the more sort of more we get in, the more machine we get in, we're going to rely less on people. So you've got to get a job fixing these machines or programming them. Because I was just on holiday recently, I was with some friends from Australia, and they were telling me that a couple of lads were IT guys. And they were showing me some things about IT, you know, writing a speech about something. I couldn't believe it. I'd done it straight away and it would have took me maybe a day to compose this. And then my son works in warehouse where there's a lot of manual picking and packing. And now they're introducing robots to do all that. So you can see that's the way it's going. Well, diversification. We've got a lot of food factories. We'll always need food. They've kind of, it's kind of a modern time, you know, the building thing. The objection I have is warehousing. It's all very well storing stuff, but you've got to manufacture stuff. To make a country rich, like the Germans and the Japanese and lots of other people Americans. You know, we used to be a massive manufacturing country, you know, ships, we built arms, we built entry engines, cars. And we're still very good at top end engineering, pharmaceuticals and things like that. And that's where you've got to, you've got to, as long as they diversify and make things what people need.

But, you know, you know, everyone's made it.(...) Businessmen will go where it's cheaper, you know, we'll make this in Vietnam, we'll make this in China.(...) You know, this used to be the heart of the boot and shoe industry in Northamptonshire. I remember the shoe factories in Corby, Kettering everywhere, employed thousands of people, good quality top shoes. And of course, it's made cheaper somewhere else. They'll get it and badge under their name. But I feel the quality isn't the same. But people perhaps won't pay for the quality.

So the future, yeah, it's not just Corby. I think the whole country's got to modernize. I love Corby because, you know, it's a diverse town, there's people from everywhere. I remember when I was growing up, we had, (...) it's probably a derogatory term now called DP, displaced persons. They were a lot of people from the Second World War that's displaced. And we had a lot of Latvians, Lithuanians with a Latvian quiet here. Mainly Latin and Lithuanian, East Europeans and Scots and Irish, it was diversified. But the timing was really good because you have everything. We had everything then. I mean, two minutes and you're into rocking and rocking, you know, beautiful countryside around, lovely trees. We had good shops in them, in them days. Corby had a really good town centre. And it was good.

I have no complaints of being brought up here. Oh, I miss the engineering, you know, and the challenges and that. I mean, I know we had pollution and no use in traffic and that. You sort of born with it and grew up with it, you know. That's, yeah, I missed it when it first shut down, but when I was away, but when I came back, I think it had all gone. It was quite a shock. Mainly my wife couldn't settle. I was there five years. In fact, I took out Canadian citizenship and two of my sons were born out there. And I didn't want to come back. I sent her home here for six months because there's a lot of people come back and then realise they're better off out there and they go back. But she said, you know, I didn't want to go back, really. I think it was mainly the weather. It's cold, but it's long. But guys who went out there, now from Corby, have moved to Vancouver Island, which is absolutely beautiful. It's nice.

Right. He was born in Aberdeen. I've got some of the documents where he was on the trawlers at 15. He joined the Royal Navy. After the war. He had a very poor upbringing because what happened, his father was a trawlerman and he was conscripted to the Navy. And on the way down to Portsmouth, he got peritonitis and died. And his wife didn't get a pension because he wasn't killed in action. So he had a pretty poor background. So he joined the Navy. And in the Navy, he was a submariner and a diver. So he went through the travel of the world. I think he was in the early 60s. The tube works where he worked. And he was quite a clever, well-read guy. And he joined the Union. He worked his way up to be the top official of the NSTC. He traveled throughout Europe and all over, mainly with the Union. But he still worked in the EWSR. He met his wife in France, San Izzere. They got married and they came to England. So it was quite a French influence. And he was a counsellor in Corby. And he was the mayor of Corby. So he'd done quite well. I think he's wrote a book about a semester. I'll go short. It might be no use to you. But he was very, he was like, "Mam, you either liked him or you didn't like him." And a lot of people didn't like him because he was forthright and outspoken.

Lots of, there were many little Scottish guys. I was in the engineering union. There was a character called George Macardt. Many of the old people would know about him. He was the end of our union. There was lots of characters. Yeah. Well, I think what they brought to the town was, they seemed to be responsible and caring, you know, them guys. A lot of people say, "Oh, the union guys, this and that." But they were good. They were on the union. And when the works were shut, they'd done a lot of protesting, to try and keep it open. They just brought their own character and made you laugh. They were quite funny, but they could be very serious. I remember going in negotiating them once. I was shocked, wasn't he, young lad? And the way they were speaking to managers, I thought, "You can't speak to people like that." But they were kind of forthright, they treated him as equal, but they were good. They tried to get you the best they could, really, the deal. Sometimes it wasn't viable, you know, it made things worse. But I could see when we were measuring the central scheme, the managers would try to introduce these schemes, and the union would try to fight them. You know, I could see both sides, because I was a shelf student once, and then I took part in this programme for bringing in introducing stuff. I tend to lean that we should have brought in a lot more, you know. (...) But I don't think it would have saved the works anyway, just purely because of the... the "I know I'm not being rich enough." You know, with three times the energy in that, you know, to produce, say, my bias, to produce some words. And then, although Thatcher wasn't charged then, I think they were tending to shut down a lot of the manufacturing, you know, bringing in privatisation, things like that, and then relying on the services in the city to make money. I've always believed if you make something and produce something and sell it, the country's stronger.

No, no, I think it's got a rich history, unique for this area, and they've come through the hard times, and it seems to be quite a prosperous time now, although I'm a bit disappointed because I see these surveys that come down quite low, (...) which annoys me, because we have people come up now from London, lots of people from London and everywhere, and they can't believe what a lovely town it is. That's its problems. You know, it used to be quite a violent time when I was brought up, but, no, no, it was a good time.

He was a mayor of Corby. He was a councillor. He was the mayor of Corby. (...) Came from Scotland, Aberdeen. Roan Mavy, Submariner, Duyler. Married a woman in France. You want to see it? Well, I've got some of his written notes here. I mean, some of his... ..his writing to the House of Commons and everywhere. Buckingham Palace. I remember they had two university students come down. I think they were from Sheffield to try and put a programme forward for keeping the place open. The thing is, there was really good redundancy offers and a lot of people think, "It's mainly in your circumstances. "What are they doing with the few grand?" And they might get by. They got a really good redundancy package. I was told to a mate of mine once, and he lived in a nice, quite a nice council house in this area. And his dad got about £50,000 redundancy. And he could have bought his council house for about £12,000, and he didn't. And it all went into the bookies and the pubs. He should have had really advisers on that. I don't know if I'd recently had advisers on modern day ones, but they want to make their cut too, don't they? the same side, they worked 6 to 2, 2 to 10, 10 to 6. The two works worked 3 to 11, 11 to 7, 7 to 3. That was mainly for the traffic and management of people, because you imagine thousands of people running out. But then the three sheriffs met in the pubs, and in them days, the pubs shut it half to 6. I remember my dad would be in the pub, come home for his dinner, and then he'd be out for round two. So constantly, the pubs were always full, because different shifts and people were like, "Yeah, the hazel tree in the town.

The drag lines, the big ones, they had a 25-ton crane. They had crane inside them. So when we were changing the motors, and the back came out, and those two rails came out, and you could lift the motors up and then take them out and drop them to a lawyer, they were massive because electrical feeds. Cables were that thick. And they fed the drag lines. It was AC. Because in them days you couldn't control AC. It had to be DC. The AC drove generators that generated DC current. And then DC went on the drag lines. Here you go. That's the Marion. That was the biggest face shovel in the country, the Marion, when it was built. They moved that from somewhere in Oxford to... Yeah. Yeah, there it is. That was an American. And the Americans came and had looked and said it couldn't be moved. Well, we had a couple of engineers. One of them was a genius guy called George Binley. He had a photographic memory.(...) And he said, "We'll move it." And they stripped it right down to the last nut and bolt and moved it and rebuilt it. Yeah, it's all gone to the quarries. say... Mid-70s it was moved. But they walked the drag line from Coastalworth up near Grantham. That's the... Sunjir.(...) Sunjir. They walked that was the end after a racehorse.(...) They walked that when I was in the mines. That was a big operation. And it took them weeks. Went over streams, rivers, a lot, you know. quarry called Cow Thick, which is near Stanion. But the limestone was that hard and that thick. It was, I think it was 80 foot thick. And they abandoned the pit and walked it across. And it's funny, welding stone. You've heard of welding stone. Welding stone is a unique stone. A lot of colleges in Cambridge have done with it. It's a lovely honey-colored stone, but it goes hard. Well, welding stone is based right near there. It's still there now, if you go, there's still manufacturing stuff. And you can carve that like cheese when it comes out of the ground, but then it hardens. But across the road, not far away, it was that hard. You couldn't do anything with it. And that's why they abandoned it. It's all sorts in here. We had a fabrication shop on Grettenbrook Road. And they used to, the welders, we used to strip all these down. You could change the teeth on site. But they spread apart and all these chains, and all these things we used to wear away. And they wouldn't let you weld a rail section on it to allow for like a wear plate. They had to build up the welds. So the guys were on these buckets day and night welding, you know, day and, welding, yeah, chains. I can't, I don't remember who that is.

They were drilling machines. About four inches down. They were drilled down to the rock. And then they were dropped down for stuff called iron regel and ammonium nitrite into each hole. And then they would light a fuse and blow the rock. And then they'd dig it out. When it got to the iron ore, they used dynamite, wired up all in a matrix. And then they would blast it and crush it, you know, all the, all the rock. Different explosives for different things. The whole ground used to remember the ICI were trying out a new explosive near, have you heard of Kirby Hall? And they tried it, an experiment and, um, just went, they went, oh, mix wrong. So we'll try it again. And it was like an earthquake farmer. It's cut off. Never give milk for three weeks. Kirby Hall was nearly, you know, they had to get people into examine the structure. So they got it from very weak to very strong.

That's what I used to fix those. That was on a Scammel truck. They were made for, they were in Glasgow. And then the big hydro arm used to pull this down. It would take work. They'd done that a Rolls Royce Eagle engine, straight six. I don't know if they're made in Derby or what. They run maximum reps, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. What an engine.(...) Honestly, we stood them down. Check that out. Yeah. And that engine drove everything, all the hydraulics. That's a cyclone to take the dust away. And the operators, some of them wouldn't use that because they get a few more reps because they were on a bonus. that was, we used to climb, that's the jibs. There was no harness safety, wire line, static line. Yeah. When you got up there, it would jut out.(...) So you suddenly, you know, you've got that structure below you, suddenly you're in air and that's where the apprentices used to freeze. They only walked, they were assigned to a pit. So what happens, they would get the overburden off and when they cleared that section, they would walk the drag line, the big feet. And it would just drag the tub along. They would drag the bottom, and they would move. We'd be doing some maintenance. We'd sit in there.(...) They had a little canteen inside. You know, you could have your teen, you'd go like that, and they would rock you to sleep because it was snowing. I'll never forget it. they had hollow tubes. So that's the jib, and that's the A-frame.(...) And they would have A-frame tension and A-frame compression. If you imagine, that bit there is under tension. Yeah. That bit's under compression. Right? So that's under tension, because you know, the weight's blown down, and that's under compression.(...) That's under compression, that's tension. They were hollow and they were full of nitrogen. Right? And they had a chart, and if they developed a crack, an item would look at you, you would see that it's got a crack, but you couldn't find it. They had to drop the jib, because this had a wire open, this could drop.(...) And then they had to go along, and with pierces, they would clean all the paint off the joints. We used to have welding machines brought into these, and you should bring the earth lead out to the bucket so it goes straight back. But some welders are too lazy, just hook the earth lead here and just drag the one cable out for welding.(...) What happened? The, do you imagine? They were welding the bucket, and the path back went up through here, arced across the bearings and back down.

I'm John McGhee. I lived in last fall in about 1982 when I came out of the army and there was no jobs up there so I came down to Corby looking for jobs and then I had a few short jobs but ended up in the tube box at voice area and I was doing steel watch part, the tube watch part of it and I think it was about 96 and it was one of the best jobs I've ever had.

People say it's noise, they say it's dirty etc but you know it was good wages. It enabled us to have a good quality of life so yeah I enjoyed my time down there and I've done many different roles down there.

The environment I mean you could go home and you're shivering and my truck coming out you know it's never a thing and it's not a good part of it but the environment itself, the actual physical environment, it's not the best place to work in some parts but that was well paid. The most, the best environment around there was the people you worked with. It was like a community in itself. Everybody knew each other. It didn't matter what mill you came to. It was two or three mills and people would work together in a different area so I think the best thing that I would take for there was the friendships that I got while I worked there. It was a great place to work and meet people and do stuff and yeah it was brilliant.

And I had for some day at left school at 15 with normal levels and lots of other to go in there and learn all these new skills which a lot of people say a lot about listening to transferables. There's not many calls for crane drivers outside of the steel works and stuff but the skills you learnt from the other areas that you walked through you know. I ended up going over to Holland to look at how they did a certain job of painting tubes and I came back and rebuilt from a bare floor, a whole paint machine that knocked out 5000 tubes a day and that was a great skill to learn to be able to start that process and see it finish. So it was a great place to work and live.

Well one of the best things I loved doing was apart from the works rep, the works helping safety rep, I was a learning rep actually. Every Saturday morning in a local school I would work with the local college, we would teach people new skills, computer skills because realistically the older guys paint myself down in the steel works. They didn't always have the literate skills that we should all have nowadays or that was needed nowadays. So the way to take people in was to run basic computer lessons and we did that for about two years, I did it every Saturday morning down the school and that was through the union, it was down there, it was the IASTC at the time, now the community union and I was involved in that for some time and that gave me a lot of satisfaction in seeing the silks. There wasn't just the guys that worked in there that was getting me new skills, they were bringing the families with them too, the kids, the parents and stuff so we did a fantastic community work there for a few years while I worked down there. And as well as doing that job of course I was the county councilor and then I started on the county council with Jimmy Kane who was the steel works, the only steel works working director at the time was the leader of the county and I came in with him at the time. And I remember both of us doing a interview and they walked the file over at the county council so yeah we had some great times didn't we?Yeah but we were involved in quite a few things and it was mostly done through the three unions but they did British Steel at once and then it was Tata Steel or there was another name, we changed hands three or four times while we were there. And then they did a golf sections, we would have dances to raise money for everyone, one lad unfortunately lost his wife quite early and we all clubbed together, we ran this fundraiser for them, helped them all out, raised quite a considerable sum. They would sponsor the golf competition, in fact I've been out of crisis on time now and I still play golf and the golf competition every September with the lads that are still there and some of the lads like myself who left a while ago. So there's still that contract there.

I joined the area and I left it in 1982 and then I came out in Glasgow and there was no jobs, there was hardly any jobs. And my brother had already moved down here for work anyway and he says to me come down we'll find something for you and I did, I had a three job before I went to the Steel work and I was just finding something that you felt that it was part of you, you wanted to do it and you wanted to put that time and effort into it. And then I arrived down here, there was so much opportunity, different skills, I ended up, I started on the cranes and about five, six, seven years later I ended up teaching people how to drive cranes and things. So you learn lots of new skills, lots of opportunities down the end of you, we're willing to grasp the opportunity as much as we wanted. I think the Steel industry and Corby's changed through the generations, when I first came down and ate it to it, just being through the worst strike that this town's ever had, the town was probably at its bottom nearly and there was a lot of funding to bring it back up and to bring other companies in to try and help people employ and build a town again.

But the Steel industry has always been there, maybe not as a Steel works, you know, it makes chips now, it's never made Steel for a long time, it's not made Steel for quite a considerable years. But it has made chips from all over and it's went from about 50 or more people down its head and I'm sure there's only about 45,000 there and all, which is a great shame but it's still there. It's still a part of Corby's history, there's still people down there that's been there 30 years, I know some of them and my friend here at Play School, we just left a couple of months ago, his redundancy's retirement and they still speak fondly of it because it was a good place to work and all.

But for Corby itself, you just have to look round Corby and see some of the places in the history that it brought, the old clubs, lots and lots of drinking clubs in Corby because that's where people furnished these hard shifts down at Woxers based on it, which is Steel Wox. First thing I would do is go into one of these clubs and have one of these killed drinks.

Hi, I'm Lola Tchaikovsky. I was born in Corbyn, 1956. And the first job I got was a cook assistant in the plug mill canteen, which was an eye-opener. It was very, very hard work. It was catering on mass. Um, you know, I've never, the frying pan had 24 sections for eggs because they used to have mostly for breakfast there would be, um, called double deckers. So it was toast with bacon, sausage and egg. And the chaps used to have, um, that worked on overtime, used to have what they called a line. So that would be, they would get a free meal. So, um,(...) it was just non-stop cooking and selling out, just churning out food.

Yeah, so it was hard work, but it was, it was quite well paid and I was on six to two and two to ten. That was the shifts. Annie McVey showed me how to wring out a dishcloth. Now this just come to my mind. And she said, no hen, this is the way you do it. I need to do it like that. That's the way to do it. Not like that, like that. And she showed me that and that stuck with me. That's strange, that is.

The Lincoln estate or the Kingswood estate used to be, um, lots and lots of young people had their own places there because it was a new estate and there was quite a lot of employment in Corby at the time. And so there was always parties there. So you could just wander around as long as you had your carriou, which is a few cans of beer or whatever to get your entrance into the party. And I remember coming down, so those salaries come down there, walking down there, going home, picking the car up and then getting into work, 10 to 6, clocking in. We had to clock in there and, and then just getting through the shift. So I was 18, you know, and, um, (...) yeah, it was an eye opener. Sometimes I'd be on the till and I would see how many people, men, when they were getting their change had digits missing, fingers missing. So lots and lots of accidents, small accidents like that. But then there was also bigger accidents although health and safety had risen in standards by then. But, um,(...) yeah, that was my experience in the plug mill canteen.It was close because the men used to just come in for their, so it was right in the fact, right in the steel works. And it was just nonstop when they had their breaks or for lunch or whatever. And I mean, huge pots that we used to carry over custard and they'd put them in a band Marie, which was kept warm by hot water. And you'd be, you'd have really strong arms to do that. And it was just nonstop.(...)

And I remember then having to mop the floor. That was really hard work because it was filthy. So you had to soak it first and then go and dry it. And it was, and I thought, oh, sod this [laugh]. It was just very hard work. And yeah, the women were like with most places of hard work, it's hard humour and hard language because it's the kind of gets you through lifts. It lifts the drudgery of the hard work. Yeah.

Okay. So when I was born in Corby, near the town centre, and that was like my dad came over as a DP, as a displaced person from Poland. And like most people that came to Corby, it was for housing and work. And then I went away traveling when the strikes were on, and it was really difficult time.(...) And then I returned in about 84, and it was like a ghost town, because the demise of the steel works. So there was a lot of properties going very, very cheap, because the council couldn't keep up with this, keep their stocks in good order. So we bought a house and we did it up. And it was in what was then one of the roughest estates in Corby. It's called the Lincoln estate. But there'd been three generations of (...) unemployment. And, you know, there was a lot of drug addiction. There was a lot of blue sniffing, and then heroin became the thing. So it was dire. You know, there was a lot of desperate people around and not much going on on the high street, empty shops. And it was a very difficult time. And because it had a bad reputation. Right from the beginning, when men came first from, like, I suppose, my dad and people from men from Scotland, they would come first and and then the families. And it was, in a quote, nothing today but the rank and fight with it. They were meant to keep them in order because the men on their own didn't have that kind of anchor. So it got a really bad reputation for being a rough town. And, you know, we're surrounded by beautiful villages. And it was really it did become a little bit of a no go area. And now people come to Corby for a night out, you know, they come to watch the theater. We've got a lovely fantastic swimming pool.(...) When I was little, there was no swimming pool. There'd be a free bus to go to Ketchum, which was eight miles away to have to almost fight to get on it.(...) So it's become buoyant again.

And I think people are really appreciated on the green and the loveliness around the town and the friendliness of people. Yeah. So I've so I've traveled a lot and then came back and settled and had a couple of children here in Corby.

Well it's always been there. We used to have the Corby candle and so that was always there as a focal point. You've always seen it lit. And it was quite sad when that disappeared and when they got rid of the Steel side of it.

Well a lot of my family came from Scotland, came down from Glasgow I think in the 70s and the 80s, which has led Corby to have the biggest population of Scottish people outside of Scotland. I think it's called Little Scotland for a reason. So we've got a deep Scottish connection and heritage here. I'd say about half the people that live here have got Scottish roots. It's had hard times, but I think it's on the up. It's on the bouncing I think. Things are starting to heen up around here. Just had some hard years.

That's a thousand ton mixer. A thousand ton, half full. A thousand ton half full. And it used to rotate. It didn't get turned into pig iron. Pig iron is what comes out of the furnace, in effect. But it was never cold. It went straight in. It was molten iron, yeah. It was pig iron.(...) They made it into pig oil before they made it into steel.

Originally, when there was only the blast furnaces there.That is... It's being constructed. Right. That's being constructed because there's men down in the thing. I'd say that's a strip mill when they redid the strip mill. I think that's when they were rebuilding the strip mill. Right.

Because they did it quite a few times to make the width bigger. It ended up at 16 inch, I think. I was trying to work out whether this was building it or disassembling it. Well, it looks too new to be disassembling. Because when they rebuilt it, they made it look like they were destroying it. To get the old stuff out. Yeah.

Well, if there's any consolation, I have a photograph of every single steam logo that ever worked here. You're not alone. (Laughs) Yeah, well that was into the coke oven. You see there, all these are the, that's all coal. We've got to get to the coke ovens, which is at the back. But they used to take that up. There's a line up the top there that went round the back of the Cine plant and into the North Bank. Yeah At the end of what is now the Weldon bypass. Where that roundabout is, that's roughly where it was. Well, they came out and then they went down and you, if you can visualize where there is now no steel work hardman block. But down there, there's a truck goes underneath the main road to Weldon. And it went out to a plant at the bottom of the hill that was tarmac. And they used to tip it all out and crush it all up and make it into tarmac. And most of that came back into the works for the roads. Not most of it, but a lot of it did.

Of course, there's the line. That line there was one that went up the hill. That one there went up the hill and they took it out the back up to there and then back down here. And they parked them all down here. Okay. Down the bottom there. Yeah. Parked them all down on this way and that's because the coke gongs were there. There was a tippler where the wagons would go in and they'd tip it upside down and off it go again.

No, most of it was designed to go in the tubes work. Right. But there were some that went elsewhere. Everything out of the electric arc was taken to Bilston because they were the ones that had the equipment to deal with the ingot. Things like stuff from the coke oven. Stuff like sulfuric acid and phosphate salts and all the rest of it. Benzene. Benzene was always taken out by National Benzole fuel that you used to put in your car. You know, the guy with the winged hat.(...) Right? There used to be a blue sign with a yellow hat. They used to go to National Benzole. And they used to put it in fuel. And during the war, they actually had big gas bags fitted on the top of vans.

Actually, I don't know whether there's a picture in there of a map. There's going on the map. If there isn't a picture in there of a map,(...) Billy has a map that I photographed when I was at East Carlton.(...) That's six foot square of what they had here in Corby in 1919. But I have at home, and no one else has it, even a picture of it. I have a map hand-drawn in 1896 of the state of the quarries. And where the furnaces-- the furnaces are not even there. Corby Village and the quarries at that time. But that is Samuel Lloyd's school. I'm cutting on my... Samuel Lloyd being... You've heard all about Samuel Lloyd. All over again. It is a guy that Samuel Jansen Lloyd was the guy that in effect cleared all the sight.(...) Samuel Lloyd, who founded Lloyd's Einstein and his son.(...) Right. A very important man he was.(...)

That's taken from the top of the ODE, I think. There were tons. (...) Before we built that stack,(...) the furnace gas stack, that we set fire to the gas. Before that, we had three bleeders that bled pure, unadulterated blast furnace gas into the atmosphere.(...) 40% CO2. Or CO rather. 40% CO. And when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, we had to shut the furnaces down. Because we were gassing people in the village. Wow. 40% carbon monoxide. How often did that happen? Quite often. That's why we built the one with the flare stack on it. Mind you, it took till 1970 something to do that.(...) It's a long one, so I did it. Where the railway station is, if you're going up to it and turning left into the car park. Keep going then. That's where that turning is. You went over the bridge and the entrance of the car. The station was just over the bridge. Right. So you're actually on the other side. What they could know is the West Cleave because the cemetery is up in the tower. And that's Rock on Road Bridge. And that stood that firm piece there.

There used to be a quarry line around there. This is pre Stuart's Alloys Day. It was way back in the early 1900s. I think it shut in 1917 or something like that. That quarry should be there. Back in the 60s. Everyone in Weldon painted their houses red. Because of the oxalide dust coming out of the new blar, BOF. But then we put some conditioners in there and they had to paint them all white then. Little stuff coming out was white.

I think the Corby boys club is in there. And that was Lloyd Payne.(...) The Payne's built that. Who were big iron stone people at the time. I didn't get into them. So I could have done. That's Lloyd's Road. There were houses down there at one point. The black house, what they call the black houses. They were knocked down in the 50s. But Lloyd's Road now curves round and comes here. Because there's a few pictures that you can see them on and people are saying, "Where on earth were these houses?" Why are you... You're not old enough. I'm not old enough because I don't remember. I know where they were.

When they were building that, they had this big tall crane that lifted everything onto the top. The top part looks like a shed. That's Hector's house is where that is. We should call it Hector's house. Because I was trying to work out why one looked different than the others. Because that number three was rebuilt in the 70s. The other three, pretty much the same way as they were built in the 30s. They did change a few things. They made a half-figure, a large bit, but nothing that you can see through it. But when they built that, the Hector's house and all the rest of us are on the top. They had these three legs to support the crane. They built everything else around it. When it came to knocking it down, they found that they built the control room. (...) One of the legs, the cross part of the leg went straight through the middle of the control room. So they had to knock the control room down to get the leg out.

That’s the central power station. Because there's an alternator. There's an alternator. We used to feed the high pressure steam through an alternator. And the resulting steam that come out was the high pressure steam in the work. 450 PS. See, they're the things I was trying to play with.(...) They're all the temperature indicators. Right till the end. That's what they're filling the furnace with. Yeah, so they're going up and then just pouring out. And the car at the bottom tips so much weight.(...) When it gets up to the top, it goes into a bell.(...) It tips it about and the bell will revolve. So you do an old pile up in the same pile. Oh, I can't just see. And when it's full, that one drops and it drops onto the big bell in the furnace.(...) And then they shut that box and then drop it all into the furnace.

Oh, okay, that's brilliant. the top of number three, when it was first built, we commissioned it where Telford Way is now. Telford Way Industrial Estate in Ketra. That was old Ketra and Furnace site. And Ian Wright said that as their base. We built the top of the furnace over there and went and commissioned it. And then we had to take it a bit and bring it back in and commission it again. Yeah, that's an old one. Yeah. When originally... Well, not originally. When we rebuilt number three, they put the staircase. You get up to each different level. We didn't put the handrails on it.(...) And it's the weirdest thing to walk up the stairway with no handrail. Yeah. It just don't work right. You just don't want to automatically reach through it. Yeah. It's a bit of safety there. this is ground level where rails are.(...) So then the cast-downs will be there. And then that's where it runs down the sand runs into the... Looking at that, I think that's number three rebuild. And we had to build... B

ecause of the increase in size, internal volume of the furnace, we had to build... The stoves were x number of meters taller. And then when Stuart's and Lloyd's took them over, they decided to use this place as their basis of their new works. They built their intention was only to build three, to replace the three that were there. But then they decided because of market conditions, they could do with the fourth. So when the fourth one was built, it was the largest in Europe.

Before they built number three back into that, it's as we now know it. I had a, I was still an apprentice officially. They sent up a proper tradesman time served tradesman to we had a thermocouple that went in the top of the thing to tell us the dome temperature. We had to go do number six. We've got this thing and they were a tube sort of that diameter. And it come up to a flange and you made an(...) asbestos grommet to go over the thermocouple and underneath the flange. And then when you put the frame down, there were four bolts to keep it in place because of the blast pressure underneath. We got to the top with this movie and I said, right, we're going to do this one, George. And he went, that's not it. That's that one we're going to do. No, George.(...) That's number seven. That's number six. You were the tradesman. I loosened the bolts and said, George, it's all yours now. Cagle was disconnected.(...) The bolts are disconnected. It's all yours. And he went up and kicked it like you had to do to loosen the finger. On this level. Yeah. That. Oh, that's on ground. Yeah. That's ground level. That is because that's the railway. There's a ladle. Yeah. A slag.

My name is Douglas Reed. I do have a middle name, I don't know if that's important. And I was born in a town called Kirkcawde in Scotland.

My trade is a central-laced thriller. That's my trade. In engineering profession, you've got all the multiplicity of trades and different traders.(...) And I worked on, was trained to work on all types of laces, machines, planes.(...) And that was my, that's my trade. I was earning money double, double what I was earning in Scotland. And then when you added the shift, what we call the shift differential, because you've got extra percentages on for doing different shifts and working Saturday's and Sunday's as well. It was fantastic, the money. Just because of what you were making, you created hazards and an environment that was(...) very, very bad. For example, my hearing is no good. And I've got the status and it's really got to a point where I can't do it here. And then after we got a settlement for the deafness, they decided to give us your defenders.

It was after the horses bolted. It's still late then. You'll see some of the men even in the blast furnaces. And they're wearing a toe-bihat on the jackets right next door to the furnace. They had some gloves. If you lost a toe, you used to get a small golden boot as a present (Laugh). And if you lost any part of your body, you used to get a tie. Earthy, stagnant water, dirty oil. But if you've been working in engineering anyway, you get accustomed to that. And Landlady would give you... We called it a Samuja's piece. We called it a Samuja's piece. It was usually made with Scottish plain bread. It's a pretty tall thing. It's got a crust on the top, a crust on the bottom. And they're quite thick slices. And the favourite things were in that was what we called mousstrapped cheese.(...) That's hard red cheese that you used to get at the Coppie. And you used to get that and a big slice of that on two bits of plain bread. And we used to... One of the boys got into doing it to make them edible. We made a stand-up like that. We used to put it out the side of the furnace. And we would have the door door lined up with the furnace. And then we'd just lift the door of the furnace, which was made with refractory bricks to keep the heat in. And we used to lift it up and just for a few seconds, the heat, the radiant heat inside, came out and just for a few seconds, it melted the cheese. And it... It give a bit of motion movement.(...) But it was a lot more pleasant to eat than just dry cheese. And that's how hot it was. But you had to be quick. You were just up there with the door. And I dropped the top. That was bloody hot.

There were 28 nationalities in this area. The last place that we got workers from, I was at a computer at the time, was Egypt. That's the last place that we couldn't get workers to work at all.

The place that you walk down the street is very close to the park. When you talk about blast furnaces, a blast furnace has what they call a campaign. When a blast furnace is freshly built, and it's assumed that it's stuck up, and you light it, and it continuously makes iron for seven years. The life of a blast furnace. The iron oren, the coke, and the lime, (...) all you can do is go down and the production man keeps just keep topping it up. He's chopping it up, and you keep tapping it at the bottom. And the stack, all the ingredients gradually melts the iron from the ore, and the iron becomes molten, and it falls to the bottom. And the iron's taken out from the bottom, and the slag, which is the waste residue, that's tapped off higher up than the iron. That's taken off the top,(...) and that's the slag. And roughly speaking, the plant was making a million tons of iron in the year. And the progression down, so that would make about a fifth reduction of 200,000 tons of tubes, would be made from that. So the amount of energy that was acquired to convert it (...) and the different processes that go through before it becomes a tube. In fact, that's roughly the conversion rate. So all the stuff goes in at the top, and through the double bell goes in the first one,(...) and then the bottom one is closed, and that one drops down and lets all the stuff in. Then they shut that again and open that, and that goes in.

And when the seven years is coming near,(...) say six and a half years, that kind of thing, you start to see the glow through the steel walls, you start to see the red glowing through because the refractory has been worn away with a constant drop in down of the ingredients from the top. So we campaigned within the unions, within the Labour Party and the TUC to have a campaign in Corby second to none. But from a practical point of view, it's fair to say that myself and people like me knew we would do one. But the least we could get(...) was a damn good resettlement, resettlement. But the campaign had to be made to keep Corby open. We were very, very successful in that campaign for years. Everybody that was finished up was made redundant financially. Well, tremendously well off.

Some people moved, (...) some people stayed in the area. the majority of people in the works worked for long, were very loyal, very loyal workers. And there was people left, but they came back. The workforce was very, very loyal. That Kettling's nothing compared to here. A few workers don't live long.(...) And I tell my family that I'm very lucky,(...) because I'm getting a pension from the poor buggers that are now dead. Because what they paid into the fund, (...) the numbers that are getting pensioned from the fund are down, down, down, down, down. So I'm picking up a pension that some of my mates paid in for and never got it because they died.

And of course, the social clubs, most of the clubs, the hours were governed by the shift times. So you could come out of the works, then the day shift, back shift or night shift, and go and get a pint.

I was at school in Northern Ireland when my parents moved over here. So I stayed behind for a year to finish my second year. But then parents wanted me over here as well. Came over here and that was the end of my blooming education as well, really apart from trade unions and workers' education association. Yeah, I was an Irishman. Yeah, I'm Irish. So I've got a kind of Corby Northern Irish accent mixed up.

My parents were already here for a year before me. So it was my father that came here for work. But I've got a funny story about that. When I went for work in the steel works, (...) my father took me there when I was 15. And the reaction,(...) the reaction I got from the guy behind the desk, the bias that was against Irish people at that time. He says we haven't got enough apprenticeships because I wasn't going to be an apprentice or something or other. We haven't got enough apprenticeships for our Scottish lands and English lands. Never mind you Irish.

I started more or less on my 15th birthday, just about. Oh, when I first went in there, they had a little group of lads who would have sent them around cleaning this and doing this and doing that. Mostly stacking bricks because then you learn bricks with furnaces and so on like that in the steel works. So that was the first job I had for about three months or so. And then they sent me to the plate layers office to deal with the plate layers. So I worked in there as an office boy, running that. Made a lot of friends from people who were displaced because of the Second World War. They sold me as a champion. I could fill in their forms for them and so on. We all had to go to the training center all the time. So everyone every week. So I suppose they picked out a few that were a bit more intelligent. The others and stuck them in the offices. And I was one of those.

When you got to 16, you had to go and work in some production side.(...) And I got into heavy rolling mills. It was all the lads who went to the Bessemer and so on. You see that kind of sand on the ground on the molten iron. Down there. And it went to the Bessemer or the BOC plant which which which. Displace the Bessemer later on. And then they blasted air oxygen through it and put other ingredients in to make it to steel.

My job in the rolling mill later on when I was was to do with the rolling and the production of steel. And sometimes we had to phone the Bessemer plant up or the BOC plant up and say could have a couple of blows. Bit more carbon and higher carbon making it harder steel. And they say OK Frank next couple of shovels are calling. They got the carbon. Well it evolved. The Bessemer plant was superseded by British basic oxygen steel making BOS. So that was a new plant and it just shut the Bessemer down and they did it instead. Right. Because they could do bigger batches. Whereas the Bessemer you could only get about four or five ingots at a time from what they call a blow. In the in the BOS plant you could get 25 tons. Right.(...) Instead of.(...) Sorry. You get 125 tons instead of 25 tons. And it was a 1910 or so around about there where the blast furnace men and Coby went on strike. And then they got severely beaten by the police and so on like that.

There's different ways of pouring steel, pouring that steel into a mold. Some of it was done from the bottom. If I just put the steel in, it would come up, it would come up, it would rise up. The others, they were poured in from the top and then plucked.(...) All the plumbing gets plugged. More specialized steel got done from the bottom. Open half steel was always from the bottom up. Right. But that wasn't done in the best of my all the past plan. That was done from the open half plan. Which is where they put loads of scrap and melted it down. When the bars came down. They roll at the 48 inch mill. The shears. They cut the ends of the the thing. Right. So all those ends. All went to skip. Then they went into a railway carriage. Sides on.(...) Then they went there. And they put into the furnace. And then they just melted it down again. Added other ingredients to make it into specialized steel. For different things like wheels of cars or bikes or whatever. They had a yard for all ingot stock called the... They called it the mortgage yard. (...) All ingot stock went up there. Including stuff they couldn't roll due to holidays or breakdowns or whatever.(...) They all worked same up there. And then it was rolled later. You had to use roughly about one tonne of coal. Right. That was the equivalent. Yeah.(...) And we rolled a thousand tonnes of shift. So that's a thousand tonnes of coal. the coal goes to the... the coke ovens, we used to call them. And then all the... All the different chemicals are extracted from the coal. (...) And then the coke goes to the blast furnace which they make iron. Then the iron goes to these different places to make steel. Yeah.

And some of the steel is made, for example, by electric furnace. That was sent to other places.(...) It used to be for special purposes.

I can remember Margaret Thatcher's brain. And the things that happened during her, the political things that happened during her time. The Financial Times newspaper, they phoned me up and they asked me if I could get a few people together to talk about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher with regards to the steelworks closure and stuff like that. So I did. And there was quite a good discussion when I'd forgotten a guy's name. But I think he produced a booklet on this. And one of the things that I pointed out to him was that the steelworks wasn't just there to make iron and steel and roll it. It was all sorts of things happened because the steelworks were there. For example, people got together socially in the welfare, in other places. And they created things like cricket clubs, like pipe bands,(...) all sorts of things like that. And it also helped when you got into trouble. Somebody got into financial trouble, for example. They might come to the shop steward. What's the matter? I can't pay my rent or whatever. But that shop steward, if he could actually help them, he always knew somebody who could,(...) somebody that was on the local council or something like that. So they were able to help people in those ways as well. So we lost all of that when the steelworks closed, as well as our livelihood.

One of the best things that we did as a trade union movement in Corby, at the time I'm talking about the 1970s now, but the people who came to Corby first of all came here in the 1930s. So by the 1970s, they were reaching retirement age. As a group, as a bunch of people in the steelworks, we decided we should do something for what we called the pioneers of Corby. And we did. We went to the local authority council and said, "Can you help us? We'll give land or something like that.(...) We want to build a day centre for retired people." And we went to Lord Melchit, who was the sun-lives.(...) And we went to him, who became the head of the steelworks in this country, and asked him if he could give help as well. And he did. He provided transport, given a bus.(...) But what we did, we collected, I think it was six old pennies, I think it was six old pennies, I think. So it was in what? Tuppence or something, isn't it? In today's money, two and a half pence. We collected that money every week, and that money went to provide facilities for our senior citizens, including hairdressers, everything, a shiropody, everything like that. And they had a day centre straight underneath the council chamber in Corby, when it was before this cube was built. So all that. We did all those kinds of things as well. So some of that, show me, something like that. Did that last beyond kind of student law? No, it collapsed. The money was no longer there, so they couldn't provide, the local council couldn't provide all of that out of their budget. For example, I'll give you a little story. On November the 1st,(...) 1979, we had a march in Corby. 10,000 people turned out onto the streets on that particular day. They joined in with the trade unions and political leaders to march through Corby to protest about the closure of the steel industry here. But the main thing was, if people were a bit of foresight, which I was on the executive committee of Rosac, and I was chairman of the activities committee, then what we were doing really was to make sure that if we're going to lose it in the end, that there would be some money coming in to regenerate Corby. And that's what happened. That's what you've got now. You've got regeneration of Corby because of the pressure we put on. We've got money from Europe coming into the town. There was a lot of fly-by nights at the time, but eventually it all settled down. (...)

So Corby is a thriving town again. You ask anyone in Corby what they think of the Corby people, and they'll tell you that they're the best in the country, (...) the most generous. Because they do. Anything that happens, they all join in. It comes from a Scottish working class tradition to begin with. Scottish and Irish, I suppose. Working class traditions, because that's what people did. Well, I find everyone was friendly here. A family, wanting to help you and whatever. Not put you down, hardly any prejudice at all. Apart from all those things like that. But Corby it's always been a kind of cosmopolitan town. At the time, when I first came to Corby, like I said, when I started with Steelworks, when the plate layers, they were the ones that looked after all the railway lines and so on. Most of them were from European extraction. They were displaced out of Europe because of the Second World War. They were all friendly, especially to me, because I helped them a lot. You know, where they're filling in their forms, and a lot of them couldn't speak or read and write English. So you helped them with their timesheets and stuff like that. He made a lot of friends because a lot of them were displaced for different reasons. But if you leave the politics aside,(...) there's still human beings and you help them if you can. And they were the same. Everyone that came into Corby, we've had people in Scotland, which was the main thing.(...) There was the Irish, there was all of those. And then this continued.

It happens even now with people coming in who are not from this country. They're just welcome. Nobody bothers them. They're just welcomed here. There's a story that... A Canadian firm... Oh, God, what was their name? York Trailers. They came in here to make trailers. And Stuart and LLoyds tried to resist them from coming in. But they came in and what they did, instead of having their headquarters in Canada where they were from, they made Corby their headquarters. So it was just interesting. So there was things like that. I mean, that was part of the political arguments we had, you know, the way we needed to have other industry in the town, but it was always resisted. Stuart and Lloyds had their iron fist on it. The mood of the town was great. The only thing was that when it was nationalised, the same people were left in charge. And they wanted to mind it, I suppose. they started to build new blast furnaces way apart from where the old, not blast furnaces, I mean, Coke ovens. Way apart from where the old Coke ovens were. The reason for that was they already had the foundation stand for what they called a queen blast furnace. Huge blast furnace. We've probably been able to produce twice as much iron as one of the old four furnaces. That was because they realized there was enough ore in the ground. In fact, we were told when I first started in the steel world, I said, you've got a job for life because there's enough ore in the ground round here to last 100 to 100 years. they started to build new blast furnaces way apart from where the old, not blast furnaces, I mean, Coke ovens. Way apart from where the old Coke ovens were. The reason for that was they already had the foundation stand for what they called a queen blast furnace. Huge blast furnace. We've probably been able to produce twice as much iron as one of the old four furnaces. That was because they realized there was enough ore in the ground. In fact, we were told when I first started in the steel world, I said, you've got a job for life because there's enough ore in the ground round here to last 100 to 100 years. they started to build new blast furnaces way apart from where the old, not blast furnaces, I mean, Coke ovens. Way apart from where the old Coke ovens were. The reason for that was they already had the foundation stand for what they called a queen blast furnace. Huge blast furnace. We've probably been able to produce twice as much iron as one of the old four furnaces. That was because they realized there was enough ore in the ground. In fact, we were told when I first started in the steel world, I said, you've got a job for life because there's enough ore in the ground round here to last 100 to 100 years. Where they should take steel to near deep sea ports so they could expo it abroad and stuff like that. All came in and called me right in the middle of the country. So that was his death really.

You've only got to go around North Hamlet you have a look at their villages.(...) And most of the most of the old houses from hundreds of years ago are all red with the iron ore that's still in the stone. There's still a legacy of having work in this. I've got CEO Katie. That's my doctor telling me that's a legacy of having work in the steel works. And I did ask this particular doctor. I know she I know she had she got confidentiality to protect the robot.(...) I says, I'm not wanting to know names of patients or anything like that.

But how many people do you reckon very often your books are suffering from chest complaints as a result of having worked in the steel works? She says all of them. All of them who weren't in the steel and this we all got chest complaints. Because where I work in the heavy rolling mills, especially in the summertime, the sunlight coming through the slots and windows in the roof. You can see the dust in the atmosphere floating about. So you drink the cup of tea, see film, little film on the air. So that intrigued me because what I did when I was a union official in the steel works, I did some research into how much of an ingot's weight is lost from being a made into an ingot until it was rolled. I found out that one percent of the weight was lost in scale and dust. One percent of a thousand tons of shift, that's three thousand tons a day. Multiply that up by a year or whatever a month a year. You see how much dust and scale there was. And people were breathing that in. breathing sulphur, more of the last sulphur and blast furnaces.(...) In fact, you're walking in. If there was a local come by with iron in it, into the boss plan,(...) the sulphur sometimes took your breath away. Just walking, just passing you over. And loads of people in Corby lost their lives because of asbestos as well. Because to keep the pipes from freezing up in winter, they had to be lagged and they were lagged with asbestos. So putting asbestos on and taking the old stuff off, knocking you walking past that and breathing it in. Quite a few people I know died of. But it was our livelihood, you know. We didn't realise all the consequences of having work. So these things only come out later on, you know, when people start doing research into what's causing these problems.

For example, there was a job in the roller mills called the de-seamers. What that is really is this de-surface and defects in the bars and after they've been rolled, they take them out with oxyacetylene torches and de-seaming rods and take the defects out that way. Hardly any of those men retired. They all died of heart attacks before they were of a retirement age. You can see the glow as you came from outside of Corby coming in. You can actually see where Corby was because of the glow in the sky. That dust was coming out as well into the women that live near the steel in the Stevenson's Way area. The black spoons are only a few in their backyard, more or less. What they were interested in was getting a job to get in the house, and then Corby was easy. One, get a job and two, get a house. Dead easy. In fact, in those days,(...) if you didn't like the house you were in, you just go and apply for another one, you get it within three months. Or if you were in a house and you didn't like the area you were in, you could go up to the council offices or the development corporation, and it was called offices, and see if there was anybody wanting to swap into your area, and you could swap houses like that. I first came to Corby and lived in the Swiss and everybody had either walked or biked, but not only that. Well, you can still see it, but it was a lot more a few years back. Taxis. People used taxes because they were quite cheap to use here. Most people used to go to work in taxes.(...) It didn't go as one individual needs taxi. What they used to do is they'd go to the bus stop, maybe four or five people waiting on the same bus. Fancy getting the taxi out, but we all chipped in. You just had to wait in the steel works. The ship come in, you're going off.(...) Somebody's coming in and the taxi, you get the same plan, get back out again.When I first started working in steel works, it was only three shifts anyway. But Saturday, they finished at one instead of two o'clock. That was so we could get to the football match and stuff. One o'clock and then it didn't start up again until Sunday night, ten o'clock. Ten to six. So there was only a few shifts that weren't working anyway. But later on that changed. So they wanted to continue. So they created another shift, so there was four shifts. The only time it stopped was...(...) It never even stopped then because they were still making ingots. But not maybe rolling them because the rolling mills were off and all of it for a couple of weeks. So they just had to maintain it during that period and stack the steel up and then it could be heated up and rolled later anyway. It was hot rolled to different... it was two strip mills.(...) It was a strip mill, a scalp mill as they called it. And a Morgan mill. The scalp mill took all the steel that was rolled through tandem side in the heavy mills. And the Morgan mill took all the continuous mill stuff out of smaller... rolled to the smallest sizes. And then it was heated up again in the furnace.(...) And then they rolled it and made it into a long... big long sort of stretch of steel.(...) Which was then coiled, made into a coil. And then that coil was taken over to the tubeworks where it was heated again. And then it was put through the furnace as it turned into tubes. And the most different process was making it. There was the straight continuous weld as they called it. Which was just bending it over and then welding it. And then there was what I call the toilet roll thing. Where it was the spiral. And that was a different way of doing it as well.

Yeah, my name's Billy Dalziel I was born in Corby in 1967, September 1967.

So, people are generally quite surprised to find it's a, it's got an ancient history to it. There's Iron Age settlements nearby, (...) or part of Corby, a place called Prior's Forge, which is probably about a mile from the village. There's Roman settlements, several Roman settlements, and then obviously you go into the medieval period, and then up to modern day. So, it has got a real long history, especially when people hear that it's a new town, they expect it to be from the 1950s, which a large part of it is.

When I say a big quarry, it's several miles long by about a mile and a half wide, and it was dug by a dragline excavator that moved millions of tons of earth over its operational life. the Romans didn't necessarily come for the iron, they were tending to make pottery there and stuff like that, they don't let it, they probably would have known the iron was there, I'm sure they would have done,(...) so you've got iron age settlements, you've got a long long period where there was nothing, it was just agricultural and it was forestry work that was done, so Corby, Weldon and Gretin were forest, royal forest villages, so most of the people that lived there would have kept and looked after the forest that belonged to Rockingham Castle, and Rockingham Forest was a huge, I mean it ran from Wellingborough, which is 15-20 miles south,(...) and then a good distance north, it was a really big huge forest, but it was, it was a royal forest and its administration centre was Rockingham Castle, so those three villages kind of serviced the woodlands there, but then with the coming of the railways, they built a mountain railway line, I think it was about 1870, that went from the Kettering main line, it went from Kettering through Corby onto Oak and Melton-Mowbray, and I think eventually Nottingham,(...) so in the 1850s when there was a great exhibition, they'd already knew that there was iron ore in the North Hampshire area, so the Lloyd's family, which is part of Stuart's and Lloyd's, the Lloyd's family knew that there was iron ore in this area, so they were thinking of south North Hampshire, a place near Daventry that was owned by Lord Hesketh, so they were originally going to build there, but the thing that's unique to Corby, not unique to Corby, in Corby's favour is that the iron ore is very near the surface, so it's cheap to extract, if you get it from anywhere else you have to do deep mining, which costs a lot of money, whereas in Corby you can do what's called open cast mining, so you're only removing a shallow topsoil to get in the iron ore, so it's much much cheaper. yeah Corby's perfect, it's got clay soil, so way back in iron age you could make your furnaces from the clay, you have plenty of wood to make your charcoal or your heat source, there's lots of water around about,(...) so you've got all the elements you need to produce that, it's just that we then went several hundred years where we had no steel making at all, and then obviously the Lloyd's family from Birmingham knew that there was iron ore in this area, it runs across the whole country by the way, it's not just need Corby, the iron ore goes from one side to the other, through a band through the middle of the country, but like I say it's just that it happens to be near the surface in Corby.

There was iron making which is a less pure or advanced type of steel, but there's iron making the North Hampshire area which predates Corby, so Corby actually had a Lloyd's, which again is the Lloyd's family, so there was Lloyd's Ironstone which was about 1880 or somewhere around there, so that's 50 years before, sorry yeah, so 40 to 50 years before Stuart's and Lloyd's actually gets up and running, so there was Lloyd's Ironstone, but you also had iron making in Kettering which is about 7 to 10 miles away, there was iron furnaces in other areas, I can't remember exactly where it's coming from, the Rochester or that sort of area of North Hampshire. But there were much smaller concerns, you know they were like single furnaces, much smaller furnaces as well, but they were making smaller amounts of iron and it was kind of like pig iron, it's like a very basic type of iron, same with Lloyd's Ironstone, and I think the thing that sort of catapulted probably Corby was the first World War, that would have made a difference, obviously 14 to 18, and then they would have looked at expanding Corby and then also by 1930 they joined with the Stuart's side in Scotland which was a tube making manufacturer's, which then really catapulted it, but yeah you're right, it's a good point. Lloyd's is a Quaker family that originated from Birmingham, I think the family comes from obviously Lloyd's Wales, but they owned a big steel making concern in Birmingham, they're one of the biggest steel makers in that region, Stuart's was the biggest tube makers in the Lanarkshire and sort of mother well region of Scotland, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, that area. So Lloyd's Ironstone like I say set up in the 1880s around Corby, it's a complicated name change, I can't even, I've read them hundreds of times, it goes from Lloyd's Ironstone to Lloyd's and Lloyd's because they were different brothers in different parts of the family, they were different ownerships, it's quite complex, I would literally have to have the paperwork in front of me, but several incarnations, but there's not so much a fascinating thing now because it's a common thing, but back then the bit that was a big step forward was joining two big companies, rather than being competitors and fighting each other on a steel making market, they decided that joining together and forming a pretty much monopoly would be the best way and it turned out it was. Stuart's and Lloyd's was a huge, I mean it was a massive company, it was probably in the sort of top three, five biggest steel making companies in the world after like United Steel in America, it had places in Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, as well as all over Britain,(...) so it was a big, big company and it made an awful lot of money.

The unique thing about Corby was it was a complete process, it did everything, it dug the iron ore from the ground, it crushed it, (...) turned it into iron ore, then from the iron ore into steel, then from the steel into the tubes and then so it did absolutely everything from start to finish. Most steel works do one iron ore, two parts of that process, they might make the steel but then send it somewhere out to be turned into tubes or they might just do the tubes, you know they will do the whole process, very few of them dig up the iron ore, the iron ore's usually done it a mile,(...) hundreds of miles away, then transport to the steel works, Corby did everything in the site, which makes it, which is why it was the largest steel works in Europe in the 1950s. it dug the iron ore from the ground, it crushed it, (...) turned it into iron ore, then from the iron ore into steel, then from the steel into the tubes and then so it did absolutely everything from start to finish.

Most steel works do one iron ore, two parts of that process, they might make the steel but then send it somewhere out to be turned into tubes or they might just do the tubes, you know they will do the whole process, very few of them dig up the iron ore, the iron ore's usually done it a mile,(...) hundreds of miles away, then transport to the steel works, Corby did everything in the site, which makes it, which is why it was the largest steel works in Europe in the 1950s. When the first quarries were much, much smaller than that, so back in the 30s they were dug with much smaller drag line. I'm going to call it a drag line excavator, but to most people they were, it's a digger really, it just digs the soil up, but they were called drag line excavators, but in the early days they were quite small machines that similar to what they would have used to dig the Panama Canal,(...) in fact someone came from there, but the Panama Canal, all the canals up in Manchester, that sort of thing, and so they used them to dig the top soil off, so all they touch is the top soil, which then exposes the iron stone bedrock, the stone bedrock, that's then drilled and detonated and then they dig that up and put it in a train railway carriage, take it to the ore crushing plant, so the ore crushing plant then crushes it down into, not quite a fine powder, but crushes it from a large rock down to a small rock. It sounds very basic, very simple, but it, there is more size to it, but for that basic person it just crushes it down, but it's then taken to the blast furnaces. There's several different types of blast furnaces, but the main one was the gas fired blast furnaces. The blast furnaces themselves, the actual initial design of them, is similar to what you'd have had going way back to Roman or iron times, it's basically a sort of bowl or bell shaped thing with the heat at the bottom, (...) vent at the top, it would have a, and then when you wanted to let the molten steel out you would just push a hole through the bottom of it and the steel would pour out the base of the furnace. The ones in the 1930s were pretty much the same thing as that, but just instead of being four or five foot tall they were 100, 150 foot tall, but the actual tapping at the bottom is the same process,(...) so much so that what they used to, what they did in the furnaces, it was a brick lined bowl shape with a small hole. Now that hole had to obviously be plugged up while you melt the steel, so it was just a great big plug of clay, it was just a big lump of clay, they pushed into it(...) with several hundred tons of steel on the other side of it, but it used to be a machine that used to just fire under hydraulic pressure, a big lump of clay into it, and then at the end when the steel was melted they'd come along with another stick, well in early days it was done by hand, it was a big steel rod that they used to just force through and then the steel would pour out, later on they used hydraulic ones.

The steel making process sounds really simple, just heat a lump of steel up, but where the science and the technology comes in is that when you heat it up you've got byproducts that come off it that can alter the quality of your steel so you have minerals and chemicals in there that you don't want that can make it a brittle steel or a soft steel or a hard steel or changes, so you then have to add chemicals, take chemicals out, (...) add processes that get rid of certain chemicals but keep others, so that's where the scientific science is, and it is complex, it's well once you want to start making steel it's very specialist, it gets a lot more scientific, but in essence it's digging iron ore up, crushing it, melting it and turning it into a tube,(...) but that's the basic process and that was all done on site at Corby.

The dragline machines that dug them, by the end of the steel making thing they were absolutely huge, they resembled nothing like the canal machines that were used, I mean the last of the dragliners were weighed 1800 tons each which is about the same as a small destroyer, so if you go to London and you see the HMS Belfast it's not far off the weight of one of them, it could walk, it could under its own it could walk under its own steel, well not steel, it was electric, but it could move itself around,(...) each bucket lifted 30 tons of soil which doesn't sound a lot, but you know the machine to build it was eight to ten stories high and a 330 foot boom, they were huge, huge, they're very difficult, you can't describe them, they're, you know, you actually physically have to see them, they're huge things.

Some of the steels that used at Steelworks were used in nuclear power plants, so they had to be high quality, you know you couldn't just be, it's not that it was going to be a handrail that if it rusted 30 years later you'd just replace it, these were things that were used in plants that they weren't sure how long they were going to be in, so it had to be robust. so I started school when junior school, well I've just seen school, I can't remember how I started junior school, so senior school I started in 1979, so that was just the steelworks was getting announced closure, so junior school was probably, (...) I don't know 75, 76, somewhere out there. If you'd have gone into a classroom of kids that age then, I would have said probably almost every single kid in that classroom, his dad would have worked in steelworks. If they didn't work in the steelworks, it's probably something connected to it and possibly a lot of their mums might have had jobs in there. Very few of my friends parents were, their mums worked even part-time, they didn't really need to because the wages were really good, the wages were enough to keep you on,(...) but yeah everybody would have worked in steelworks.

My granddad worked there from 19, I think it was 33, 34, somewhere out there, near enough when it's opened, so he worked there 43 years and I've got a brother, I have to keep reminding myself, because technically this tube works which was part of the original works is still open and operational, I mean so when my granddad worked there or retired there in 1977 there were between 12 and 15,000, I can't remember the exact number off hand, but between 12 and 15,000 were up there, my brother works there now, I think it's 350, 400 working in tube works, when they closed the steelworks in 1979 they shut the steelmaking, but they kept the tube works open, but the tube works were still the largest employer in the town, even after shutting two-thirds of the business and getting rid of two-thirds of the workforce, it was still the largest employer, the next largest employer I think at that time is RS components,(...) and RS components didn't overtake the tube works until I think late 90s, maybe early 2000s, so it shows you how many people had bought, how big an influence it had on the town.

It's not until it's shut and you look back on it that you realize just how influential it was on the town, so(...) things like in a paternalistic way, so I don't know if you can ask questions later on, but but yeah I mean yeah so my dad didn't, but all my friends, my friends' dads worked on the security gates in the fairness areas, the tube works, like I say my brother works there, he's been there 36 or 37 years now,(...) if he stays till, my brother actually stays till 65 at the time, he'll work there longer than my granddad, so my granddad did 43 years, I think if my brother stays till retirement age he'll have done 47 I think. I say when I understand when it was open, it was quite, the trouble with the town is people remember it from when it was closed and when it went through rough times, but if you, so you talked about 40 years ago, so I understand that for a lot of people to remember back beyond that, it's not so easy, but when I was younger it was quite, it was a prosperous town,(...) all the jobs were well paid, there was no reason to be unemployed,(...) you could leave, one of the actual downsides in the little respects, or big respects I suppose, is that you could leave school with no qualifications, you'd get a job, you wouldn't be unemployed, you could literally leave school with nothing, at no-one levels, no-one levels, anything, and you'd get a job, okay you wouldn't be managerial, or you wouldn't be in a scientific area, but you would get employment, and it would be not bad pay. If you had a trade or anything like that, there were really good jobs.

The apprenticeship schemes that Iran were second to none they are, they, you just don't get them today, that quality and that standard of training doesn't exist, unless you went into a really big company that's around in Britain, like British Aerospace or Rolls Royce or something like that, they're the only kind of industries that would do this sort of apprenticeships and research training that they did back then, so it was good times. we also had the Highland Gathering which was a two-day festival, which when I look back on it it was absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing, I mean it was the largest Highland Gathering outside of Scotland, we used to have the first day was the official sort of gate, so they were proper, it was tossing the cable, throwing the hammer, (...) all that kind of, they were proper contests, so we'd get teams from Scotland coming down, the second day I think it was the second day, the Sunday was the fun day, and still what's paid, we used to have East End stars from Diana Dawes, the cast of East Enders, now when I look back then, they would have paid for these people to come here so when the steelwork shut the council took it over and they only ran it for a few years before they realised the cost of fortune, so they cut it down to one day, they ran it for a couple more years and realised they still couldn't afford it, they had to jettison it completely, it's now run by an absolutely fantastic committee that worked incredibly hard, but they cannot make it like it used to be under the Steelworks because they subsidized it to tunes of well it must have been tens of thousands, more than that even, and it was all free if you worked in Steelworks you got in, well they put it on, you still had to pay but it was subsidized, the amount you paid to get in was negligible. you'd have sports halls that were built, sports camps, football, rugby, cricket, they bought a local manor house and they didn't need it, so they handed it over to the town and turned it into a opinion called the boys club, which ran for 34 years, that's all subsidized, and I'm sure there's hundreds of other stuff that's just fell by the wayside that people have forgotten about that they've funded, they built a social club for all the former steelworkers, so it was called the welfare club, it had bars, a ballroom, dance hall rooms, billiard rooms, sneaker rooms, a lounge, a bar, bowling alley to the side, rugby pitches to the back, all this, that was all built and paid for by then, and I can quite safely sit here, and this I can say safely without fear of contradiction, you don't get companies like that now, you just do not get companies or businesses now that invest in their towns or their community to that scale. and they weren't small sums of money, and then they were with anything from two and a half thousand right up to 25,000, now 25,000 you'd have to have been there for years, you'd have to be senior management,(...) but if you think back to 1979-80,(...) even two and a half thousand to three thousand was a lot of money, it doesn't sound a lot today, but you could get houses, a house in Corby for anything from three to eight thousand pounds, you'd get a whole house for that.

When my kids were born, my old son was born in 2000, so things were a little bit grim, and I said to my wife, I thought well we've, we love the town, we've lived there all our lives, fantastic, but there's hardly anything, everything started to get really old and really tatty, the town center looked terrible, it was literally just get well card shops and chemists, the swimming pool was seen better days, although it was a great swimming pool, they'd seen better days, the cinema, there was no cinema anymore, I don't think we'd had the railway station at that point, we might have done, I can't remember,(...) it was just, it seemed that we thought, let's just move somewhere, where we can offer the kids a bit of a better standard. and you live there you kind of just bumble along, you get along with it, you don't, you go somewhere else, you get in your car, you drive to Kettering or Northampton and all that, you get your stuff, you know, it's very easy to do, (...) but it's not until now you actually see the difference, it's still things wrong with the place, I'm sure, but there is in most towns in Britain today.

My grandparents came from Glasgow, both of them, and they had relatives, friends, lots of people came down, so a lot of people knew each other, or if they didn't know each other, they knew the districts they came from, and they had a commonality between them all. (...) So I think sort of like 1950s, 60s, 70s, if you did census, looked at census, where people came from, I think it was at one point it was running at 50, 55 percent Scottish, 20 odd percent, or somewhere around there for Irish.(...) If you were English, you're actually in the minority, and I was in classes where friends that were actually English were almost the only person in the class, or a few dozen in a year or something, I thought it was a collection, they were English on the No Scottish Collection whatsoever.(...) So there was English, Irish, Welsh, Estonian, Latvian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, they were much smaller amounts, but they were still there, and obviously got English as well. So you had that right until 79. Obviously when the steel works closes, but a lot of people move away, what point, a lot of people that were keen for Scotland could move back up and get jobs in the steel works that were still open up there, so they would have connections so they could go back up to motherworling, working, I was forgetting the name of the steel plant up there, anyway, huge steel, it's closed now, so they could go back and work in the steel industry up there.

So I don't, you need to look at the population figures, but I suspect it went down quite a lot. House prices crashed, all that kind of stuff, which does affect the town as well, that makes a big difference. But migration wise is an interesting thing about the town, because we've always had migration, always always had migration.(...) We had a little bit of friction in recent, not massive amounts, just tiny little bits, because obviously we had an influx of people from Europe, so in the warehouses a couple of factories had lots of people from Eastern Europe, so we've got a big contingent of Eastern Europeans, so we've got lots of people from Estonia, Hungary, great, absolutely great, they've opened up lots of shops in the area, Polish, Hungarian, all kinds of stuff. Some of the churches that used to be nearly, very nearly shut in the town, are now mushroomed,(...) a lot of the Polish Catholics coming, the churches that were going to shut are now being kept open, so it's made a really nice positive effect on the town. People just come to get a job, really. So we've got a lot of influx from London, but we've got a new influx of people, we've not had the fortune to have for Caribbean.(...) Now if you'd have gone back to when I was a kid, there were no people of colour, virtually none, I had one, two people in my year that were Asian, from Asia, the rest all white, everybody was white, the whole town. Now it's really nice, so you've got some nice little Afro-Caribbean shops opening up, there's a cracking Afro-Caribbean church on one of the main streets, there's loads of weddings there, so that's nice as well because it was never there before. you went to another town, you stood out like a sore thumb, you know, if you went to Kettering or Wellandborough or even to Leicester or anywhere like that, your accent straight away knew exactly where you were from, because it didn't sound, you know, our accent did not sound like anywhere else around this region. So as soon as you went outside the borders of Corby, unless your accent was very English, it's just still a sore thumb, especially if there's a group of you, you know. And that was what was nice about Corby is that it had lots of different accents. there was a nightclub in the town that was part of the welfare which was built by the steel works and when it shut at night and you walked down the main street, everyone would be just joking and laughing with each other and taking the mickey out of each other and sharing taxis,(...) always sharing, if you got on a taxi if there was somebody in front of you they'd say where are you going and you'd say oh I'm going to the bean field and they'd say oh I'm going up to my truck, I'm going to pass them by, we'll drop you off, all the time, all the time, you'd never walked down the street,(...) somebody, having had done my new hat so much now, but people would do that, they would get in a taxi shout where you go, they wouldn't get in the taxi, one person in the taxi on their own and then shut the door,(...) they'd get in, if they had space in it they'd ask you out and just share the taxi with you. it is fact we had the largest number of black Hackney cabs outside London at one point, probably in the 60s and 70s, when I went to pubs and drink them and I left school, you went everywhere in a black cab and virtually every pub in the town would have two or three black cabs pulling out, there was the pub called the Hazeltree, it was almost like an unofficial taxi around, the behalf of a dozen black cabs pulling out, one after the other, one after the other, ferrying you around town from one pub to the other to the nightclubs, and there was two, two or three big taxi companies, Knights was one of the really big ones, Flanagan, the Irish family, and they had,(...) like I say, we had the largest number of black cabs outside London, bigger than more than some cities.