The Black Country Part 2

‘Daytime - 1997’ Richard Bellingham

Richard Bellingham was born in Cradley Heath in the Black Country, West midlands in 1970. Initially he wanted to become a painter. In his late teens, he began taking photographs of his family and immediate surroundings as source material for paintings. His fascination with photography gradually took over and led to the book ‘Ray’s a laugh’, published in 1996. As images of love, beauty and intimate community, the photographs represent one of the most moving bodies of work from the end of the twentieth century.

In 1998 his film ‘fishtank’ commisioned by artangel for BBC 2, was screened to high acclaim. Since then he has travelled widely in Europe, Pakistan and Ethiopia photographing the landscape with an emotional engagement more often found in painting than photography. In 2003, he returned to Cradley Heath to continue taking a series of photographs he had first begun in 1997 and which is the subject of his book.

Bellingham was awarded the Citibank photography prize in 1997 and nominated for the Turner prize in 2001. He exhibits internationally and currently lives and works in Brighton.

“I took a lot of photographs in this street, of something I wanted to capture, because I had more of a relationship with it.”

- Richard Bellingham

Richard Bellingham’s first Cradley Heath photographs, 1997, are snapshots. They are images surreptitiously taken within walking disctance of 19 Sidway street, the house where Billingham was born. They are urban landscapes in the Black Country of England’s Midlands, depicting scenes that are archetypal as they are personal - factories, streets, parks, schools, playgrounds, tunnels, car parks and churches - as unpopulated as they are full of memories.

“If I took a photograph with someone’s house in it and they saw me, they’d think I was going to break in later.”

We asked Richard to simply dream up something about this place this place we call the Black Country. At first he kept saying “But what else do you want me to do? How big should the images be, how many should i do?” We said it was really up to him; he told me this rarely, if ever, happens. So, he talked with the team, experimented with with some high end digital cameras and made night time treks to his old and new haunts. In this series of photographs we have both new images and slightly older images, by night and day. They tell the same story and a different one. To me they tell of Richard’s relationship with this area. The Black Country has that strange quality of not letting you go, of keeping you hoocked in, of maintaining a certain sameness and of keeping the relationship going wherever you’ve been in the meantime.

- Sylvia King,‘The Public’

“The Black Country has that strange quality of not letting you go, of keeping you hoocked in, of maintaining a certain sameness and of keeping the relationship going wherever you’ve been in the meantime.”

“A few days before his exhibition opened at the Ikon, in the centre of Birmingham, I was chatting to Richard in a cafe adjacent to the gallery. We found ourselves discussing The Five Ways, a pub we both knew in Cradley Heath in the Black Country. Situated at one corner of a major junction, it was referred to locally as just ‘The ways’. We both knew the pub itself, however, as ‘Charlie Wright’s’. Neither of us had been there for many years, We decided there and then to leave behind the pavement cafe culture of Le petit Blanc and go to visit this pub. Except for the addition of a huge plasma screen for the football, it turned out to be exatcly the same as we remembered; the tables, the stools, everything else, all exactly and spookily the same.”

- Sylvia King,‘The Public’

“We went there becuase we had been talking about growing up in this same area, though at slightlydifferent times; about being poor, being working class, about not knowing things. We talked about what those things meant now and about how you could feel - despite living a whole other ‘successful’ life in a different world - that maybe somebody would tell you that you weren’t really supposed to be there, that you didn’t belong and would be moved on. It was strange because in different eras we had done similar things and we could still feel some of the same emotions about our background, and experience that awkwardness and discomfort.

We talked a lot that day about the Black Country, Richard’s family, my family, about art and Art. We also talked about The Public and how we might work together. Though it might appear to some as an unlikely collaboration, it seemed to me that it would happen at some time. When we talked about Richard’s images of his family, we discussed the ways in which some critics viewed and positioned the work - they were seen as exotic, as representations of ‘the other’. Perhaps they didn’t understand Richard’s affection, impatience, care, concern and a myriad of other emotions that gave the pictures their dynamism. His landscape images at that time were his escape, his moments of calm amidst chaos. He felt, though, that people only wanted him to do more of the same, more family portraits, more of the images of the working class that people seemed to enjoy being shocked by. But they were then and this is now: he needed to do something else.”

- Sylvia King,‘The Public’

“The Public is a reborn Jubilee Arts. They have been going for over 30 years, mostly hidden away in the Black Country. They make work with communities, with the arts and artists, finding ingenious ways of enabling people’s voices to be heard and understood.

Time and timing are crucial for Richard Bellingham. Beyond the question of shutter speeds and it’s pragmatic adoption of fugitive behavior is the unavoidable Barthesian cliche of mortality instantly embodied in photographs, the shift that the closing of a shutter makes between the present and the past. The generation gap that largely inspired Billingham’s famous family portaits corresponds to a poignant game of ‘spot the difference’ that can be played between his first Cradley Heath photographs and their subject matter as it is today.”

- Jonathan Watkins

“Walking around outdoors in July 2004, with photographs from Billingham’s first Cradley Heath photographs to hand, it is clear how things have changed. Some of the trees on the edge of Bearmore Bank have disapperead, whilst others, like that one where a neighbours Robin Reliant was always parked, near the corner of Claremont and Sidaway Streets, have grown beyond recognition. The school on Mace Street now has a blue semi-circular sign welcoming us over it’s gate. Another sign, that wasn’t there before, behind, warns potential trespassers that CCTV will be watching them. A worrying crack in the wall of the watering can factory has been repaired.

The watering can factory has a yard that stretches along behind the terraced houses on Sidaway Street. As a boy, Billingham could hear the constant sound of it’s presses and other machinery. It’s quite quiet now. In fact, this town has an overall quietness, foiling the giggling gossipy conversation of the schoolgirls who walk through the tunnel below the railway on their home to the Codsall Estate. “Fuck off”, courtesy of the old woman across the road with tourette’s syndrome, seems very loud.”

- Jonathan Watkins

“Fuck off”, courtesy of the old woman across the road with tourette’s syndrome.”

Life in Sidaway Streetwas loud. “There was always noise - people who’d been in prison, staying with us and that...”, so loud in fact that neighbours moved out, and then the neighbourhoods first Pakistani family moved in. Later the Billinghams moved out. “There was this con man called Maurice who dealt in used cars. He said to my parents who were always broke, “Look, this house is worth hardly anything. I’ll give you two-and-a-half grand cash for it”, and they said “yeah, alright”, and they just sold him the house. I think they got a thousand for it in the end”. When asked if his

- Richard Bellingham

parents later regretted the loss of their family home, Billingham explains, “They didn’t appeart to, it was like they expected it to happen. Maybe they felt powerless, like there was nothing they could do about it. They’d have to walk to a telephone box to make a call, and they couldn’t be bothered. People round here have very poor expectations of themselves, so they don’t try... I was fourteen or thirteen years old. I wasn’t old enough to know we were being ripped off. Even if I’d’ve said something they wouldn’t have listened to me”.

“19 Sidaway Street - “It’s probaly worth between eighty and ninety thousand now”. It has three bedrooms, including a small one over the kitchen at the back. “... that was mine. It used to leak. There was no paper on the walls. Mouse shit on the pillow when i got into bed. They took the chimney down. It was really high, and starting to lean over the roof. It scared us, and so the council took it down.”

“There was always noisepeople who’d been in prison, staying with us and that.”

- Richard Bellingham

Cradley Heath in the 1970’s, when Richard Billingham was growing up, was an exhausted industrial town. Undoubtedly he has fond and Proustian memories of it, the many corner shops that have long-since gone - victims of the out-of-town Merry Hill shopping complexchildren playing in the streets now crowded by parked cars, the pubs, the rows on rows of terraced houses, the heartbeat sound of the factories. He has been living in Brighton for a couple of years, often returning though to visit his family and, incidentally, to remember.

The future is just about to happen in Cradley Heath. Shortley after we pass the schoolgirls in the tunnel we find ourselves back on the other side of the Codshall Estate, where new housing estates are rising up out of recent demolitions. We enter a sales office, the “Westbury Homes Information Centre”. A representative is not so interested to talk to us, as, after all, every one of their seventy newly built houses has been sold. We are directed across the road to the Kings Oak company office, advertising homes of disctinction. The whole Black Country is being “spruced up”, we are told there, and the names of the types of homes say it all; Ruskin, Arran, Jesmond, Beaulieu, Kingsford, Ashwood... These are houses with showers and “dressing areas”, all so terribly posh, completley unimaginable to the artist as a younger man.

- Jonathan Watkins

Richard Bellingham

‘Night time - 2003’

Jason, unemployed and addicted to Playstation at the time of the double portrait, has got a new job now working on building sites that are seemingly everywhere in Cradley Heath. He wants to take a course in tree surgery in the near future. When Ray was taken into care, Liz, Bellingham’s mother, left the high-rise flat to move into a small council flat between Pearson and Petford Streets. Living there by herself, she is very house-proud, carefully arranging ornaments on the window sills and cultivating a decorative mass of potted plants around her front door. From here with her son she sets forth down Clyde Street, across Lawrence Lane, to visit her husband.

We find Ray in the Trinity Care Home quietly sitting at a table by a window overlooking the back garden, a bit confused by our arrival. Full of other elderly people, mostly not very well, this place is a far cry from the melee he was part of in the high-rise flat, captured by Billingham in his “family photographs”. Then, in spite of the physical differences we saw between him and his youngest son, Ray could be laddish, if not a lad, boisterious, if not a boy. The truth now he and his family knows is that there can be no return to the places where he used to live, to the domestic scenes he used to dominate.

- Jonathan Watkins

As we walk down to Old Hill, Billingham explains that usually you didn’t move out of this place, if you’d been born into it. His parents, Jason and his elder brother have always lived within a mile of Sidaway Street, and almost everything they need and/or want is within walking distance. We pass the Ambulance Service and the dormant Police Station. “Most of the old people around here. I’m told, “have got something wrong with them: a limp, a bad arm, a bad back, but they don’t bother going to the doctors.” Hence the three pharmacies in close succession on Old Hill High Street.

- Jonathan Watkins

For those coming to live in ther new homes built by Westbury and Kings Oak there is a building society and a local mortgage advice centre. Then we come across a post office, a dentist, a place for denture repairs and another pharmacy. There is Karen’s carpet shop and Karen’s cafe: faggots and peas. There are lots of hairdressers: “all over head shaved for three pound, grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... pensioner’s day on Wednesdays”.

This is a place largely for the old people who grew up here. The younger ones, including the new house buyers with cars tend to do their shoppingg further afield and so Old Hill gives way to Merry Hill.

Richard Bellingham - Night time in the Black Country

The Black Country - Culture

“People round here have very poor expectations of themselves, so they don’t try.”

Richard Billingham finished taking his family photographs in 1996. They constitute a discrete chapter in the story that this work tells. There was for him never a question of revisiting the high-rise flat with the intention of making a sequel, or recasting the family photographs as the start of an ongoing project. The same is true for the first series of Cradley Heath landscapes. This signifies not so much a compartmentalising tendency as the artist’s profound apprehension of the nature of his medium, and an understanding of what it means. Photographic images, so real looking, are cut off from the reality of time rolling on, and we have no chance to climb back into the frame. Similarly, Ray might once have been aspiring to the condition of Jason, but it was of course hopeless ultimatley.

Billingham’s most recent photographs depict Cradley Heath at night. They iamges made when this increasingly somnolent town is sleeping. Unlike the earlier photographs they are the results of very long exposures, in the light of street lamps and so we can see what can be seen from thoroughfares, in weird sodium, halogen and neon colours. Most poignant perhaps are the pictures of the graveyard, full of monuments to people who have ‘fallen asleep’, clearly taken in autumn as trees are bereft and leaves lie on the ground, blown into the corners where graves meet other graves. The orange light burns out the detail on some surfaces, and makes the lichen an even stranger green. More than once photography has been referred to as the medium of death and more than ever Billingham’s work exemplifies this.

- Jonathan Watkins

“And what a heartbreaking fact of life, this relentless passing of time in the Black Country.”

With or without the graveyard we have the idea of Richard Billingham as a ghost haunting Cradley Heath. He has gone from there, but is uneasy. He keeps on being preoccupied with these locations around Sidaway Street, these pathways, these places where he walked as a boy. We are outside the school again, for hours in a very early morning, looking through a camera lens at the wall that seperated the playground from the world beyond. What a beautiful composition: the hard shadow of the signpost on the brickwork, the zig-zagging line on the tarmac, the orthogonal recession of classrooms against a soft grey sky, and what a heartbreaking fact of life, this relentless passing of time in the Black Country.

- Jonathan Watkins

Much but not all of the area now suffers from high unemployment and parts of it are amongst the most economically deprived communities in the UK. This is particularly true in parts of the metropolitan boroughs of Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton. According to the Government's 2007 Index of Deprivation, Sandwell is the third most deprived authority in the West Midlands region, after Birmingham and Stoke-onTrent, the 14th most deprived of the UK's 354 districts. Wolverhampton is the fourth most deprived district in the West Midlands, and the 28th most deprived nationally. Walsall is the fifth most deprived district in the West Midlands region, and the 45th most deprived in the country. Dudley fares better, but still has pockets of deprivation.

The Black Country - Culture

As with many urban areas in the UK, there is also a significant ethnic minority population in parts: in Sandwell, 22.6 per cent of the population is from ethnic minorities, and in Wolverhampton the figure is 23.5 per cent. However, in Walsall 84.6 per cent of the population is described as white, while in Dudley 92 per cent of the population is white. Resistance to mass immigration in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s led to the slogan “Keep the Black Country white!”

Marianne Monro

Smethwick

“My Mum’s name was Meena Monro, but actually her name before she came here was Minnaxi Patwardhan. My mum married someone below her caste. Her views and the way she thought was very much about treating people with respect and it doesn’t matter what colour you are, it doesn’t matter what class you are. My mum was Brahmin by birth. She was always a rebel even when she was in India, so she married someone of a lower caste. She was quite a socialistic person. There’s always been abit of a rebellious streak in me and my sister Vee becuase of how we were brought up.

She came to England becuase she was married, she’d got two children in India. The man she married wanted to come over to England to look at nursing and she came with him. Unfortunatley the marriage did not survive and she stayed in London on her own.

My mum couldn’t speak very much English but then she met my Dad and she managed to get a job. I don’t know how she managed to get it, I mean this was the sixties and basically, my mum got a job in Marks and Spencer on the fish counter. If you understood the racism that was going on around that time, well I don’t know how my mum got that job.

We were close and my mum was always loving, she was a loving person. My mumwas a character. She was so clever, I don’t mean clever as in getting degrees although she was at Bombay University when she was younger. My mum was really clever. Clever in the way that was about people. She’d got a charm about her as well.

Although she was a Hindu she had a side that was quite westernised. So she’d have her Indian days and her English days. So her Indian days would be that she’d be wearing a sari and she’d be cooking Marathi food. And then she’d have her English days where she’d be wearing trousers and she’d speak English. She’d go to Smethwick Lbary and get the maximum books she could get at that time. Five of them would be English books, a combination of Catherine Cookson and Mills and Boon. The Indian books would be a combination of Bengali, Marathi, Urdu and Hindi. So there was a split. I think that when people came over here they’re trying to identify with this country, but then they want to hold on”.

Left page: Marianne’s mother, Meena Monro,1990

“My Dad was in the Indian Air Force as a gunner during the war, and after that, he was a police officer in Calcutta. When the British Empire collapsed and the Anglo-Indians were leaving, he came over to England, London.

He was living in Chelsea and his first job was as a swimming pool attendant. It was a big transformation. If you think about all those changes in jobs, from a pilot and a police officer in India, then coming over to England as a lifeguard attendant.

From there we moved up to Birmingham, to Smethwick, where he got a job in a factory called IMI in Perry Barr as a sheet metalworker. There was an opportunity for better work in the Midlands, there was alot of industry going on here.

My Dad was the youngest boy out of his family, looking back, I think he was quite a soft boy, quite sensitive. He had to toughen up, and I think he toughened up to the point that he became something that wasn’t really him. He joined the Calcutta Police and that made him quite a hard sort of person, but actually, this wasn’t really his nature. As he got older he mellowed.”

Right Page: Marianne’s father,Kenneth Mayor Monro,Calcutta,1948

“This is me and my best friend Sandra, she grew up like me. She lived in a terraced house in Smethwick and they used to have goats in the back garden. Her dad used to cook for the Caribbean club and you’d go in the backyard in this pre-1919 house where the billy goats were kept. And he’d have all the cow’s feet lined up becuase he’s cooking them.

We used to have to walk the billy goats out of the house, down the road to Corbett Street to the old gardens to feed them. We were about 15 at the time and we were interested in boys by then, and she’d have a stocking on her head. We’d walk down the road with these billy goats and somebody would walk past and get embarrassed and say “Oh god, we’ve got the billy goats, and you’ve got your stocking on your head!” She was wearing a stocking becuase a lot of Black people in those days wanted to straighten their hair so they used a hot comb. But in order to keep her hair flat becuase it would go all over the place, she’d flatten it with a stocking to keep it in place after she’d straightened it. “

Marianne and Sandra, Dover,1985

“Either theres nothing to do in your house or you hadn’t got anything to eat, but there were no boundaries between people, becuase everybody was the same.

You didn’t generally find Asian people living in blocks of flats. So we had a bit of turmoil to deal with. They’d call us ‘curry buns’ and Vee, my sister was smaller than me - well everybody was scared of Vee. She beat up one of the local trouble makers becuase they kept calling us curry buns, and actually, after that, we’d made our mark becuase nobody touched me, becuase of Vee. I used to say, “Do you know who my sister is?” So then we were accepted to be like everybody else. So the curry bun name stopped becuase we’d got an identity.

I think there was a bad name to those blocks from the beginning. We didn’t know at the time but if you lived in Murdoch and Boulton place you were lowest of the low. But people just mixed. People just played together, and there was no childcare. You went out of your house from early in the day, and you were making the

most of it. You would be mixing with different people playing and talking, just making games to be like everybody else. I worked in Liverpool for a year and then came back to Smethwick. I’ve travelled all around the world but i’ve always come back to Smethwick. I just like living here. I don’t think I could move far from here. I like living around the chaos and the people and shops within shops. Walking on the streets and there are crates all over the road, and chaos, and people talking in different languages.

Thirty years on I just feel comfortable, I feel at ease. I feel there’s a different mix of people now. There are still people from the Asian, Black and White communities. But there’s a lot of newer communities that have now come in. But to me, it’s the same realy. It’s just a different group of people and that gives you more breadth of cultures and languages and food - the same mix that we had in Boulton and Murdoch place, people coming together. It’s not all positive, but to me, the mix of culture, people and languages is really what makes Smethwick so unique. I definitely feel i belong here”.

Marianne with a photo of her Uncle Chippy, Smethwick, 2019

Smethwick

“Bob was born in Smethwick and he never left. He was into cycling from the time he 12 months old becuase he was in the sidecar of a tandem bike that his mum and dad were on. So he was on a bike from being that young until he died. The bike was definitely the centre of all his life. Nothing else mattered, if anything went wrong he just jumped on his bike and go off for a ride, then he would come back and he’d got it all solved in his head. He was always cycling and once he had found a camera, well, everywhere he went, the camera went with him. So on all his holidays abroad, and while he was out with the boys, he took photos.

I met him at a coffee house on the way to Birmingham going down from Smethwick, down the Dudley Road Hospital there was cafe called La Fiesta and everybody used to go there for coffee. That was our recreation. So i met him there and i told the biggest lie ever becuase he was into jazz and and Ella Fitzgerald and all that, and i said “Oh how i love Ella Fitzgerald.” I’d never heard of her in my life but he thought that it was wonderful that he’d met this girl that liked Ella Fitzgerald. Well, the marriage lasted for 45 years so i think he must have liked me!

Mansell by Cath Mansell

When I met him he had already been running the cycle shop in Oldbury Road which he inherited from his Grandmother. Prior to that it was owned by his Grandfather when it was a second-hand shop. His grandparents were downand-out, got no money at all, but they had got a barrelload of books. So he took these books to this shop in Oldbury Road and it became a book and secondhand shop and it turned out he was really good at it. His grandfather had got a few bits and bobs of cycles in the shop. Once he died Bob went in and it became a bike shop. So that would have been 1958”.

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“It was quite a famous shop. Well, he was quite famous himself becuase he was doing so much for cycling in the area and there weren’t a lot of people doing it. And he used to do lots of things for the kids as well. So there weren’t that many people that were prepared to organise the races. Consequently, he was well known all over the place”.

“In the 1970’s he started going into schools, doing road safety to do with bicycles. The organisation was RoSPA. It was so popular that the “cycling in schools” scheme followed on from that. He was asked to teach in the schools full-time which is what he did until he retired in 1987. He would be taking the boys out and they used the canals a lot becuase they were easy to access from the majority of schools around by us, and you hadn’t got any of the traffic.

f ro m S m e t

There was lots for him to teach the boys - the industrial areas, the industrial heritage that we have got in Smethwick and around and he’d love taking photographsof reflections so he set these sort of things up just to get that beautiful reflection.

The kids just loved going out with him becuase they would

learn so much about the local geography, industrial areas, the birds, flowers and so on. They’d pick up a great deal of knowledge and they would take it back to school and into the lessons. They wouldn’t have seen these things in their everyday life going backwards and forwards to school. So he was taking them to places they wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.

I thought he was wonderful. He was very friendly, he’d go out to buy a newspaper which is five minutes away, and after three-quarters of an hour i’d be thinking, “Where is he?”, and he would just be talking to someone. He knew the postman by name, he knew the milkman by name, knew the coalmen by name. He would stop and speak to everybody. He was just a very outgoing, friendly person. He had a good sense of humour, but he was fairly strict and had his own ideas about things. Keeping to the letter of the law, he hated cars, he never wanted a car. He was always environmentally minded.

He loved his life. He couldn’t imagine how other people lived their lives doing jobs that they hated in factories. He was in school, teaching young people how to appreciate life and the countryside. He just loved it”.

Keith Hodgkins

“I was born in Tipton in Binfield Street, which is a little street right by what was then Tipton central library. I like to think that was the first piece of architecture I ever saw looking out of my Gran’s window in the room where I was born.

My own interest in the heritage of the Black Country goes right back to when i started trainspotting at the age of 10. That opened up a whole new world of exploring, travelling and visiting new places. Obviously this was just locally to begin with. My dad would take me on alternate Saturday afternoons to Birmingham New Street Station and Wolverhampton low-level station, where we would spend afternoons trainspotting. That was from about 1961, so of course there was aq tremendous amount of steam still in operation at that time and it was just a wonderful environment.

My dad was a typical Black Countryman in that he worked in the foundry industry as an iron-moulder, which is a dreadful job. He was always quite surprised that i found that work so fascinating becuase to him it was an awful job. To me it was all fascinating and i was interested in the whole history and culture of that kind of work and at that time particularly the visual imagery that went with it.

Later on when i was in my teens and i started taking photographs, i rememeber my dad taking me to the foundrywhere he used to work. There was me raving about all these spaces and the way the light was coming through the roof of the foundry and so on. Of course there was absolute filth and it was horrible, but for me, architectually, spatially and visually, it was a magical place. Of course my dad couldn’t understand that as he had to work in such an environment, he said, “If you had to work in a place like this you wouldn’t be thinking like that”, which obviously you can really understand”.

Left page:The Old Bull,Wednesbury, 1978,Photo from Keith Hodgkins