Dispatches From a Dilettante (15 page)

Young People, Education and Inner City Challenges

My first act as an employee of the Prince’s Trust in 1990 was to drive to Butlins holiday camp on the windswept Norfolk Coast. Four hundred challenging young people selected by the Trust from all over the UK were spending a week there. It was a laudable and concentrated effort to reignite their enthusiasm, prepare them for work and generally get them to buy back into what we are now obliged to call the big society. It was brilliant. A range of sporting and rock music heroes visited with the most consistent and meaningful contribution made by Frank Bruno. If there ever was a zenith to his boxing career it was at this time and he was generous, empathetic and went way beyond his remit in helping some damaged young people start to enjoy life once more.

The culmination of the week was a visit from the Prince who was duly helicoptered in. He was engaged and engaging. The Prince made a great impression with the kind of person who, in different circumstances, may well have said very negative things about him. He shook hands with hundreds of the kids and was clearly running out of things to say at the end. In one building when he came to the last young person in the group he asked to the kid’s utter bewilderment “How are the toilets round here?” This was almost as bad as the Queen’s constant use of the word ‘fascinating’ when she is palpably bored to tears and possibly has lost the will to live after a long day of meeting over excited members of the public.

The Prince does not really understand the educational agenda. There again there is mitigation in the fact that he was advised by Chris Woodhead for a while. No sooner has he made an intelligent comment on an educational issue than it is followed up by a view that is so right wing and/ or bonkers that laughter is the only way of stopping incandescent rage at the vacuity of some of his pronouncements. He has genuine empathy for the challenges facing young people in our inner cities but no clue in terms of the detail of their daily lives. It was only after huge pressure from the then ceo of the Prince’s Trust Tom Shebbeare, that the first black person was employed by his office. That person was Lizzie Norris and she ended up suing the Prince for racial discrimination.

My final encounter with him was in 2010 in Burnley where his charities have been making a huge and co-ordinated effort to reverse years of decline in the area. The Prince has been consistently caring and genuinely deeply committed in visiting the town to chivvy progress and action. It is clear that his intervention is working. What he had to smilingly endure in dealing with some of the Council there would have been beyond most people.

The visit started off in the town hall with Council top brass and key business people gathered round a large square table. The self important Leader of the Council who was sitting immediately adjacent to the Prince and whose elbows were touching those of HRH, produced piece of crumpled paper from his pocket. Without making any eye contact with the Prince he stared at the paper and slowly read the following complex message, with the intonation of a nervous five year old proclaiming a line at the Christmas play. “Good morning your Royal Highness and welcome to Burnley.” He then solemnly folded the paper, replaced it in the pocket from whence it came and made not one single contribution to the rest of the day’s proceedings. No wonder the fucking town needed assistance.

And that by, and large, is the Prince’s lot. He writes memos deep into the night, frets against the incompetence of the public sector, fawns at the so called expertise of the private sector, charms and irritates in roughly equal measure and would never pass for a man considered to be happy.

If you ever find yourself in Leith and have some spare time, a visit to the Royal Yacht Britannia, which is permanently moored there, will tell you a lot about the Prince of Wales. The tour round the yacht is an expertly constructed experience which evokes the sights, sounds and lifestyle aboard of days gone by. There are many opportunities to glimpse how the Royals lived when sailing, from the separate beds for the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh to the modesty balustrade added to prevent the Queen, who always wears skirts or dresses, being embarrassed by swirling winds. Just before stepping onto the yacht visitors walk through a room of photographs, among which is a close up colour shot of the Prince of Wales at the decommissioning ceremony for Britannia. He is clearly in the most tremendous and angry sulk. His petulant and defiant rage could not be misinterpreted as anything other than a disgust that the Royal Family have had to give this privilege up. He believes that God meant him to rule. His outburst to Diana ‘but don’t you understand, every Prince of Wales has had a mistress’, while true is not ultimately the utterance of a man with much to offer.

11.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN – SOUTH WALES 1992-97

High up in the Rhondda Fach, cut off from the ribbon terraced housing of the valley below, lies the Penrhys Estate. In 1992 it had three and a half thousand inhabitants, ninety three per cent of whom were unemployed. I’ll mention that again - ninety three per cent unemployment. It was originally built to house miners that were to be recruited from Durham but by the time it was finished (preparing the site for construction took ages as it involved slicing the top off a small mountain), there were very few miners left in the Valleys never mind Durham.

The Full Monty starts with the actual footage of one of those self aggrandising Council PR films with celebrity voice over along the lines of, ‘Sheffield - city on seven hills ready for the challenge of the nineties’. Birmingham did one around the same time which was made even more bizarre by the fact that it was intoned with utter lack of conviction by Telly ‘Kojak’ Savalas). Rhondda Borough Council had one commissioned for Penrhys where a woman in a ridiculous English accent extolled ‘Modern living high up in the fresh air, with space to live’.

The reality was that within months of the first residents moving in it became a dumping ground used by the same Rhondda Borough Council to deposit difficult families on a bleak hillside conveniently cut off from the rest of the population. The second phase development consisting of a library, petrol station, police station and youth club had been ditched with the result that facilities were virtually non-existent. A committed churchman, John Morgans, and his family, were single-handedly trying to bring out the humanity of the place, but the Council had long ago abandoned any semblance of commitment and fought a rearguard action while wasting millions in the process.

The physical location and design, which was laughably on a Tuscan hill village model, meant it was very difficult to police. When officers were required in numbers they could be seen coming up the mountain and this gave criminals and drug dealers plenty of time to make themselves scarce. Council housing staff regarded a posting to Penrhys as a penal sentence and I heard one Councillor say ‘They should burn the houses down with the residents in them’. Predictably then there were all the usual challenges of poor housing, drug abuse, random violence and a plethora of other social problems.

Penrhys regularly featured in the national press, who ran headlines like ‘Britain’s worst estate’ or ‘Murder shame of Valleys blackspot’. TV crews made numerous documentaries most of which were clichéd and judgemental cut and paste jobs full of emotive and simplistic solutions for complex problems. There were exceptions, with BBC2 giving award winning director Penny Woolcock the chance to make ‘Mad Passionate Dreams’ which was a considered and sympathetic look at daily life on the grey monotone microclimate that was now my place of work. As a direct result of a Business in the Community business leaders visit with the Prince of Wales I was appointed Director of the newly formed Penrhys Partnership and started on April 1
^st
1992 – an interesting date in view of what lay ahead.

The ambitious remit was to construct a ‘village centre’ by converting existing derelict buildings, and to create jobs for residents in the process. We were to concentrate on Education, Health and protection of the vulnerable in the new buildings. That barely tells the tale or the scale of the challenges. There was some European money available but any attempts to build attractive dwellings on Penrhys had been given up years ago, so in excess of a million additional pounds had to be found. What commercial entity would want to run a shop on the ‘village’ street even if construction could be achieved in this hostile setting? It says something that when we had almost completed the build and had finished what was to be a brand new and fully equipped Doctor’s surgery we got precisely two applications from GPs and one of those was from a doctor who had only just been reinstated after being struck off. How would buildings be secured, maintained and run cost effectively? The then current youth club, run by third rate council employees, operated out of a metal box and offered nothing that would positively impact on disturbed young people. The list of physical and logistical challenges was endless.

However the real agenda was about re-engaging significant numbers of disenfranchised people who ranged from the unlucky to the criminally inclined and all of them physically, emotionally and financially cut adrift from mainstream society with catastrophic results. Penrhys had health, employment and educational statistics that were beyond appalling and an indictment of the abject failure of local government to understand, commit and address major social issues on any sort of cohesive basis.

As in any new venture, but particularly given the setting for this one, it was imperative to get to know as many people on the estate as soon as possible. Ivor was one of the first guys I met on walkabout and he was the goalkeeper for Penrhys United who had just won the local cup final in extra time. Minutes after I had first chatted to him I bought a copy of the Rhondda Leader and there, covering a quarter of the back page, was a colour picture of Ivor flying athletically through the air to make a spectacular save. Next time I saw him we had a conversation that explained a great deal about life on the hillside. It went as follows:

”Great photo of you in the paper Ivor, you’re a star”

Instead of looking proud he looked almost suicidal.

“Bloody disaster man”

“Oh why is that?”

“I’ve been on full disability benefit for two years”

Journalists and particularly politicians often talk about the black economy in general terms as something reprehensible yet unavoidable. Whereas there are criminal abuses by the lazy and dishonest, much of the black economy on the Penrhys estate, with the notable exception of the drugs scene, was driven by the desire to get just a few of things that made life tolerable. ‘On the hobble’ is a lovely Welsh phrase used to describe anyone working illegally. This could be as minor an ‘offence’ as decorating a friend’s house and getting paid for it while signing on.

Considering the pathetic standard of education on offer in a disturbing number of Valleys’ schools at the time, given also the complete disappearance of thousands of traditional jobs like mining and add to that the fact that third generation unemployment existed in many households on the estate, it says a lot for a good proportion of people ‘on the hobble’ that they still want to be part of any economy.

The drug dealers on Penrhys were mostly minor criminals who were quite open about ‘nipping’ over to Amsterdam to get ecstasy and dope for the then burgeoning rave scene in South Wales. There was one notable exception who was making serious money from drugs and who I won’t name on the basis that I still value the use of my legs.

When he was away for long periods on procurement missions he left a new Porsche parked outside his council house just yards from a couple of stolen and burned out wrecks. There was never a scratch on the Porsche for the five years that I worked on the estate. He had a vicious looking pit bull which he left in the care of his girlfriend while he was away, although she never got to drive the car which remained motionless, and parked in glorious defiance for all to admire but not touch.

I had occasion to call round to the house in order to ask him to have a word with a couple of kids who were causing damage to a flat nearby. I never actually asked him what words were used when he had them, but they usually did the trick. At this point it is perhaps worth mentioning that I have never been good with dogs and was petrified of the horrific breeds that were regularly on display on the estate. If the dogs could smell fear, they must have sensed that I was reeking of it and with some just cause. They were used as casual weapons. Years later John Morgans was savaged in a flat on Penrhys by an Alsatian, and had to be hospitalised with sixteen serious bites.

As I approached the house, his girlfriend was in the garden and invited me in. I sat down on the expensive leather settee in the living room, which I couldn’t help noticing contained very impressive and state of the art Hi-Fi and televisual equipment. The man of the house appeared with his dog. Both were small, stocky, powerfully built and quietly menacing - ostensibly calm but in reality unpredictable powder kegs who could explode with devastating consequences. He plonked himself down at the other end of the settee and the dog leapt up and filled the space between us. I could feel the quivering brute strength as it then readjusted its’ position and sat on my lap.

The conversation from that point is a complete blank but went on for ages as I could not, and dare not, move. I drank a cup of tea and held it above the beast dozing on my thighs, and for a moment contemplated scalding the dog in the hope it would leap up and away. Abandoning that idea I watched as the animal languidly lifted a leg and licked his bollocks, thinking for one terrifying moment thought he might be turning his attention to mine which were in close proximity. After a while the drug dealer grew weary of my presence and got up to signify the chat was over. The pit bull followed as his master left and levered itself up by kicking me in the crutch, as a final reminder of the power dynamic in the room. After encounters like these I always felt relaxed later in life when in corporate boardrooms in so called pressure situations.