Marvellous Maureen

Written by Chris Corbett, Community Engagement Officer, Teesside Archives (christine_corbett@middlesbrough.gov.uk)

Image reference; LS/TC/15 Contents page of Clean Air for Teesside booklet (searchroom copy)

March is Women’s History Month when we come together to collectively celebrate and shout about the incredible contribution women have made to our local, national and international histories. It’s a chance to reignite our enthusiasm for the more well-known historic figures but also gives me the perfect opportunity to shine a light on somebody who you probably haven’t heard of but who deserves to have their story told and I have to warn you, this is a long one too, for which I make no apologies!

This time, the national campaign sparked off the old memory cells, sending me back to last summer when a chat with a fellow stall holder from the Borthwick Institute for Archives at York University, at a history conference in Durham, roused my curiosity about a woman called Maureen Richardson. Sally-Anne from the Borthwick Institute had been intrigued by Maureen’s story, which she’d discovered through cataloguing the extensive Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) archive. The archive gives details of applications for the trust’s grants and Sally-Anne was particularly taken by the records relating to Maureen and her community activism on Teesside during the 1970’s. Sally-Anne approached me to ask if I could track her down in our collections and while that’s not been as straight forward as hoped, we do have some tentative links to her story and together with the British Newspaper Archive records and Sally-Anne’s generosity in sending over relevant digital scans of the amazing JRRT archive, I can now piece together a little about a woman whose indominable spirit, passion, energy and determination deserves wider recognition, an all too familiar story.

Maureen Anderson was born on Tyneside but at the time of one set of JRRT records (1974-79), lived at Eston on Teesside, a homemaker, the mother of small children and the wife of a chemical worker. I have no idea what drove her to immerse herself in local environmental issues but it would appear that Maureen was a woman ahead of her time, active in championing such causes as recycling, overpopulation and, pertinent to Teesside, pollution, among others. In reports and letters written by her to the trust in support of the grant applications that she was making, she cites membership of the Clean Air for Teesside Society, and we do hold a Clean Air for Teesside booklet, produced by the Teesside County Borough. It dates from the late 1960’s and gives information about the corporate powers given to the council by the Clean Air Act of 1956 to tackle such unpleasant phenomena as the ‘Teesside Mist’, our equivalent of the infamous London smog. Teesside at the time had an active iron and steel industry, the largest chemical works in Europe and a growing petrochemical industry which together with domestic coal fires, resulted in very poor air quality with a significant impact on public health.

Image reference; LS/TC/15 page 4 of Clean Air for Teesside booklet

While monitoring and regulation of industrial air pollution was already being carried out, it would appear that the council was also pushing for an expansion of Smoke Control Areas to help with the particulate pollution caused by coal fires. However, a record in the JRRT archive suggests that Maureen wasn’t overly impressed by the Clean Air for Teesside group though she stuck with it and became its secretary. In fact, she lists a number of organisations that she was a member of in addition to this, including Friends of the Earth, Tidy Up Teesside and the League Against Cruel Sports. Indeed, she even founded a pressure and study group called the North East Survival Group, which has left no trace in our collections that I can find. However, if this triggers a memory or recollection in any of our readers, please do get in touch!

Maureen wanted to be independent so that she could react to issues as they arose, which perhaps explains why as far as I can tell, she wasn’t involved with local politics and she helped to set up the Eston Neighbourhood Association, to champion residents’ issues and concerns. In the JRRT records, she mentions a BBC documentary made about the Stillite Campaign, about which again I can find nothing online though we hold a plan for a tractor garage for Stillite Products on Station Road in South Bank from 1967. As part of this campaign, she met managers, interviewed local people, gathered complaints and made the case, though it’s not clear from the records what the case was. Maureen recognised that communication was the key to grassroots activism and wanted people to have access to the necessary information to empower them to improve their lives. All of this was presented to the JRRT in applications for funding from them, to enable Maureen to hire researchers (to look at such documents as the Teesside Structure Plan), to meet babysitting costs (cited as £1 for an evening) so she could attend meetings and conferences and, to cover consumables such as paper and stamps. The grant would give Maureen greater flexibility and keep this sort of expense out of the household budget, as she had no income of her own, her husband was the sole breadwinner and money was already tight with a young family to support.

Image reference; LS/TC/15 page 6 of Clean Air for Teesside booklet

What is so wonderful about the JRRT records is that I hear Maureen’s voice in her various letters and reports; she replies back to the trust when they award her the first annual grant, and the joy and relief at what this money represented is so clear. One of the people who provided a reference for her to support her grant application was Maurice Frankel, of the Public Interest Research Centre, and through this, we see how other people knew her as he talks of her energy, having stayed with her during a visit to Teesside to research air pollution when she presented him with cups of tea and files of press cuttings each morning while getting her children ready for school. He says that he only had to mention her name to ICI Billingham and interviews with managers and tours of the site were offered. From an internet search, it would appear that Maurice went on to write a book titled the Social Audit Pollution Handbook, an interesting link to his experiences on Teesside perhaps. Maureen was also described in the JRRT archive as ‘a remarkable housewife from Cleveland who operates a dynamic and almost irresistible one-woman pressure group’: they were rightly unable to refuse her a series of annual grants which in turn helped her to expand her already extensive activities. I was aware of the philanthropic aspect to the Rowntree name but I hadn’t heard of these grant trusts before; they still operate today, along the Quaker principle of strengthening the hand. I admire their creative approach to funding that empowers people to actively participate and make change whatever that might entail.

When I did an initial internet search on Maureen last year, the British Newspaper Archive also came up trumps. According to an article in The Journal from 25^th November 1971, Maureen was the secretary for the Clean Air for Teesside group and the report covered her determination to hold a local ironworks to account over the pollution emitted from their chimneys. She was planning to buy a share in the company, giving her the right to attend shareholder meetings and so confront the directors and she’d already organised a sit down at the works gates, designed to cause maximum disruption and publicity, when the company refused to meet the group and hear their concerns. We hold the records for the company, Warner and Co. in our British Steel Collection (it was a subsidiary of Staveley Industries and was once located on South Bank Road) and I’m intrigued as to whether this act of defiance and determination was recorded in these records, something to follow up later perhaps. Their rather dismissive and patronising quote given at the end of the article in which they stated that they had no comment to make in response to ‘this woman’s actions’ but were planning improvements suggests that they were irritated at the very least!

Image courtesy of British Newspaper Archive (Newcastle Journal 25th November 1971)

In 1974, newspaper articles in the Evening Gazette for Middlesbrough showed that she was involved with a larger campaign to challenge Phillips Petroleum, who wanted to install 2 large radio dishes on Eston Hills, to improve communications and support their oil supply pipeline. A number of local and national organisations joined forces to object on the grounds that the Eston Hills were the ‘lung of Teesside’, a last refuge for Teesside walkers and a place to escape the pollution and industrialisation. As far as I can tell, this battle was eventually won, though I don’t know how it relates to the current telecommunications complex which stands close to Eston Nab.

Looking further ahead into Maureen’s story, the family eventually moved down to Nottingham, possibly in the 80’s which is where Maureen again immersed herself in community work with another series of JRRT records covering her grant applications and projects from 1984-88, which included the rather inspired purchase of a caravan for outreach activities! It was while living here that Maureen turned her love of communicating into a role as a creative writing tutor, publishing her own work alongside encouraging others to express themselves. As she’d already discovered, being able to communicate is at the heart of activism and community empowerment, getting information out to people and enabling them to articulate their response to it. In an age where people often feel disenfranchised and distanced from decision makers, where they have little or no control over their lives, it feels fitting to look back and see Maureen, passionate about demonstrating that ordinary people can make a difference and institutions and organisations should take heed and respond.

It’s fair to say that both me and Sally-Anne continue to be completely gripped by Maureen’s story and Sally-Anne managed to track down Maureen in her latter years though it was a bittersweet discovery. A diagnosis of dementia in 2013 led to Maureen’s involvement with the Dementia Choir instigated by actor Vicky McClure in response to her own family experience. Remarkably, footage exists online of Maureen singing as part of the choir and there’s a wonderful short account of her life and achievements on the Dementia Choir website, please do follow the link below.

MAUREEN Richardson | Our Dementia Choir

There is so much more that I want to say about Maureen and I wish I could have met her, and I hope this blog in some small way pays tribute to her and all the past, present and future Maureens that work so tirelessly for their communities. I find it humbling, though not surprising, to find stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to inform, improve and protect, to hold corporations to account and create healthier environments for everyone. I haven’t had time to research the broader history of the environmental movement, but I still think that Maureen was ahead of the curve, championing environmental issues in the 1970’s when perhaps pollution was considered a fair price to pay for employment, despite the legal powers to control and regulate it. She was a strong advocate for supporting people to find their voice, not afraid to take risks and challenge authority; she even writes about attending a Young Liberals Conference at Darlington to criticise their views! Her move into creative writing was another opportunity to help record people’s stories and thoughts, a fundamental goal of archives, to record everyone’s story and ensure representation for all.

I am so grateful for that serendipitous conversation with Sally-Anne and for her subsequent research and generosity in sharing Maureen’s records, a great archival partnership. I would love to reach out to Maureen’s family to let them know how much I admire her, to make them aware of the story that she has left in the archives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could make contact with her family to see if there are records and documents from her campaigning on Teesside that could better represent her story in our collections? Please share this blog as widely as you can, and especially if you have any contacts in the Nottingham area!