ORAL history by its very nature is plain speaking, but there is a north-eastern plain speaking that is quite distinctive. It is captured here with a vividness that reflects the author’s passionate interest in the working lives of women she encountered as an industrial chaplain at an engineering company in Wallsend and a women’s clothing co-operative in Hebburn.

She made the recordings in 1983-84 and used them as the basis of a research degree at Durham. So, even with the academic references stripped out for readability purposes, this is not, she readily acknowledges, a popular “tales of canny Tyneside women” — my mind instantly went to Catherine Cookson — but a serious account of women’s employment.

The eldest of the women featured started working in 1930, the youngest in 1981. So, here is Vera, born in 1921, who left school at 4 p.m. on Friday and was gutting herring on the Fish Quay in North Shields on Saturday morning, a “tuppence ha’penny learner” on no set wage.

Here is Audrey, working in the strictly disciplined Wills cigarette factory in 1955, remembering that “if you were in the toilet for more than one minute or so, the door was banged and you had to get out.” Here is Nancy, working in a plywood factory in the 1960s, “awful, but making more money than my dad, who was in the shipyards”. Here is Phyllis, a supervisor in a sweet factory in the 1950s, voicing both strengths and vulnerabilities.

Women working at Osram Lamps on the Team Valley Industrial Estate in 1960. “The factory surprised Jeanette by being clean.” A photo from the book under review

The broader picture is sobering for both the women and the men. The collapse of job opportunities in the north-east in the 1980s was so catastrophic, the author reflects, because people thought that they had seen the end of the blight of large-scale unemployment. With the miners’ strike in 1984, “the idea that the son might follow his father down the pit had become a hope rather than a fear, an opportunity rather than a life sentence.”

She finds the women to be resilient, dignified, humorous, and rooted in solidarity. “It was hard going. But the women were a jovial lot: it didn’t matter when you passed the yard, you could hear the women singing,” Vera says.

It is a serious and thought-provoking read, illustrated by black-and-white photographs, in which women emerge as the linchpins of families and society. Each woman and each industry deserves a book to itself, really: there is plenty here to whet a researcher’s appetite for more.

Speaking As We Find: Women’s experience of Tyneside industry 1930s-1980s
Caroline Barker Bennett
Tyne Bridge Publishing £10
(978-1-7392233-2-8)
Church Times Bookshop £9