At Dormans Club in Middlesbrough, founded in 1899, photos of the steel plant still line the corridors and a weekly country and western night draws many former steelworkers to the dancefloor. “Steel here meant life,” said Alan Metcalfe – an 84-year-old stock-taker at Lackenby, one of the many British Steel sites in the area. He was the third-generation of his family to work inside the plant, and had come to Dormans with his wife Nita. They met at the Astoria club after a 1963 Beatles concert which she was attending at the Stockton Globe theatre, a few blocks north of the Teesside Princess moorings, was interrupted by the announcement of President John F Kennedy’s assassination, forcing her to search out entertainment elsewhere. “It wasn’t just the jobs, it was a mentality: we all stood together and supported each other,” she reflected. “But everything’s flat now.”
A collaboration with Jack Shenker. First published in The Observer
