Graham Smith took this picture at Clay Lane ironworks on the south bank of the Tees in 1981, when he was in his early 30s. In some ways, it represented a fate that he had avoided. Three generations of his family, on his father’s side, had spent working lives in ironmaking. His father, Albert Smith, would, he recalls, return from long shifts and all-nighters, “filthy, stinking of oil, stale sweat and, if money permitted, Bass beer”. At school, Smith dreaded following his father into the works when he left, but no one suggesting anything different. “When comforted by my dad,” he remembers, “which wasn’t often, I felt the hardened skin from his years of wielding spanners bigger than his arms”; Smith listened to gruesome stories of workmates injured or killed and thought: “There must be a better job for me in Middlesbrough.”
Photography was Smith’s escape, though he stayed close to the culture of home, taking pictures in the 1970s and 1980s of life in the shadow of the ironworks, of long nights in local pubs, at a time when Britain’s industrial landscape was being erased. A retrospective of the pictures of those years, alongside those of Smith’s great friend and collaborator Chris Killip, will open at Martin Parr’s gallery in Bristol in April.
The exhibition includes this picture, a private kind of memorial. Towards the end of his working life, Albert Smith had been part of a squad repairing and relining the No 2 furnace at Clay Lane, working high on the outside of the tower, on scaffolding two boards deep. The repaired furnace was never commissioned, however, and the entire plant was demolished in 1988. Albert Smith’s funeral was at a redbrick church overlooking the demolition site. His son could have ended up in a plot alongside him, but, as he says, he found a way to “break the mould”.
• 20/20: Chris Killip/Graham Smith is at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, from 11 April to 30 June
