Mammoth bones and financial woes – a look back on 1980s Shropshire

In so many ways, the 1980s forged modern Britain. Industrial, manufacturing Britain took a hammering and Labour, under veteran left-winger Michael Foot, took such a hammering in the 1983 general election that the party had to embark on a long and painful process of reinventing itself.

People were given the opportunity to buy their council houses, and were encouraged to buy shares in newly-privatised public utilities. 

Britain plunged into recession, but it was also a time of pride and patriotism with victory in the 1982 Falklands War which had been sparked by an invasion by a Fascist junta led by a drunken general.

Love her or loathe her, one way or the other much of what happened in the 1980s was down to Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

The list of local industrial casualties was long and included some big names, like the Court Works at Madeley which shut in 1983; AB Cranes, the old Horsehay Company, which shut in 1985; and the C & W engineering works at Donnington, which closed in 1987.

When GKN Sankey announced nearly 1,000 redundancies at its Hadley Castle plant in February 1981, the Employment Secretary James Prior was due to speak to local Tories at the Charlton Arms Hotel in Wellington the following day. Around 500 demonstrators gathered outside the hotel as he arrived.

The new town of Telford was growing up, but unemployment was soaring to levels which seem remarkable now and the town was one of the region’s worst unemployment blackspots.

In the summer of 1981, one in five of the working population in the Telford and Bridgnorth area was without a job.

Some key pieces of Shropshire infrastructure came to fruition. The M54 motorway finally connected the town to the motorway network in November 1983.

Another dream, which had gone back to at least the 1950s, was having a new general hospital for the east of the county. The new Telford hospital was given the go-ahead by Shropshire Health Authority in July 1983 and was a project which was successfully completed by the end of the decade, with the first patients moving in at the end of January 1989.

The winter of 1981-82 was not one anybody who lived through it will forget.  December 1981 was the coldest December since 1890, with a combination of cold and snow not exceeded since 1878 at minus 26.1C. This record still stands.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but it did at COD Donnington. On June 24, 1983, there was a fire at the military stores and supply depot which not only left a £165 million bill but also covered a large area of Shropshire with asbestos.

On April 25, 1988, there was another huge fire at the depot, which again covered a large area with asbestos fallout – the asbestos was used in the roof structure – and this time the cost was put at over £174 million.

On a more positive note, the Ironbridge Gorge was designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco, the designation coming into force on January 1, 1987.

And let’s highlight some individual successes as well. In 1988, Sarah Ryan of Wrekin College was the BBC choirgirl of the year, and Shrewsbury-born golfer Sandy Lyle became the new US Masters champion. T’Pau became the most successful Shropshire pop group ever, hitting the top spot in the charts in 1987 with China In Your Hand.

There was also a fairytale royal wedding, that of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Ludlow racecourse had a bit part in their courtship, as when Prince Charles rode his horse Allibar there in October 1980, Diana came to watch him.

The Shropshire Star was on the crest of a wave, posting record sales.

By 1981, the Star and its sister paper the Express & Star could boast the biggest regional evening sale in Britain. Also on the crest of a wave were Shrewsbury Town, just one step down from the top flight – finishing the season in eighth place in both 1984 and 1985.

In 1986, a woman walking her dog spotted some unusual bones at a quarry in Condover. They turned out to be mammoth bones. It was one of the most exciting finds of its type in modern Britain.

There was one tragedy which was narrowly avoided. In 1989, the Parachute Regiment was based at Tern Hill barracks and the IRA decided to target them.  The bombers were spotted planting their bombs and a swift evacuation ensured there were only minor injuries when the bombs detonated, although the bombers got away.

And a Shropshire murder was to lead to national attention In 1984 Hilda Murrell was abducted from her Shrewsbury home, stabbed, and left for dead in the shadow of Haughmond Hill.

There were claims that British security services were responsible, and there were books and a play based on the case, although the police theory was that it was a “burglary gone wrong.”

The killer was caught many years later through a DNA match and turned out to be a local teenager.