Sheffield and The Yorkshire Ripper

I had been with the travelling circus for a couple of weeks. I was actually helping to dig a latrine, almost over my head in a 6x6 foot pit, when I heard the voice of the director from above. "You swing that pickaxe like a girl." he commented, grinning. I leant on the haft of the pickaxe and frowned up at him from under my bandanna. He added "Do you want to come to the pub for a pint?" I looked down at my dusty dungarees and work boots. "It's not that kind of a place" he reassured me. "No one will notice you." So, I climbed out of the pit and shortly a group of eight of us was crowded into the circus personnel vehicle, the ancient Bedford hearse that was featured in one of the acts.

The pub was in a poor area of Sheffield, which was at the time, a redundant description, since Sheffield was the heart of the Yorkshire rust belt. We disembarked outside a run down looking building with bars over the windows. We stood around while drinks were ordered, and I noticed that the furniture, wooden tables and chairs with steel legs, were bolted to the floor. Just as I was sinking the first delicious taste of bitter after a hot, dry afternoon, the barman came over to us. "You've got a woman there?" he asked the director. The director straight away assumed his most charming manner, and said "Why do you ask?" Somehow I recognised that his voice, with its pristine Oxford accent, would have a most irritating effect on the bar in general. "Women have to go to the Ladies Lounge." the barman declared. "House rules." said a deeper, gruffer voice from the back of the room. "Don't worry. We'll go with you." said the principal performer. It was not until this point that I realized that I was the only woman in the group.

Under the disapproving glare of the customers, mostly out-of-work steel workers, we took our cissy Southern selves to the other side of the pub, carrying our pints with us through the street and round the corner. The Ladies Lounge was a deeper shade of decrepit than the main bar, which had a workmanlike scrubbedness to it. There was a woman with a pram sitting with a friend, both with vodka and lime. A group of older women were at a long table at one side of the bar with bottles of stout or barley wine. But most of the customers were a different kind. Next to me, stood a fleshy girl with very black hair and carelessly applied black eye makeup. She wore a thin red sweater and a black leather mini-skirt over fish-net tights. An older woman sat behind her, in a sequinned knit cardigan and a tight white skirt, again with the black fishnets, this time with holes. Both women had large handbags that they clutched defensively across their bodies.

The director whispered close to my ear "I think I know where the whores are now" and giggled. I was not sure how to react. I was at once angry because I had been thrown out of a place just because I was a woman, which had never happened to me before, and scared and humiliated to be grouped with prostitutes. What I didn't know was the extent of the terror that the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper had cast over the area in which we were playing. I didn't know that the Leeds football fans had taken to chanting "Ripper 12, police nil", nor that men in bars sometimes sang an adaptation of an old pub song which started "One Yorkshire Ripper, there's only one Yorkshire Ripper." as if he were a folk hero. If I had asked one of the locals if I should be scared, he might have said, as was reported by others, "Don't worry - he's only doing tarts." No wonder I felt vulnerable. The atmosphere of misogyny was tangible. The liberal, feminist, hippie "love peace and understanding" in which I had lived in for more than four years had insulated me from this sexual real-politik.