The Working Class Library Episode 9: Colour Blind by Catherine Cookson

For the ninth episode of the Working Class Library, the writer and campaigner Terri White joins Richard Benson and Claire Malcolm to talk about the legendary Catherine Cookson. We focus on Cookson’s 1968 novel about a mixed-ethnicity marriage in 1920s Tyneside, but also talk a lot about the author herself, and her phenomenal popularity among working-class women readers in the late 20th century.

Catherine Cookson (née McMullen) was born in 1906 in Tyne Dock, South Shields, in a two-bedroom terrace in an area known as the Fifteen Streets. It was a strongly Catholic area settled by Irish immigrants. She said of her home: “There was poverty and then there was Jarrow”. She grew up poor as an illegitimate child, the stigma of that latter fact influencing her whole life. That life is as dramatic and engrossing as one of her novels, and in the podcast we look at her tangled family relationships, her health and how she came to be a writer.

Her books tend to be dismissed as escapist romances, but in reality they covered social issues in stories and language with which a generation of working-class women strongly identified. For years she was one of the top 20 most popular authors in Britain, and was the most borrowed author from libraries for 17 consecutive years, losing her spot to Jacqueline Wilson only in 2002.

Colour Blind is an example of her willingness to address serious concerns in her work. It tells the story of the marriage between Bridget, a white working-class woman, and James, a Black man from Sierra Leone. Their relationship, and their child, attracts racist hostility in their community, and violent, incestuous feelings from Bridget’s brother Matt. The story tracks Bridget and James’ daughter Rose-Angela as she grows up facing prejudice, and finally learns to overcome it and find love. The story also involves Hassan, a man from the Arab community in Tyneside that began with Yemeni seamen who settled in South Shields in the 1890s.

In 1998 the novel was adapted into a TV miniseries for ITV, starring Niamh Cusack as Bridget and Tony Armatrading as James.

Terri White was introduced to Cookson’s novels by her nana. “She felt passionately about Catherine Cookson,” she explains in the podcast. “It’s only as I’ve got older that I’ve understood what it was my nana connected with. She had her own intergenerational trauma, and violence in her marriage, and it all becomes clearer the older you get, and the more perspective you get.”

White, author of Coming Undone: A Memoir, joined us at the Durham Book Festival to talk about Colour Blind, and this episode is a live recording. County Durham, of course, is “Cookson Country”, and the sense of connection between Cookson, her books and the audience made for a moving hour.

At the end we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about working-class people, and wonder if the time has come for a reappraisal of this unique literary figure.