Thomas Snowdon Blaiklock was born in the 16th-century Manor House on Market Street, Ferryhill, County Durham. His father was a mining engineer and later a colliery manager. 

 

Soon after his birth, the Blaiklock parents, with six siblings, moved to Bebside in Blyth, where young Thomas attended the local infants' school.

 

The family later moved to Bishop Auckland and lived on a farm, during which time he was sent to the fee-paying boarding school St Bees in Cumbria.  

 

Not long after leaving school aged 16, his first taste of being a strikebreaker happened in the 1921 miners' lockout.

 

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During WW1 (1914-1918), the economy would become mostly nationalised and oriented towards the war effort because the war, which people were told would "be over by Christmas [1914]", was unplanned for by the capitalist class, who initially saw death and weaponry as an opportunity to line their own pockets.

 

This resulted in the Shell Crisis in 1915 and the fall of the government.  The economy was mostly nationalised and in 1916 conscription for men was introduced, allowing millions of working-class women to enter the workplace, especially heavy industry. 

 

These women and the dedication of the miners on the home front saved the war effort. This is covered in Wor Bella. 

 

After the war, the pits remained nationalised until 1921 when they were returned to private owners, who had been lavishly compensated throughout nationalisation. In his book No Regrets, Bill Muckle talks about British miners in post-WW1 coalfields using Victorian tools and how the industry needed massive investment to compete [make profits] with international coal producers and competitors.

 

Capitalism is driven by the need for profit. This is the only rule of capitalism - profit. The big question is who gets the biggest share of the wealth [profit] created by the working class in the first place. Is it the parasitical capitalist class and shareholders, who do no productive work, or the working class who do the work/create the wealth? 

 

The stark choice for the coal owners in 1921 [and 1926] was to:

 

1. Invest: increasing the productivity of labour and undercutting competitors in price. That's the fundamental law of capitalism - invest to increase the rate of profit.

 

Or, they could:

 

2.   Not invest and increase profits by cutting the wages and conditions of the miners. 

 

The latter, short-sighted, short-term, option is what they went for, and that's the class struggle in a nutshell.

 

This battle for the unpaid wealth of the working class is built into the capitalist system and can never be avoided until the profit system is replaced by a socialist, planned economy.

 

Until then, class war over the workers' surplus value (unpaid labour) will continue and only get more acute. 

 

That's the period we have entered today [the 2020s] and why a new General Strike looms on the horizon after the forthcoming tumultuous strike wave internationally. Capitalism collapsed worldwide in 2008, and the election of Trump in the USA in 2024 is speeding up the process of the rapid, terminal decline of the profit system. Socialism or barbarism!

 

So, back in 1921, upon the mines being returned to private ownership,  the coal bosses demanded the workers take a 40 per cent wage cut to increase "productivity" ie their profits. Miners said no and were locked out. 

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During the 1921 strike, the 16-year-old Blaiklock had just left school and got his first taste of strikebreaking in his home village of Newton Cap, near Bishop Auckland, in County Durham. He helped production by "loading coal tubs, stoking the boilers and carrying beer to the pump operators" (reported in the Morpeth Herald and Reporter, 16 April 1976).

 

The bitter three-month lockout (April 1 to early July) ended with the desperate miners being starved back to work, causing malnutrition and other terrible illnesses related to acute poverty in pit villages.

 

Surely, the prospective doctor must have seen first-hand the catastrophic and heart-breaking consequences of his strike-breaking actions. Obviously not.

 

After the 1921 strike, aged 16, Blaiklock started training at the Medical College, Newcastle, and it was in his last year, aged 21, that he blacklegged in the 1926 General Strike. 

 

Qualifying as a hospital doctor in 1927, his travels took him far and wide.

 

However, from 1933, he sank roots in Morpeth and for 43 years ran a practice from the family home at the historic 19th century Oswald House in Bridge Street, which is sited on the Morpeth side of the bridge and immediately to the right of the roundabout (opposite St George's URC Church).

 

He ran this operation singlehandedly, the only help coming from his wife Becky (Constance Rebecca, née Caris), a part-time anaesthetist, who acted as an unpaid receptionist. The evening surgeries, including Saturday, did not finish until 7 pm, and the family doorbell would ring at any time of the night with patients wanting to see their doctor.  

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On-call at all times, according to a patient we spoke to, Dr Blaiklock was "dedicated to his profession", making house calls in the evenings and even into the small hours. He was also the chief police surgeon for Northumberland and a founder member of the Police Surgeons Association.

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His golf handicap was 6, and apparently, he liked watching football. In his youth, he played tennis for the university and Durham County. 

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"It was his belief that he had lived through a golden era of medical advance," wrote Christopher Blaiklock. "He had smelt diphtheria, had seen paralysis from polio, and had witnessed the severest cases of whooping cough, all of which disappeared with immunisation." 

 

In 1934, Dr Blaiklock was awarded the Royal Humane Society bronze medal for an attempted rescue of a little girl from the freezing waters of the River Wansbeck.

 

In May 1969 - when a mainline sleeper train crashed at Morpeth Station at 1.30 am, killing six people and injuring 21 others - he was the first doctor at the scene. 

 

A widower at the time of his death in 2001, he and Becky had four children and 14 grandchildren.