'All of a sudden there's nothing there for you'

A DECADE has passed but the impact of the monumental closure of Redcar's SSI steelwork - which saw thousands of workers lose their jobs - can still be felt across the region.

- POPPY KENNEDY

For 26 years Brian Dennis worked on the site and describes its closure as an "absolute loss of family".

The 59-year-old was a project supervisor on the concast when he was told he would be losing his job at SSI in September 2015.

Brian, who was also a Community Union representative, said: "My phone never stopped. Grown men I had worked with, crying on the phone, telling me they didn't have a purpose in life any more. Some of these guys are 30/40 years who have been there since school - man and boy - asking what am I going to do."

Brian said: "My grandad worked there, my dad had worked there, my brother had worked there. My nephew he was just starting on an apprenticeship just before it closed. It was multi-generational and that's gone now.

"The jobs aren't there any more. Manufacturing has been in decline for a long time. The successive government' haven't done anything about it, much to the detriment of the country as I see it."

Brian, of Normanby, described how, as the administrators came in, workers waited for an official letter telling them they were no longer needed. The dad-of-one said he always thought he'd leave the steelworks on the day he retired.

"But my last day wasn’t that. It was a letter - ‘come in get your things between 11am and 12pm’. I would say it was black. It was a black day. You're going out into nothingness. You've worked all your life and then all of a sudden there's nothing there for you."

Like so many, Brian found work elsewhere - first in County Durham and then later at Calor Gas in Port Clarence - but the jobs weren't the same, he says. He described his time at the steelworks as “hard and honest" work, which allowed his family and thousands of others to earn a good living.