Dragged Up Proppa: Growing up in Britain’s Forgotten North by Christopher Fallow & Pip Fallow

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Dragged Up Proppa: Growing up in Britain’s Forgotten North

Growing up in a forgotten Britain

by Christopher Fallow & Pip Fallow

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Narrator Pip Fallow

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Length 10 hours 17 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

Dragged Up Proppa, read by the author, is the story of growing up working class in a forgotten England.

'Very compelling, beautifully written memoir of a time and England that no longer exists but remains just as important today as ever' - Sebastian Payne, author of Broken Heartlands

Pip Fallow was born in the coal-miner’s cottage where his family of eight lived, in a village near Durham. Pip was destined to join his father down the pit, but the closure of his village’s mine in the 1980s saw him at the back of the dole queue like the rest. This is Pip’s story of being ‘dragged up proppa’, living by his wits, working and travelling the world before finally settling a few miles from where he grew up.

A lot has been written about the red wall in recent years but Pip Fallow has lived it. This is his account of some of the most important issues affecting Britain today; from levelling-up and the north-south divide, to social mobility and class, and the devastating social upheaval caused by decades of deindustrialization and government neglect. Showing how broken promises of the past impact his village and the politics of today.

This is the memoir of a man who left school illiterate, but has now written a book. The story of a lost generation who were prepared for a life that had disappeared by the time they were ready for it, of communities with once strong social ties that have now disintegrated, and a way of living that simply no longer exists in Britain today.

'Fallow's memoir is not just a classic piece of working-class writing, but a truly gripping narrative' - Brian Groom, author of Northerners: A History

Biography & Memoir Nonfiction

Pip Fallow grew up on a council estate deep in the coal fields of County Durham. Spewed out of the newly implemented comprehensive education system and destined for a life of cutting coal, he found no coal to cut. Thatcher’s mass pit closure had taken hold. Illiterate and armed with little more than a CSE pass in metalwork, he joined the back of a dole queue three and a half million souls long. He served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer as all around went on strike and fought bitterly with their own government. His apprenticeship complete, it became apparent that, due to the recession, there were no bricks to lay. He was told by Thatcher he was a ‘moaning Minnie’ and by Lord Tebbit to get on his bike and go find work. He did, living by his wits for a decade before landing back in a broken North East, now literate and ready to write. He is a bricklayer, published author and calls himself ‘a former young socialist’. He was shortlisted for the Sid Chaplin Award for working-class writing and has dabbled in acting, with a brief role in a Ken Loach film.