John Harry Godber was born in Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, on 15 May 1956, the elder of two children. His mother worked at a factory that made metal studs for shoes, and his father was a third-generation miner. Godber grew up in the small mining village of Upton, ten miles southeast of Wakefield. His family had an abiding loyalty to the Labour Party and deep roots in the mining industry. Godber's maternal grandfather was a miner, as was a great-uncle and a first cousin. The story of his parent's courtship and marriage forms one of the central narrative threads of Salt of the Earth, a 1988 play Godber wrote as a commission to celebrate the centenary of the city of Wakefield. Key moments in the playwright's early life are re-enacted in Salt of the Earth as well as in Cramp (1981), September in the Rain (1983), and Happy Families (1991).
Godber's formal education began at Upton Junior School. In 1967 he sat his eleven plus, an exam used to determine a child's fitness for one of three types of secondary school--grammar, technical, or secondary modern.
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