By 1932 unemployment among Cleveland ironstone miners had reached 91%. Accordingly, Major Pennyman and his wife Ruth, of Ormesby Hall, initiated the land reclamation scheme near Boosbeck which became known locally as Heartbreak Hill. Students, and other outsiders (many from Germany) came to help, and Prince George, brother of the future King George VI was a visitor. According to some versions, so was William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, though Malcolm Chase finds no evidence for this in his research.
Michael Tippett, later to become one of the foremost British composers of the 20th century, was appointed in 1933 to direct musical activities at the Cleveland work camps. Though the original scheme had right-wing, even Nazi overtones, Tippett's influence was subversive, and he is remembered with his shock of dark hair, conducting 'The Red Flag' at meetings and concerts in the Miners' Institute Hall at Charltons. Though it was not intended that opera, or indeed any original composing would be required, Tippett revised and abridged the celebrated Beggar's Opera for performances in the church hall next to the Miners' Institute in Boosbeck. This, Tippett's first essay at vocal or choral music, was a resounding success both musically and socially, and encouraged Tippett to compose an original ballad-opera of his own - Robin Hood. In fact the 1934 production of Robin Hood represented both the high-point of both the music-making and arguably of the project as a whole. In Malcolm Chase's words, Tippett sought to integrate artistic goals and political aspirations and the opera also had to fulfil the objective of the project as a whole, that is, to bring miners and students closer together. Musically, the work bears hardly any relation to the composer's mature style, and Tippett later would not allow it to be performed, though he incorporated the overture and the Angelus ad virginem as one of the two elements preserved in his Suite in D of 1948. For the year's work on Robin Hood, he moved into Boosbeck, joining Wilf Franks over a sweetshop in the High Street.
When the ironstone mines reopened, the miners withdrew from the land, where, paradoxically, they had favoured individual allotments rather than the collective cultivation. Nevertheless, Tippett's Cleveland experience in a working-class community was, according to his biographer, Ian Kemp, 'to prove a turning point in his career'. In the year following Robin Hood, he joined the Communist Party, and his political commitment, assisted by his friendship with Wilf Franks eventually led him out of it and into Trotskyism. Tippett dedicated his first string quartet to Franks.