by Paul Morley
The north begins in the Cheshire Plain, a flat area of land covering thousands of square miles bounded by the hills of north Wales to the west, the Derbyshire Peak District to the east and the Pennines to the north-east. It was once under the ocean, but emerged from the water, dried out, leaving vast salt deposits, and remained remote from the early maritime influences affecting the English south. It begins with the mossy, peaty, fast-flowing or lazily drifting and nameless rivers cutting through the plain, which would eventually, once there was a need, a way, a variety of ways, to name things, be called Dee, Weaver, Gowy, Dane, Wheelock, Bollin, Goyt, Etherow, Tame and Mersey. The rivers flowed west and north into the Irish Sea, changing the landscape as they went, as if from the very beginning they knew that they were heading for greater things, that they would cause more than just geographical change.
From around 4000 BC there were slow changes in life in what would be the far north-east of England. As well as hunting and gathering, it appears that people began to plant crops and domesticate animals. It took a long time for these early farming techniques to become the main source of food, and the sea in particular remained a vital source of nourishment. The slow growth of farming led to forests being cleared more methodically, and although the environment is harsher in northern England than other parts of the country, people successfully farmed animals and crops. They lived in relatively varied types of settlements: hill forts, open settlements and square or circular enclosed settlements. In some places evidence of settlement is sparse, and quite large areas of land would have been used to support small communities.
6
1972
Alan Bennett’s first small-screen play, A Day Out, was filmed for the BBC by Stephen Frears, who would direct and/or produce the majority of Bennett’s television work over the next decade. Both this and 1975’s Sunset Across the Bay were wistful, elegiac pieces, with Bennett drawing on his Yorkshire roots for the first time in his portraits of, respectively, a Halifax cycling club in 1911 and an elderly couple (based on his parents) retiring to Morecambe but feeling desperately homesick for Leeds.
A word about what I always consider rather a dubious role, namely ‘a northern writer’. Northern writers like to have it both ways; they set their achievements against the squalor or the imagined squalor of their origins, and gain points for transcendence, while at the same time asserting that somehow northern life is truer, and in some undefined way, more honest than a life of southern comfort. ‘Look, we have come through,’ is the message, but I can’t quite see why a childhood in the industrial north is less conducive to writing or whatever, than a childhood in Peterborough or Wimbledon or wherever. I mean it’s quite true if you’re born in Barnsley and you set your sights on becoming Virginia Woolf, it’s not going to be roses all the way.
On 10 June Michael Parkinson’s guests on his chat show include both Bernard Manning and A. J. P. Taylor.
The brooding, perfectionist actor James Mason teamed up with Yorkshire Television to make a fifty-minute feature called Home James. He was filmed revisiting and rediscovering Huddersfield, where he was born in 1909, the son of an affluent wool merchant. ‘I was born in Huddersfield. When I was young I had very little affection for this part of the country. In fact when I finished my schooling I couldn’t wait to get away from the place and try my luck in London, but recently for family reasons I’ve been returning here more and more frequently and in the process being more and more won over by it. My growing enthusiasm has made me as bad as any other sort of convert.’ He observed in the film how his mother’s attitude to Huddersfield had rubbed off on him: ‘She was always reaching for a grander way of life that was more than could be expected of Huddersfield.’
1971
Bernard Manning was forty-one when he made his television debut in 1971 in Granada producer Johnnie Hamp’s The Comedians, alongside Mike Reid, Charlie Williams, Frank Carson, Colin Crompton and thirty or so others. The briskly edited show, which featured quick-fire gags from hard-working no-nonsense club comics mostly new to television, was a huge success, and Manning swiftly became one of its biggest stars. With the national fame came the notoriety – with Manning cheerfully praising Enoch Powell, even Hitler, in various newspapers. ‘I am an admirer of Adolf Hitler,’ he told the Sunday People. ‘Not everything about him, of course. I deplore his gas chambers and Gestapo as much as anyone, but I admire him for the things he got right, which I reckon was about 50 per cent.’
1970
A bronze bust of William Wordsworth is unveiled opposite Wordsworth House in Cockermouth on 7 April, the bicentenary of William’s birth, by his great-great-grandson. As part of the same celebrations, 27,000 daffodils were planted on open spaces and approaches to the town.
7
The north begins with my own search for the north, as a particular place, written into history because of one thing leading to another across helter-skelter centuries that tumble on one after the other, across the minds, struggles and achievements of millions of people, who keep overcoming obstacles, replacing each other and starting all over again, because they have no choice. The north begins with a few stray bloody-minded humans and hardy small communities fighting for survival through fog, damp and supernatural-seeming dangers. The north begins, becomes all it becomes, because these diffuse obscure individuals find ways to resist the oblivion that threatens to wipe them away. They develop techniques and strategies that enable them to defeat or control the elements, and they set up the momentum that ultimately leads to the very changes that inexorably lead to more changes which affect the whole world. They protect themselves, against all the odds, against all manner of enemies and perils, and progress from there. They do battle with the speaking of language itself, which leads to greater understanding and a certain amount of cultural and psychological difficulty.
A north, a source of northern spirit, an analysis of how the north was formed geographically and then psychologically, a survey of its origins, could develop through a description of the Roman occupation of the area for the first few hundred years of the first millennium. The Roman pacification and colonisation of Britain was a massive violent upheaval for the pre-existing small-scale Iron Age cultures and societies, which had been developing for 500 years since the arrival of the Celts from mainland Europe. The Celts – not known as that for centuries – were the first in a long line of invaders, the first to influence a shadowy indigenous population but not completely overwhelm and assimilate it.
Once the drilled, disciplined and self-important Romans arrived, and events were written down, key dates, events, battles, skirmishes, decisions, social structures and eventual failures help explain how the territory itself and the attitude of the people who, by luck good or bad, accident or intention, happened to live there was created – and how a layer of northern character based on the attacks, force, discipline and civilising innovations of these committed visitors from the distant south developed, a character based on resistance, objection, contempt, but also on a certain level of acceptance and agreement, perhaps a reluctant sort of understanding and admiration.
How those who found themselves in this part of the world adapted, advanced or retreated, faced with all of the real and unreal threats specific to such a location, surrounded by sea, land, distance, internal threats, external enemies, specious, petulant gods, trapped by terrain and compromised by climate, hindered or liberated by a succession of competing superstitions, bullied or inspired by a series of intolerant tongues and despotic, vicious regimes, would ensure the character and personality of the northerner.
I found it, my north, smoking and babbling, battling and loving, scattered and glittering, lush and brisk, nattering and trusting, plain and fancy, high up and low down, forgotten and fantastic, rickety and plush, conspiring and cracking, rich and poor, poorer and poorer, mean and generous right where you’d expect, but also in less obvious places. I found everything I found by walking in what turned out to be the right direction, and seeing what happened. I
found the north by looking. Sometimes out of the window of a train or of a car, at some point on a short journey from, say, Macclesfield to Manchester, via Poynton and Cheadle Heath, past freshly scattered leaves, curtained rooms and all those dense connected bricks, all those hills and all those chimneys, all those kerbs, pylons and sudden turnings. Past some stubborn, colossal buildings that seem to have been around for centuries, and others, glassier and slighter, which seem to have impetuously popped up and might burst at any moment. Sometimes I found the north as I looked at a picture of something that happened before I was born, or a few years after. Sometimes it was at the side of the road that I was walking along, wondering where it would lead, or the stream, or the field, or the hill, or the pub, or the playground inside the park, which was surrounded by houses, which were surrounded by the north.
I found it by looking at a piece of text written by someone with the finest of minds who was also looking for the north, or who had found it, and they were trying to explain what they had found – something, perhaps, not yet formed, or buried in the past, hard-edged, not sun-spoiled southern soft, generous, grander, better, deeper, realer, sootier, poorer, harsher, brighter, stranger, slushier, something that came with a tremendous amount of baggage that you had to get rid of or felt proud of. Sometimes I was walking in the footsteps of others, opening up their own meanings and directions. They found a north, a defamiliarised England, which was an essential part of the classic endlessly discussed north–south divide – deprived, ugly, industrial north; prosperous, lovely, arrogant south – which has become a more or less permanent feature of the standardised national story.
The Merseyway shopping centre, Stockport, 1972
Sometimes, in how the north was recalled and defined, it was merely if magnificently grim – for some this formidable grimness was a form of unique exotica that suggested the north was out of this world, and for others it was how the north had become a cliché of its own sentimental self-pity, making a way for non-northerners to keep it in its place, condescend to it, even dismiss it. The north was truly grim, stuck in the mud, stuck where it was, permanently pinned to this planet with no real chance of achieving lift-off. All its attempts to change that situation, its regular outbursts of activity and bravura, of defiance and ambition, of adventure and hilarity, the time when it was the future created by shrewd, forceful and radical self-made men and women, and the south was the quaint, uninspired and deeply conservative past, were always destined to come to nothing.
I found the north through what I was hearing, or remembering, or checking, or exaggerating. By waiting on a platform, catching a bus, walking into a shop, talking to a stranger, arguing a point, researching a technical invention, hearing a pop song, watching a television programme, by seeing a northern football team formed in the nineteenth century win international tournaments like a continental conquering force, or tumble down into bleak non-League status as though the very town it represented had shrunk in size and lost its dignity. It turns out the north is quite an easy place to find: it’s there on the map, comprehensively drawn, full of gutsy towns and unyielding rivers that connect to each other, one by one, marked by railway lines that criss-cross themselves and turn the north into an intricate patchwork of straight lines that somehow go round in circles. It’s there on the television in some form, fact or fantasy, gag or verse, curse or smirk, every day.
So much about the north, the people and places, the names of those people and places, their position on the planet, the connection to those that came before them, remains the same, even after the last 200 years or so of tumultuous change. So much about the north could be summed up quickly and simply, and the results of such an assessment would be generally acceptable to those looking for a glib description, a hasty dismissal, a tidy list of northern attributes, stereotypes and presumptions. This north, though, would be too quick, too tidy, too obvious, and a north that covers up, with a pale, complacent version of accuracy, the north, a better, other north, which is always on the move, never fixed, always redefining itself, even as it seems to have been fixed in place, because of how it sounds, and the uniform it’s been given.
8
1969
Dominating the entire length of Piccadilly station approach, Gateway House is a visitor’s first view of Manchester once off the train. Replacing a row of nineteenth-century railway warehouses, it was built as part of the 1960s refurbishment of the station and completed in 1969. Nicknamed the Lazy S, designed by the Swiss architect responsible for slamming the inscrutable Centre Point into central London, Richard Seifert, and reputedly based on a doodle on a menu, it sends people down a hill into the heart of Manchester following definite, gentle and proudly modern curves. If you wanted, you could use this ramp to make a show-business entrance into a city set up by a clamouring succession of mouthy, passionate showmen and -women. The curving slope instantly mocked the notion that this was a city stalled in a strait-laced Victorian past, even as at the bottom, suddenly amid the multifarious city itself, you were faced with lingering evidence of that past. Some of this evidence was solid, some of it was in ruins, some of it was just around the corner, and some of it was submerged under the flat diminished surface of occasionally sighted stretches of sunken inky canal that had been left to rot. A short distance from Piccadilly, deeper inside the city centre, there is the smaller Oxford Road station, the ‘little sister’, connecting Manchester with places to the north-west. The entrance to the station is also up a hill, more modest in length but steeper than Piccadilly, which means leaving the station also encourages a dramatic entrance into town – this one ending with the sight over the road of Alfred Waterhouse’s ebulliently baroque late-nineteenth-century Refuge Assurance building, a solid,definitive example of late-Victorian, Manchester-style commercial pride, extended with a conspicuous 210-foot tower in 1910 by his son Paul. By the sixties, the multi-tiered, richly ornamented, granite-and-terracotta-loaded building seemed ghostly and adrift, an ugly, enormous and ultimately tasteless sign of decline.
‘W. H. Auden does not fit. Auden is no gentleman. Auden does not write, or exist, by any of the codes, by the Bloomsbury rules, by the Hampstead rules, by the Oxford, the Cambridge, or the Russell Square rules.’ Geoffrey Grigson (1969)
Both BBC1 and ITV started colour transmissions on Saturday 15 November. The first colour episode of Coronation Street – number 928 – was transmitted on 17 November. The colour title sequence, used until June 1975, featured a shot of a modern tower block to represent changing times.
1968
Robert Harper (Bobby Ball) and Thomas Derbyshire (Tommy Cannon) were both born in Oldham. They met in the early 1960s while working as welders in the same factory. Becoming friends, they formed a club act known as Bobby and Stevie Rhythm, which became the Sherrell Brothers then the Harper Brothers. Initially they were a vocal duo, but over time started to introduce more comedy into their act. They turned professional in the late 1960s, and eventually changed their name to Cannon and Ball. Their first TV appearance was on Opportunity Knocks in 1968, when they came last.
1967
Opened in 1967 St Peter’s shopping precinct was to become Oldham’s main retail destination attracting the major chain shops. Influenced by the popular newfangled Merseyway centre in Stockport, opened two years previously alongside the Mersey Square bus terminus, it was hoped that the winning formula would work in Oldham. Given the cold Oldham weather, its windswept location won few friends with shoppers and retailers. The subway link from the precinct to C&A acted as a wind tunnel, which was exacerbated by the precinct being mostly open to the skies. For most of its time, empty units plagued the precinct. The precinct’s anchor store was a Tesco supermarket, opened by Ken Dodd in 1968. The Post Office was moved to the precinct from Union Street, to a unit overlooking George Street near the Tesco store. A NORWEB electricity showroom took up a unit under the office block. The rest of the precinct included a handful of chainstore retailers and independently owned shops, and a café.
Together with his wife, John Ravenscroft returned to Britain in 1967 and because of his experience in the USA was hired by the pirate radio station Radio London. There managers decided that John Ravenscroft, or indeed Ravencroft without the ‘s’, as he had become known in America, was too much of a mouthful and requested something shorter. John Peel, apparently the suggestion of one of the secretaries at the station, was duly adopted as his new radio name. The new Peel made his first appearance on Radio 1 on 1 October 1967 when he presented Top Gear. Initially he was only one of a rota of presenters assigned to the show but by 4 February 1968 he had become the sole presenter.
By mid-1967 the BBC’s Manchester Dickinson Road studio had become too small for the increasingly complex Top of the Pops production, and the show was moved to Lime Grove studios in London. It was also becoming more difficult to get bands up north to perform due to the fact that most of them were now based in London.
Philip Larkin reflected: ‘Sometimes I think I shall never leave Hull – I am growing defeatist . . . I am not even turning into a regional poet, with his clay pipe and acknowledged corner in the snug of the Cat and Fuddle. Just an anonymous figure, whom people will dimly remember seeing when the evening paper says “Hull Man Dies”.’ The same year he wrote ‘Annus Mirabilis’.