The North

by Paul Morley

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me) . . .

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  The jaundiced middle-aged narrator simultaneously romanticises and ridicules Britain’s ‘swinging sixties’. While he laments that he is too old to indulge in the free love of the sexual revolution, he also mocks the notion that it will provide the young with any more happiness than traditional marriage. Anthony Burgess would talk of how Larkin had given Hull (officially Kingston upon Hull) a voice, and ‘that voice is larger than the city’.

  James Corrigan, who came from a Yorkshire fairground family, built what came to be seen as the biggest variety club in Europe. James had married a Batley girl, Betty, and together they opened a bingo hall in the town, but James’s dream was for something much bigger. They found a derelict site in Bradford Road, Batley which had once been the site of a municipal sewage works. On Easter Sunday 1967 the Batley Variety Club opened its doors. It had taken just fourteen weeks to build after the Bachelors had laid the foundation stone. Corrigan was impressed by the supermarkets springing up in every northern town. He thought pile it high and sell it cheap could be applied to showbiz, and he engaged stars who were at that time the biggest names in the business. The A653 Bradford Road soon took on the glamour of Broadway, as Jimmy Corrigan drove stars like Shirley Bassey, Louis Armstrong, Jayne Mansfield and Roy Orbison to his new club in the gold Rolls-Royce he owned.

  Prime Minister Harold Wilson officially opened the Mancunian Way on 5 May 1967, the second time a section of motorway in the region had been opened by the PM. It travelled across the southern edge of the city centre, to ease congestion, and modernised the look of the city along with Piccadilly Plaza, featuring the thirty-storey Sunley – later City – Tower, completed in 1965, the narrow side of the block decorated with a relief pattern inspired by the circuit boards of a computer. While the cranes and concrete mixers were at work on the new road, a local schoolboy won an Evening News competition to name the road. The Manchester Evening News ran article after article on what they called the ‘highway in the sky’, which was seen as a major engineering feat and a very positive modern development for Manchester. Despite the publicity, the road wasn’t quite as impressive as intended when it opened. The A34 junction included a famous mistake: there is an unfinished slip road leaving the eastbound carriageway which ends in mid-air because during construction the contractors realised that it would direct traffic the wrong way on to a one-way street.

  9

  Everyone knows, up to a point, what you are referring to when you say ‘the north’, especially when it’s clear that what you are talking about is the north of England. The north of England is a very real thing, separated from the very real south for all manner of solid and imagined reasons, and it’s easy to list a few objects, people, sights, disputes, scandals, reports, buildings, clichés, poets, comedians and references and come up with an image of the north that does the job. The north all wrapped up and firmly in its place as a combination of nostalgia and obedience to the notion that the north is summed up by a cloth cap, an Eccles cake, a bangin’ tune, a witty catchphrase, a no-nonsense hard man, a once-vital political struggle, a stick of rock, a vast ocean of coal under the ground, a stagnant canal, meandering backstreets clinging on to a narrow layout first established in mediaeval times, the careful brick detailing on an everyday railway tunnel, a comedy double act, an outside toilet, a deep gorge, a rags-to-riches story, a situation comedy, ghosts forever rehearsing the same futile rigmarole, a smoking chimney in a pre-clean-air-act sky.

  But the north is also not so easy to find. There is an invisible, a less stable north co-existing with the flat tempered same old north that we think we know from that book, that song, punchline, landmark, anniversary or accent. There is the north that is the result of a series of communal decisions, collected wisdom and general understandings that we can be very comfortable with even if it annoys us with its simplicity or predictability. Then there is another north, still made up of the usual names, achievements and history, but one that might perhaps be a little truer – to a certain something, to a sense of how the north actually came to be so fixed even as it was resisting being fixed and controlled and organised by indifferent, or all too attentive, outside forces. A north that routinely emerges from the geography, the weather, the landscape, the humour and the settled patterns of behaviour. But a north that also emerges from the shadows, from its own mysterious position as something that contains such tradition and militancy, brilliance and persistence, acceptance and slyness, dirt and glamour, and from the fact that in the end the north is made up of lots of norths, all of them containing their own invisible north.

  These different norths, these norths within the north – clear, obscure, competing and overlapping with each other inside such a short cramped enclosed space – are all very different, to the extent that the only thing they have in common is that they happen to be a few miles apart, just across the river, over the hills, down the road, the other side of the island. Perhaps all that submerged, simmering tension between one coast and the other, between one county and another, between this city and that city, that valley and this gorge, village versus village, neighbour against neighbour, has compressed into a tart, brittle togetherness connected only to their shared position of not being in the south. The beauty of the north is that it is all about difference and a refusal to sacrifice a pungent hard-won sense of difference. This difference, from the south, from those close by, explicitly represents an independence that has been difficult to officially, formally achieve, and this difference, this abstract independence of thought, is loudly, boldly, brazenly, excessively, romantically and sometimes subtly represented through the walk and talk that the classic northerner uses even when it appears to confirm and clarify the cold, simple and undermining stereotyping that the northerner traditionally – and yet radically – despises.

  10

  1966

  While training as a teacher, Abdur was interviewed by the BBC for a television series called Minorities in Britain, transmitted on 27 June 1966. ‘I became one of the first Asian teachers in Bradford. To children, I was a novelty. To teachers, there was a mixed reaction. I was invading their territory in some ways but I got on with people very well. Pakistan means “land of pure” and people started to call Pakistanis Pakis as if it was a swear word, so that sort of thing started coming on. The streets were littered with graffiti, Paki go home, and all that business. Some people even criticised the smell of curry.’

  German-born writer W. G. Sebald, a concerned perceptive analyst of the emotional dissipated post-war aftermath, moved to Manchester in 1966 to take up an assistant lectureship at the University of Manchester. In his book The Emigrants, published in 1981, Sebald’s narrator arrived in the city by plane.

  Looping round in one more curve, the roar of the engines steadily increasing, the plane set a course across open country. By now, we should have been able to make out the sprawling mass of Manchester, yet one could see nothing but a faint glimmer, as if from a fire almost suffocated in ash. A blanket of fog that had risen out of the marshy plains that reached as far as the Irish Sea had covered the city, a city spread across a thousand square kilometres, built of countless bricks and inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.

  Driving in from the airport, Sebald’s narrator, no doubt mirroring the author’s own experience, notes the almost graceful suburbs of Gatley, Northenden and Didsbury, before he encounters the soiled inner-city areas of Hulme and Moss Side, ‘whole blocks where the doors and windows were boarded up’ and then a city centre that was ‘hollow to the core’.

  I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialisation had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see. As
we drove in among the dark ravines between the brick buildings, most of which were six or eight storeys high and sometimes adorned with glazed ceramic tiles, it turned out that even there, in the heart of the city, not a soul was to be seen, though by now it was almost a quarter to six. One might have supposed that the city had long been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum.

  In 1966 Julie Goodyear’s successful modelling career – she had been named Miss Britvic and also Miss Astral Cream – led to a part in one of the four Coronation Street spin-off comedy series that emerged in the sixties, Pardon the Expression. She also made a six-week appearance as Bet Lynch in Coronation Street, then joined the Oldham Repertory Company. After roles in Family at War, The Dustbinmen, Nearest and Dearest and City 68, she rejoined Coronation Street in 1970 as the feisty, definitively busty and defiantly down-to-earth barmaid in the Rovers’ Return. Her earrings, sharp tongue, animal prints and piled-high rough blonde hair would become legendary, but as dramatic as her role was in the soap, her chaotic private life driven by a host of lusts was often even more intense and far-fetched.

  1965

  Forton Services on the M6 near Lancaster opened. It was operated by Top Rank Motor Inns, part of the giant media and entertainment combine J. Arthur Rank. It was Top Rank’s second ‘motor port’ as they called them. The centrepiece of Forton was a hexagonal tower, which resembled an aircraft control tower. The Tower Restaurant, which it contained, was the most upmarket dining experience offered at Forton. Diners had views over Morecambe Bay and to the Lakeland fells beyond. In spite of the ambitions of Top Rank, when Motoring Which? visited Forton during a survey of motorway service areas, they found the quality of the food ‘only fair’.

  1964

  In February, at their first American press conference, when the Beatles were asked, ‘Can you explain your strange English accents?’ George Harrison replied, ‘It’s not English. It’s Liverpudlian.’

  The Rolling Stones concert at Rochdale’s Cubi Klub in April 1964 was cancelled after trouble broke out among nearly 1,500 youngsters trying to get in. Queues had formed outside the Slack Street club hours before the show, and over 800 people eventually packed inside waiting for the pop stars to appear. Two of the Stones arrived on time but the other three were delayed coming from Knutsford after their car had a puncture.

  Riffat Akram arrived in Bradford with the rest of her family. She was only eleven years old.

  The journey was long and dreary. My father tried to teach us some English on the way. I hadn’t come across English before so he taught us a few words on the train. When we arrived in Bradford it was an extremely cold November evening. Foggy, smog, drizzle – horrible. And I remember my mum’s face when we got off. Some of my father’s friends were there to meet us. Dad said, ‘We’re here.’ And Mum looked around and she looked at the horrible, cold, dull, dark place and said, ‘THIS is England?!’ I’ll never forget that expression for as long as I live. She was just horrified!

  Bob Dylan played his first show in Britain on 14 May 1964 at ABC Television’s Didsbury studios in Manchester on the corner of School Lane and Parrs Wood Lane. The studios were a former ‘super cinema’ opened in 1931. ABC broadcast in the north at weekends until 1968, while Granada took care of the weekdays. Dylan sang ‘Chimes of Freedom’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice’. The studios first went on air on 5 May 1956, opening with the FA Cup Final of that year between Manchester City and Birmingham.

  Ray Allen opened the UK’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Fishergate, Preston. Ray had met Colonel Harland Sanders in 1963, securing the UK rights to the famous ‘secret recipe’ American fried chicken.

  Top of the Pops is first transmitted from a converted church in Dickinson Road, Manchester, which had been acquired by the BBC and fitted out as a studio some years earlier. It was used because other studios were busy. The first show was broadcast live at 6.35 on BBC 1, New Year’s Day 1964. It was presented by Jimmy Savile, who opened the show with the immortal line: ‘It’s Number 1, it’s Top of the Pops.’

  ‘We are living in the jet age but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality. Over the British people lies the chill frost of Tory leadership. They freeze initiative and petrify imagination. They cling to privilege and power for the few, shutting the gates on the many. Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority, in which the master and servant, landlord and tenant mentality is predominant. The Tories have proven that they are incapable of mobilising Britain to take full advantage of the scientific breakthrough. Their approach and methods are fifty years out of date.’ Harold Wilson

  In summer 1964 Barbara Hepworth travelled to New York for the unveiling of her monumental sculpture Single Form, a towering shield-like block of bronze, on the plaza of the UN Secretariat. For once Hepworth upstaged her old friend and rival Henry Moore (he had adorned the UNESCO Building in Paris a few years earlier). Usually it was she who came off badly from the inevitable comparisons, having been born within five miles and five years of each other.

  11

  The north begins once you have crossed this river, or that river, or maybe that sensational sudden plunge in the landscape, over that bridge built in the seventeenth century but which still followed some route established by the Romans as they forced their way further and further into the mysterious alluring roughness of an island that got rougher, damper and chillier but more spectacular the further north they ventured. The Romans made their roads direct, so that troops could travel swiftly from one military station to another, and their straight lines cutting through the nation influenced the routes and resting places of roads and railways that would criss-cross the country in centuries to come. Windswept, wild and wet, north-west England was about as far as one could get in the Roman empire from the sun-baked lands of Spain and Syria. Feeling the bitter cold and fans of comfort, the Romans heated their substantial yet delicately decorated homes, and built furnaces, foundries, hearths and ovens for the tiles, glass, utensils, heating systems, baths, bricks and pottery they needed, teaching the Britons a multitude of new trades.

  The north became the north first as a shadow of possibility with the fixed, rather indifferent and actually alien grandeur of Hadrian’s Wall, which was ignored when an actual legal border was finally decided in 1237. And then the north’s north was under constant challenging siege from battling governments and elusive locals fighting to eke out an existence in an area where you got no immediate advantage from belonging to either the English or the Scottish, and whatever nationalistic pride you did develop was contorted. You survived on your own terms by establishing your own rules, and lack of rules, and by creating your own complicated, tangled and internal allegiances.

  Hadrian’s Wall was a provisional hint of where the north’s northern border would end up, a suggestion, perhaps a Roman recommendation which would be corrected temporarily by the Romans themselves when they moved the line north. The wall is an ideal metaphor for the border: something which is an actual physical barrier between the two nations but only a fantasy border, one which implies, by not actually being a border, how a border is often arbitrary, liminal and psychological.

  Beyond Hadrian’s Wall there is more English north, and more stories, and myths, and misunderstandings. There is the history of how the border between England and Scotland, and therefore the northern end of the north, itself vibrated, sometimes viciously, through time as skirmishes, battles and disagreements meant the border changed shape, was argued over and moved about before there was a final decision, in 1237. Hadrian’s Wall does not mark a place where the north becomes the north, which would be romantically attractive and to some extent exists in a comical and even ideological version of how England is separated from Scotland. North of the wall, there are nine miles more in the west, above Carlisle, and sixty-eight miles more in the east, above Newcastle, before the Scottish border finally appears, sealing the top end of the north, giving us one place where the north begins, as th
e south to another land, another state of mind.

  The north begins with that border skirmish, that line in a poem, that invention of a machine, that adoption or rejection or adaptation of a foreign influence, that criminal act, that frame of mind, that revolutionary impulse, that massive experiment in splendour, that brand-new trade, that personality trait, that thirteenth-century treaty, that clinging on to a word, a phrase, the curtailed form of the definite article, in t’ north of England, put th’ wood in th’ ole, champion, a blunt outburst, it doesn’t do, a crusty slice of boisterous slang, for fuck’s sake, them as ’as nowt is nowt, that low toneless cloud over a windswept isolated field, that touching arrangement of looming brick and sombre shadow, that red sprawling scab, the oily rainbow shine on a slate-grey rain-covered roof, that period of class conflict, that border change, that melancholy nostalgia, tha’s a face like a line a wet washin’, the pressing pain of an endless now, a colour that could only belong among L. S. Lowry’s faithfully maintained and reworked five favourites.

  12

  1963

  The 1960s was the perfect time for a Yorkshire man to join the BBC. ‘Once, I couldn’t have got a job there as a gateman, with my accent,’ reported Michael Parkinson, born in 1935 in Cudsworth on the outskirts of Barnsley, South Yorkshire. ‘Now, they were on their knees begging you to join if you had a northern accent.’

  On 10 October Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan resigned and was succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Douglas-Home put up a brave fight in the general election one year later, but it was Wilson and his Labour Party who won, with a majority of five seats.