by Paul Morley
Coronation Street became known for the portrayal of strong women, with characters like the imperious Ena Sharples, Annie Walker, Elsie Tanner and the battling Hilda Ogden becoming household names during the 1960s. By 1962 Violet Carson, born in Ancoats in 1898, daughter of a flour miller father and amateur singer mother, pianist at Market Street cinema accompanying silent movies after the First World War, a member of the cast in the 1920s of the BBC’s Children’s Hour, pianist during the forties for Wilfred Pickles’ Have a Go, who played seventy-two-year-old Ena Sharples, was ITV Personality of the Year.
Tony Warren created a programme largely based around loud, powerful, determined women, which some commentators put down to the environment in which he grew up – a close-knit world where the matriarchs were the guardians of their community and obtained power over an apparently male-run society through a combination of good will and cattiness, and a careful storing and distribution of valuable information. His tart-tongued, shrewd, energetic and proud women, especially Sharples, Tanner and Walker, were in part a tribute to those pioneering northern women who had found subversive ways to wield influence. He was honouring those women, some more moral or self-righteous than others, making the best of their run-down and limited circumstances, those committed to ensuring that women and their bold brilliance did not shrink behind the archetypical powerful male northern entrepreneur, planner or politician as they reorganised the fundamental structure of society. The consistent, pugnacious and sometimes punishing female edge of Coronation Street existed from the very first episode. It can be traced back to a woman who never for a moment accepted that the progress taking place for better or worse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was going to be solely controlled by men.
Violet Carson as Ena Sharples from Coronation Street, with view over Manchester
In 1960 George Formby made his last record, ‘Happy Go Lucky Me’, and in December of the same year made what was to be his last television programme, a forty-minute one-man performance called The Friday Show. It was a confessional with George admitting that his wife Beryl had been the driving force behind his success, that he couldn’t read or write properly, that he didn’t understand music and that he regretted not having children. Beryl watched the programme from her sickbed. She was dying from leukaemia but was still able to offer her usual tough critique of George’s performance. Formby – before the final credits began to roll – turned, full face on, to camera and appealed: ‘And folks, if you’d like to have me back again, I’ve got a lot more stories to tell, and a couple of hundred more songs to sing.’
The Beatles played Hamburg for the first time in 1960. They described Liverpool as ‘pockmarked and shagged out’ in comparison, the ‘Reeperbahn was still open while Liverpool was shut.’
Not only had Granada built a brand-new studio centre in Manchester, they had developed a strong northern identity for themselves – with northern voices, northern programmes, northern idents. This immediately set Granada apart. It made them unmovable and led to the ITA deciding that all TV companies, large and small, should identify with their regions. Granada, Granadaland – these terms entered the nation’s psyche so much that the terms still mean Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, Cheshire. For a decade ‘Granadaland’ vied with ‘the north country’ as the term used in the south to describe any godforsaken sooty town over two hours away from London by train. The people of the north, at thirteen million the biggest of all the regions, became citizens of Granadaland, and the local newsreaders spoke to them like neighbours.
By 1960 the cotton industry, which had flourished in the north-west of England for 150 years, was in terminal decline. The Cotton Industry Act of 1959 was intended to revitalise the Lancashire industry by helping cotton companies replace outdated machinery, but its practical effect was to close countless mills. During the 1960s and seventies mills shut across Lancashire at a rate of almost one a week.
The Football League gave permission for a scheme to, in the words of its secretary Alan Hardaker, ‘arrest the alarming decline in football gates and extend the game’s popular appeal as a spectacle’. The idea was ‘to present football and the League in the best possible light and give the public, including millions of women who watch television on Saturday nights, a taste of the excitement and spectacle of first-class football’. So, on Saturday 10 September 1960 the match between Blackpool and Bolton was screened live on ITV. The match kicked off at 6.50 pm, so as to avoid clashing with any others, and the channel was able to screen the last ten minutes of the first half and the entire second half. Blackpool had agreed to be televised as they were confident of a good attendance thanks to the pull of the town’s illuminations. With crushing inevitability, this example of ‘the excitement and spectacle of first-class football’ ended goalless.
1959
The opening images of Room at the Top stand as some of the most familiar in the history of British cinema. Black and white shots of industrial landscapes, majestic ageing railway stations and a young man arriving somewhere with a raincoat folded over his arm are instantly evocative of a certain time and place in the history of British cinema. The British New Wave is commonly seen as comprising nine films released between 1959 and 1963: Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), This Sporting Life (1963) and Billy Liar (1963). The films shared characteristics: black and white photography, moody jazz scores and northern locations – Blackpool, Salford, Bolton, Bradford, Wakefield, Morecambe, Stockport, Manchester. Recurrent images of puffing steam trains, cobbled backstreets, mournful gasometers and deadpan railway viaducts gave the films the feeling of taking place at the crumpled end of the nineteenth century. The bus ride around Manchester that opens the film version of A Taste of Honey captures perfectly the oppressive and decaying world of time-worn military statues, smoke-grimed buildings and weather-beaten Victorian iconography.
After completing his National Service in 1959, John Ravenscroft spent six months working at the Townhead Mill in Rochdale. His father then decided that it would be a good idea if his son spent some time in the United States learning the cotton business. In the spring of 1960 John climbed aboard the SS Eugene Lykes bound for Houston, Texas. From Houston he caught a train to Dallas, where he worked for a firm at the Cotton Exchange.
In 1959 Bernard Manning borrowed £30,000 from his father and transformed a run-down billiards hall on the Rochdale Road in Harpurhey into the Embassy Club. Manning the family man came to the fore: ‘Everything clicked into place. My sisters and my brother were going to go behind the bar. John, my brother-in-law, went on the door. Mum would work the cash till, Dad do the cellar and Vera keep an eye on the rest of the club. It was a real family concern, a right team, with few outsiders – and no fiddlers.’ At that time his material was comparatively innocuous, but as white working-class Britain began to experience an influx of workers from Asia and the West Indies, Manning’s act adjusted to reflect its anxious prejudices and concerns. It is not known whether he held the racist, homophobic and sexist views he expressed on stage or if they were just part of his act. ‘I get up on stage and I do an act,’ Bernard Manning once said. ‘It’s not me, just as an actor playing a part in a film isn’t the character. I don’t go home to my grandkids and say, “Fucking queers, niggers, they’re all cunts.” It’s my act, not me. It’s all a joke.’ Manning would place visiting liberal journalists in seats near the stage, the better to torment them. The typical audience at the Embassy Club came from the working-class estates of Manchester and surrounding areas, even Liverpool. They seemed to enjoy being insulted by him. Revelling in his own repulsiveness was part of his act. It was as though his audience needed, demanded, to be wound up in order to deal with and confront the merciless stress and pressure of their everyday lives.
1958
The Preston Bypass was Britain’s first motorway, opened by Pr
ime Minister Harold Macmillan. The road was barely a motorway by later standards – two lanes each way with soft shoulders, a broad central reserve with a hedge and just one junction. It started and ended at roundabouts on the A6 to the north and south of Preston. The road, said Macmillan, was a sign that Britain was finally beginning the process of bringing its highways up to a standard that a modern country could be proud of. At this point press releases promised the sight of him pushing a button which would automatically cut the ribbon and unveil the plaque, but unfortunately the system couldn’t be made to work, and so on the day there was no button and no ribbon. Instead, he simply revealed the granite plaque himself and then got into the first car of the motorcade.
1957
Roger McGough graduated from the University of Hull in 1957 after studying French and geography at the same time as Philip Larkin was head librarian and sub-warden of his hall of residence. They never met. McGough didn’t dare speak to him – ‘He didn’t hang out with any of the students’ – although he sometimes found himself in the same room as Larkin and described him as a ‘toppling steeple of tweed. But I did send him some poems while I was there and he was very nice, very kind. I wouldn’t have known what to say to him really, you know. I was a bit gauche then.’ Larkin made the young Roger McGough realise that it was possible to be a poet and not be already dead. ‘I’d grown up in Liverpool with a working-class, Irish-Catholic background. Men of my father’s generation worked on the docks, but I was among the first of that post-war generation for whom education was available – I got a scholarship to go to grammar school, and then a university degree.’
Guardian writer Nicholas Wroe wrote, ‘The publication of The Uses of Literacy in 1957 propelled Richard Hoggart, then an extramural lecturer at the University of Hull, to the forefront of the changes that swept British culture from the sclerotic 1950s into the swinging sixties. The book was a ground-breaking study of working-class culture and a critical appraisal of the changes wrought by the commercial forces . . . Not only did it anticipate the opening-up of the cultural landscape, it also contributed to a critical and popular climate far more receptive to the subsequent explosion of books, films and art about working-class subjects by working-class artists.’
John Braine’s Room at the Top was published in March 1957 and was immediately and exceptionally successful for a first novel by a largely unknown author. Written in 1953–4 while he was being treated for TB at Grassington Sanatorium, it was initially rejected by several publishers. When it finally appeared, Braine was working as a thirteen-pounds-a-week librarian at Darton, near Barnsley, and living with his wife and two-week-old son on Doncaster Road, Wakefield. Within a month the BBC’s Panorama had sent the journalist Woodrow Wyatt to interview Braine in Yorkshire and hail Room at the Top as the most significant novel for a generation. Braine told Wyatt he had no plans to relocate to London ‘because it has ruined many potentially good writers’. (He would move south nine years later and begin the process of self-destruction.) The novel is set in the north of England, with its working-class protagonist Joe Lampton ruthlessly climbing the social ladder by seducing and marrying Susan Browne, the millionaire factory-owner’s daughter, and abandoning an older woman whom he actually does love who tragically dies of drink. He wants to get rich as fast as possible, even though he hates the rich, and secure a source of individual power at a time when there was a general feeling of powerlessness. The book’s genius was to tap into the mood of 1950s Britain, when old attitudes were disappearing and working-class people more than ever before aspired to join the middle classes, and when the idea of youth was rapidly developing as a separate class, a distinct cultural entity.
Elizabeth Raffald, cook, entrepreneur and inventor of the Eccles Cake
Joe says of his ambition, ‘I was going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpse filled me with excitement. Big Houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges.’
Part Two
Through no fault of my own
I take a simple view of life. It is to keep your eyes open and get on with it.
Laurence Sterne
21
I was not born in the time before Christ was born, or in the time of the Romans, or Alfred the Great, or the Black Prince, or Elizabeth I, or Thomas De Quincey, or Emily Brontë, or Gracie Fields, or Jimmy Tarbuck, nor in Doncaster, or Rotherham, or Barrow, or Glossop, or Gloucester, Bath or Pontypool. I was not born outside England, anywhere on the planet, at any time between, say, 1234 and 1957. I could have been. I could have entered existence anywhere at any time, catapulted through an unbelievable gap that suddenly prised reality open, and found myself stunned and speechless where I happened to be, in time and place, obediently getting on with accepting, coping with, or even rejecting, where I was during whatever period of time.
There were millions of possibilities for where I could arrive on the planet, and on what date, at any point between, say, 1234 bc and ad 1957, and ultimately it might have been at any second, on any day, anywhere in the world. I ended up in a very particular place at a very specific time, with a date of birth stuck firmly inside the month of March, in 1957, when most of the patterns, accents, attitudes and principles of the north were considerably established, when a vast amount of social, political, legal, technological and economic history was in place, and after the world had spent more than a century being transformed by a series of inventions, imaginings and innovations that had made parts of life more convenient, pleasant and accessible, and parts of life more gruelling, pressurised and crowded. I turned up, and there was a time and place for me, and a lot to get used to connected to the time and place where I did.
In the early 1960s through no fault of my own, I found myself, as a young boy, duly breaking into awareness, six or seven, shy, reticent son of dad Leslie and mum Dilys, skinny big brother of Jayne and, eventually, in 1966, Carol, living at number 12 Westbourne Grove in Reddish, Stockport. I loved my mum and dad like a small boy loves his parents, but I didn’t know what love was in much the same way I didn’t really know where in the world I was. Slowly I would find out, if never fully understand, what it was to love your parents, who were simply there when you arrived, and to get to know where in the world I was, which of course I had no say in deciding. Where in the world you found yourself after some kicking and screaming and catching of breath would make such a difference, because it would slowly dawn on you that where you lived was filled with meaning and detail you could spend your life investigating and recording.
I was born two days after the American writer, essayist and editor Christopher Morley died, and a newspaper obituary spotted by my mother almost meant I was named after him. For a few days I was nameless, as my parents had been expecting a girl – a boy, needing a name, disconcerted them, upset their plans for a Kim Elizabeth. I was not named after him in the end, but some of his interests seemed to have become tangled up in my consciousness – how this happened is either a miraculous transference through the Morley name into my mind at the moment he died, or just one of those things that make it into a writer’s notes, and then make it into a book, on this particular page.
He wrote an essay in 1918 entitled ‘The Art of Walking’, remarking on the reflective practice of walking during a time when automobiles were rapidly making ‘the highways theirs beyond dispute’. I seemed to spend a lot of my time as a young boy walking, and as it happens reflecting, at a time when the car was well on its way to completing its conquest of even the backstreets of the world, and I never learned to drive, preferring always the walking, and reverie, to the extent of often being in the sort of trance as I wander and wonder that would be dangerous while driving. C. Morley in his essay notes how William Wordsworth would ‘employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy’ and how your true walker is ‘mightily curious in the world, and he goes out of his way to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses . . . walking will remain the mystic and private pleasure of the secret and humble few’. All great ideas, he
suggests, are conceived by walking, with the brain working at the pedestrian speed of three miles an hour.
I lived in a district at the far north-easterly edge of Stockport named, it seemed to me without a care in the world, Reddish, which was too small to be called a town, and too big to be called a village. It was a fine place to walk, because whichever way you headed, there was something to see, even if that was nothing but a paving stone, a lamp post or shop window, all of which were new enough to me as a boy to send the pulse racing. I became an explorer of corrugated iron, drainpipes and gutters, which are strangely fascinating when you are fresh to them and have no idea of what else there is in the wider world. A matter-of-fact zebra crossing and a metal garden gate in a certain shade of green can for a while introduce a young mind to the spiralling miracle of existence; and the zebra crossing can give you a certain amount of power, stopping cars in their tracks, and the gate can be opened, leading to the creation of a brand-new moment where something unexpected could happen.
There were plenty of corners to turn, and places to visit at a later date, and high brick walls, fences and hedges that hid from view what might be nothing special, but what might be astonishing. The hidden remained astonishing, until I knew for sure that it wasn’t. I learned from an early age to relish being lost, because then I would find new areas that I had not yet surveyed.
Reddish was very neatly if haphazardly laid out, small streets nicely leading to other small streets without it getting too built up, the occasional giant dingy mill turning its back on the present, so aloof it could make you feel a little paranoid. Back alleys were not intimidating, and there were parks, worlds within the world, and because this is the north, it was within reach and actual sight of the sort of open spaces running wild and free on the edge of farmland that could make you think you lived in the country. Reddish was not blocked in by the brick and muck of relentless urbanisation. It was, though, largely unassuming, and I am hoping to connect directly with what I thought as a ten-year-old who had nothing really to compare it with, rather than respond with my own later feelings about its tired, vaguely desolate atmosphere, where nothing was destined to happen now that Manchester, and Stockport, had spread this far, because they were full, and needed somewhere to deposit their leftovers.