by Paul Morley
Davyhulme, six miles west of Manchester city centre, bound by the Rivers Irwell and Mersey, can be traced back to the twelfth century, when it was the seat of John de Hulme. It is assumed that ‘Davy’ was prefixed to ‘Hulme’ to distinguish it from Hulme in Manchester. In 1948 the minister for health, Aneurin Bevan, conducted the symbolic inauguration of the National Health Service at Davyhulme’s Park Hospital (now Trafford General Hospital). He received the keys from Lancashire County Council; nurses formed a guard of honour to greet him, and for the first time hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, opticians and dentists were brought together under one umbrella organisation providing free treatment for all at the point of delivery. Sylvia Diggory (née Beckingham) was the first NHS patient – she was thirteen. Before she died, Sylvia said, ‘Mr Bevan asked me if I understood the significance of the occasion and told me that it was a milestone in history – the most civilised step any country had ever taken, and a day I would remember for the rest of my life – and of course, he was right.’ The hospital also witnessed the first baby born under the NHS, weighing six pounds eleven ounces, named Sandra Pook.
The decision to take children’s shoes off rationing was the subject of a speech given by Harold Wilson on behalf of the Labour government in Birmingham in July 1948. ‘The school I went to in the north was a school where half the children in my class never had boots or shoes on their feet,’ he declared. The schools that young Harold had attended were soon objecting strongly. The mayor of Huddersfield declared that when Wilson had been at New Street Council School in Milnsbridge there had never been any children without shoes. There was awkward backtracking, with confused excuses about clogs not counting as boots or shoes. The ‘barefoot speech’ aimed to give the impression of great crusading progress; in reality, as the mayor of Huddersfield pointed out, it wasn’t true.
In 1948 David Hockney won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, one of the best schools in the country. In Keighley Road opposite the statue of Sir Titus Salt in Lister Park he enjoyed his art classes most and decided that he wanted to become an artist. Furthermore, he disliked the other subjects he was required to study. It was also in that year that Kenneth Hockney took his son to see Puccini’s La Bohème at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford’s Morley Street. It was the first opera the future stage designer had ever seen. In 1950 he asked to be transferred to the Regional College of Art in Bradford so that he could pursue his interest in art more seriously. However, the BGS headmaster recommended that he first finish his general education before transferring anywhere. Previously making good progress, Hockney responded by behaving badly and with poor grades. He spent his class time doodling in notebooks. Nonetheless, his artistic leanings won him prizes and recognition, and he drew for the school newspaper. Overall, he was a likeable and intelligent student with many friends. He once said: ‘East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvellous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.’
W. H. Auden was besotted by the north Pennines in particular, and limestone in general, and in 1948 even wrote a poem entitled ‘In Praise of Limestone’. He clearly had extensive knowledge of the Pennines and his works make numerous references to remote places that could only be known by exploration on foot. In America in 1947 an Ordnance Survey map of Alston Moor hung on the wall of Auden’s chaotic shack on Fire Island (and later in his house at Kirchstetten), and he told Geoffrey Grigson in a letter of 17 January 1950, ‘My great good place is the part of the Pennines bounded on the S by Swaledale, on the N by the Roman wall and on the W by the Eden Valley.’ Despite living in Birmingham and attending school in East Anglia, Auden’s mind was irresistibly drawn towards the north. In December 1947 in an article for House and Garden entitled ‘I Like it Cold’, he wrote,
Though I was brought up on both, Norse mythology has always appealed to me infinitely more than Greek; Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin were my favourite fairy stories and years before I ever went there, the north of England was the Never-Never Land of my dreams. Nor did those feelings disappear when I finally did; to this day, Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien south ends and the north, my world, begins.
North: cold, wind, precipices, glaciers, caves, heroic conquest of dangerous obstacles, whales, hot meat and vegetables, concentration and production, privacy.
South: heat, light, drought, calm, agricultural plains, trees, Rotarian crowds, the life of ignoble ease, spiders, fruits and desserts, the waste of time, publicity.
Sooty’s birth occurred in 1948 when, during a family holiday in Blackpool, a Yorkshire engineer and part-time magician named Harry Corbett came across a glove-puppet teddy bear in a novelty shop at the end of the seaside resort’s famous north pier. ‘I’d always had a thing about teddy bears,’ Corbett said years later. ‘And this one had a cheeky face. It was almost as if it was saying, “Don’t leave me here.”’ So Corbett paid 7s 6d (38 pence) for the bear and returned to his boarding house with his new partner-to-be wrapped inside a brown paper bag.
1947
From 1905 to 1924 the Newcastle press used every other description but Geordie to report the triumphs of Newcastle United and its supporters: they were by turns Tynesiders, Novocastrians, Northumbrians, Magpies, North-country men, Newcastle excursionists or Northerners, but not Geordies. There is no definitive meaning to the term anyway. As a place to start, Newcastle City Libraries ‘Fact Sheet Number 5: Origin of the name Geordie’ offers four original meanings: a supporter of the Hanoverians at the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rising, a name given to coal miners, the nickname for George Stephenson’s pit safety lamp and a term for the Tyneside dialect dating back to Stephenson’s oral evidence to Parliamentary inquiries in 1826. The BBC Home Service programme Wot Cheor Geordie was immensely popular from 1947, and had as its signature tune Jack Robson’s ‘Wherever ye gan you’re sure to meet a Geordie’.
Les Dawson attended Cheetham Senior School, and began his semi-professional career in 1947, in the same venues as Bernard Manning. Before his fame Dawson wrote poetry – a guilty secret for someone of his earthy background – and he harboured literary ambitions throughout his career. He wrote many novels but was publicly regarded solely as an entertainer, and this saddened him. Having broken his jaw in a boxing match, Dawson was able to pull grotesque faces by pulling his jaw over his upper lip. Dawson and Manning first performed at Lee Road Social Club in Harpurhey, where Dawson was immediately popular, as he came to be all over the working-men’s club circuit of the north-west.
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The Reddish houses and streets stretched all the way to Stockport, which was, as far as I could tell from my irregular trips with my mum, made up of miles of countless buildings constructed out of bricks and slate standing guard each side of endless roads, which I had very little idea about but which, as far as I could tell, took you all the way to Manchester, which I knew about because I would hear it mentioned, because my dad worked there, and every day we received a copy, around four in the afternoon, delivered as if by magic through the door, of the Manchester Evening News. The ink would still be wet inside a small box on the front page where the latest cricket scores had been printed like a bulletin from heaven. This brought me news, exciting even when I was seven, of the lunchtime score a few hours before of the Lancashire County Cricket team. Because the ink was wet, this cryptic, crooked information, which would generally report something like ‘Lancs 113–4 H.Pilling 64 no v Glouc’ and nothing more, seemed to glisten with modern magic, and no news that Google can now instantly supply me with can equal the marvel of knowing so quickly how Lancashire were getting on against some English county that seemed as far away and mysterious as the other side of the Iron Curtain.
This cricket news for some reason became an early addiction, and the damp blurry latest score, those numbers that meant something next to places with names that already had their own charact
er because of the shape of the letters and the rhythm they made, helped me to begin piecing together the universe as a combination of evidence and mystery that required careful examination. The expanding universe at first was made up of the seventeen counties that played first-class cricket, and I made my first move out into that swelling cosmos to go and see Lancashire play cricket at Old Trafford. This required a train journey, which meant I realised that next to Reddish was another place, and then another, and then another, and that it was not all alone in the world. One street led to the next; one railway station led to another; you could move from one place to another; each place was named; each place was where people felt as unchallenged and as secure as I was where I had been placed.
The idea of the county gave me my real first sense of a tangible locale bigger than just the streets I lived in – although I did not attempt to work out why I happened to be in the county I was and simply took it for granted that because of where I was I followed Lancashire. That would soon seem like a choice made for heroic and important reasons, and then seem like Lancashire had chosen me, because of my virtues.
Lancashire were one of the counties in the Cricket County Championship, and these counties were for me inevitably superior to what were called the Minor Counties, which had their own pretty much invisible competition. This, then, as far as I thought it through, was the heart of the country, the seventeen counties that I list here in the order they came in the 1967 final championship table: Yorkshire, Kent, Leicestershire, Surrey, Worcestershire, Derbyshire, Middlesex, Somerset, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire, Hampshire, Sussex, Glamorgan (the one county outside England), Essex, Nottinghamshire and Gloucestershire. Essentially this meant that the two great northern counties, Lancashire and Yorkshire, plus the Welsh Glamorgan, were pitted against counties from the lower midlands and the south, the non-Danelaw Anglo-Saxon heartlands, from where it seemed the game had spread. Cheshire was Minor, the thought of which had quite an impact on my consciousness, slightly tarnishing its exoticism and cultivated airs and graces, which meant it was consigned to the world of first-class counties’ second elevens and those apparently less powerful, somehow more delicate counties such as Dorset, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Suffolk, Wiltshire and Devon.
Cheshire, though, as I learned as I became more experienced in my love of cricket, tended to be at the top of the Minor Counties table, so all was not lost. Cheshire was Minor, but within that superior, so my picture of where I was, with all those other counties simply somewhere else, was not significantly degraded. In fact, Cheshire’s position in my mind as king of the Minors seemed to support the picture that they were not like any other county. To some extent they were a fantasy county, coming into and around and through the north with a special sensibility that was limper and more subdued than the more emphatic counties, more intangible than the mighty two northern counties, but also more quixotic.
I grew to love the structure that the County Championship appeared to impose on the wider world, even if this was a structure filtered through cricket. I sensed, somehow, perhaps from the nature of the game – complex but thrilling, taking its time, where patience met urgency and with very particular rules and regulations, played on an area of unspoilt summer grass marked out into very specific shapes, with players in pure white positioned in important parts of the playing area in ways that seemed deeply symbolic, some of those players sporting various types of protection that made them look part warrior, part angel – that cricket brought with it not only history, but also the very reason why England was what it was. My sense of England developed as I followed how players from the various counties represented England, so that I began vaguely to piece together a sense of the dynamic of a nation in which elegant opening batsmen tended to come from southern counties, and furious fast bowlers, greased-back hair flapping manically as they bore down through a red mist on Australians and Indians, were tough, threatening and beguiling northerners – suave Brian Statham of Lancashire, bolshie Fred Trueman of Yorkshire.
Even if this order was reversed, and stolid, careful, almost paranoid northerners opened the English batting, and tough, uncompromising fast bowlers from counties in the south hurled the hard red leather ball at aggrieved if defiant representatives of a collapsed empire, there still seemed something of how the nation was itself divided, into counties, into regions, into different characters, through the way cricket, and the players, organised themselves, and represented their counties, and, possibly, in occasional enforced unity, their country. This was the ethereal, gentlemanly conclusion of centuries of tribal rivalry, the separated kingdoms, competing interests and colonising/conquering temperament of the eccentrically compiled nation distilled into this highly ritualised competition, where the idea of battle, of gaining territory, protecting interests, removing members of the enemy, piercing their armour, tactically outwitting them, had been transformed into this cryptic, philosophical and serene-seeming abstraction. Englishness had culminated in a unique way of translating and modifying centuries of invasive, controlling exuberance and consolidation into a pattern arranged out of attack, defence and protection.
There are players who are specialists in certain areas of the game, some requiring strength, composure, determination, power, a strong arm, some requiring intelligence, persistence, imagination, a quick eye, all of them needing concentration and good judgement, led by an unruffled captain who at his best personifies the sensible, the controlled, the calculating, and yet the ingenious, righteous and perceptive. This game can seem chaotic and/or banal to the outsider, packed with pointless effete repetitions, never really beginning, never really ending, a futile pursuit of futility itself, but is to the insider an enthralling accumulation of patterns, conclusions, internal battles, surprising moments, implicit tension, small triumphs, stunning disappointments and, even while a result, a conclusion, is never guaranteed, an overall victory.
Sometimes, because this open-air game is only a shadow, a polite charming echo of tempestuous combat, rain and bad light are deemed an intrusion on the game, something that ruins the moment. The weather has the last word, and often brings the game to an early end. This infuriates the non-believer, as hours and days of effort and endeavour can come to stupid rained-off nought, but further excite the believer, who understands how this game reflects the nature of life itself, where nothing is sure and/or everything changes from moment to moment, or stays exactly the same for vast stretches of time. Sometimes, however much you want something, and fight for it, nothing really happens: life goes nowhere, and there is an empty feeling, but also a sense of anticipation, for the next game, the next over, which could make everything burst into life. Other times, one shot, one catch, even one dropped catch, and the game shows how out of nothing life itself becomes life itself and who knows what will happen next.
Alderley Edge, Cheshire
I didn’t think about it like that at the time. I started to watch Lancashire during a good period, when they were becoming the very best at a new abbreviated form of cricket played in one day, often a Sunday, in which each side bowled a limited number of overs. Lancashire players were kings of the sponsored forty-over format, launched in 1963, which offended traditionalists with its commercialised bluntness but excited a new audience.
Cricket’s unhinged elegant crystallisation of skill and discretion, which could take days to make its point, which was often pointless, a grave matter of deadlock, was refined or coarsened into something shorter, faster and more explicitly argumentative. The one-day game was less stationary, and even though it could still be curtailed by weather or dwindling light, there was a greater chance of one side winning, and one side not doing enough to win. The one-day game was more of a clash involving clear dispute rather than a drawn-out encounter hinting at a minor difference of opinion twice removed. Three-day county cricket and five-day test cricket still leaned towards the seductively epic, but the commercial single-day format, without cutting too many corners, translated a complicated set of e
quations into a purged and thrilling accumulation of additions and subtractions.
Lancashire’s cricket team – I quickly found out because I was obsessed enough with the county team I started to watch when I was ten, in 1967, and breathlessly looked up their statistics and backgrounds in cricket manuals and magazines – was made up of players who were mostly from Lancashire or a scant few miles over the border. Without thinking about it or even really knowing it, the names of the places where those Lancashire players born in Lancashire came from gave some sort of clue as to the nature of Lancashire itself, and why those players played the way they did, and spoke the way they did. Even those from outside the county seemed to devote themselves to the fierce, proud Lancastrian cause, so that when belting rangy batter and spectacular fielder Clive Lloyd arrived from the West Indies, and the wildly enthusiastic Farokh Engineer, deft wicketkeeper and flamboyant, even camp, slightly erratic batsman, landed from Bombay, India, they were instantly Lancashire, and Lancashire itself was made richer, and harder to beat, because of these legendary test players from the other side of the world.