by Paul Morley
Engineer and Lloyd joined Harry Pilling of Ashton under Lyne (settlement by ash trees, possibly ‘under the line’ of the Pennines, considered in 1769 to be bare, wet and almost worthless), my favourite player, small and perfectly formed, with neat pre-Beatle black hair tidily side-parted, in first wicket down, after either Geoff Pullar of Swinton (swine town, in the city of Salford on the gentle south-west slopes of the River Irwell) or Barry Wood of Ossett (a fold frequented by blackbirds, over the Pennines between Wakefield and Dewsbury). Pilling of Ashton scored the first century I ever saw made in a match, 112 out of 284 against Northampton, after Wood had made a duck, enough to make the ten-year-old me marvel at the idea of Lancashire, and cricket, and fiercely competitive number-three batsmen bravely marching into war, and then working hard and making something out of nothing that went all the way to 100, a number it had taken all my life to count up to.
Lancashire, as a thing to be loyal to, expanded in my mind seeing such batting a few miles from where I actually lived. There was Ken Shuttleworth of St Helens, eleven miles to the east of Liverpool, twenty-three miles from Manchester city centre, 1901 birthplace of George Groves, sound recordist on the famous first talkie in 1927, The Jazz Singer, Oscar winner for best sound for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Sayonara and My Fair Lady, whose father George Alfred founded the first brass band in St Helens. Dour, direct middle-order batsman David Lloyd was ‘Bloody ’ell, my backside’s a fire engine’ of Accrington (acorn-ringed town, between Burnley and Blackburn, with a soft cultivated accent all of its own, where you catch the ‘buzz’ and ‘them up Burnley Road’ means those in the cemetery, twenty miles north of Manchester city centre, producing famously hard-wearing super-dense bricks used for the Empire State building and Blackpool Tower, rapid nineteenth-century industrialisation and a century later riots between locals and Asian and Caribbean immigrants).
Committed, energetic fast bowler Peter Lever – gently pushed into cricket by his parents because it would be ‘better than hanging around street corners’, apprentice to the great Lancashire bowlers Gorton’s Brian Statham and Ken Higgs of Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, a few miles south of the Cheshire border – of Todmorden, birthplace of Keith Emerson of ELP, right on the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire, seventeen miles from Manchester, the border running through the centre until the 1888 Local Government Act, when it was nudged into the West Riding, but with an Oldham postcode, so of Yorkshire with a Lancashire pull, its town hall built astride the border, and a name made up possibly of two words for death, tod and mor, so that it means death death wood, or in Old English marshy home of the fox. Todmorden cricket club, where Lever started playing, was the only Yorkshire team in the Lancashire League.
Lever’s debut for England in 1969 was against a Rest of the World team hastily assembled to replace a South African team exiled from test cricket due to the apartheid regime. Lever took seven wickets, those of Eddie Barlow, Graeme Pollock, Mushtaq Mohammed, Gary Sobers, Clive Lloyd, Mike Procter and Intikhab Alam – arguably the greatest batsmen on the planet at the time. This was Lancashire ruling the world.
Off-spinner John Savage was born in Ramsbottom (valley of the ram or possibly wild garlic valley) in the Irwell valley four miles north of Bury, the skyline dominated by the 124-foot Peel Monument on Holcombe Moor, built for the nineteenth-century prime minister and founder of the modern British police, Sir Robert Peel, for his help in repealing the Corn Laws, with views across west Yorkshire, north Lancashire and Manchester, to Blackpool and Wales in the west.
At the time I didn’t know anything of the history of the county or of cricket, and how, perhaps, cricket is rooted in the thirteenth-century game of club-ball, which itself might have emerged from a tenth-century game played by children using a bat and a ball – and cricce is a Saxon word meaning crooked stick. Something, though, took me to the game, and to Lancashire, which was just a word but, because of the cricket and the idea of a team representing the county, meant more to me than just a word; it was where, and therefore who, I was, and what I could become part of – even if initially that meant batting at number 3 for Lancashire, and bowling the occasional deadly bamboozling spin that put me on the very edge of being a cherished all-rounder, one who could now and then even do a spot of wicketkeeping, padded- and gloved-up like someone who had some important guarding and attacking to do. Now and then I might turn out for Cheshire, and I had a soft spot for Surrey and an affection for Kent, my dad’s county. He was deeply Kent, to the extent that in the north he was from far, far away, across so many boundaries and borders and rivers and hills, and different shades of history and meaning, that he appeared, inside rough, plain and shrivelled Reddish, to be from another country, representing another race, and all but speaking another language.
Counties and the parishes within them were originally political constructs imposed on the land by invading forces, and counties have somehow retained some of their authority. Sometimes this is because their borders are what they are because of some sort of fixed geographical feature, because of coasts, rivers, hills, forests, mountains. They fit around natural contours, and in between a coast line and on one side of a particular mountain range. Sometimes they do not and seem entirely arbitrary, and yet have continued to inspire loyalty whatever political and historical changes have ensued.
Shires were originally West Saxon territorial units, spheres of administrative responsibility, many based on old tribal districts and retaining Celtic roots in their names. ‘Shire’ came from scir, meaning district; these developed in Wessex in the eighth century and then spread through the country as Wessex itself gained more land. They were run by the shire reeves – sheriffs – the oldest secular office in the country after the crown.
Wittgenstein flying a kite in Glossop in the summer of 1908
The Saxons rejected Roman social organisation in favour of their own ideas of community and cultural structure, which the Normans were happy to maintain when they took over. The Saxon shires constituted a practical and uniform administrative system leading to an efficient method of raising local taxes. The wealth generated made England a tempting target for invading forces. The original five shires of Wessex were Devon, Dorset, Somersetshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire, followed in the ninth century by Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex and Essex. Cornwall became one of the Wessex shires in the tenth century. Those formed out of the ‘reconquest’ of the southern Danelaw, the East Anglian provinces of Norfolk and Suffolk and the shires of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, were created out of Mercia again some time during the tenth century.
Yorkshire represented the remnants of the vast Viking kingdom of Jorvik, and emerged in 954 as the most northerly shire. After 1066 the Norman word comté – which became ‘county’ – replaced ‘shire’, as the new French rulers aligned the scir scheme with their own administrative understanding, and continued in the north the successful southern uniformity. Where the shire system existed, the Normans were able to detail every manor, but in the dubious areas in the north towards the fluid tenebrous border with Scotland, their Domesday surveys were less complete and sometimes did not take place at all.
Six new counties were formed in the Norman era – Rutland was granted an independent existence from Nottinghamshire by 1159, Lancashire was created in 1168 and the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland in 1177. County Durham and Northumberland were not completely integrated into the shire system until the sixteenth century and their territorial boundaries not finally set until 1844. In addition to these thirty-nine historic counties of England there are the forgotten Anglo-Saxon shires of Winchcombshire and possibly Stamfordshire as well, plus the later northern ‘peculiars’ of Norhamshire, Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire, Salfordshire, Hexhamshire, Tynemouthshire, Heighingtonshire, Carlisleshire, Hullshire and Stai
ndropshire.
The division of England into the classic thirty-nine became the basis for English history, our sense of the country, and where we belong within it, and from the Normans to the twentieth century the borders of the counties stayed more or less intact, and certainly their names did. This meant that real allegiance to their shapes and names developed and also the idea that these were permanent places that contained the places, neighbourhoods and streets where we lived which themselves existed in the way they did because they were inside a particular county. The county we lived in, more in England than in Britain as a whole, could supply a powerful sense of rootedness and meaning in a world that could seem extremely confusing and futile. The sense of county – the one I was on the edge of, Lancashire, as much as the one I was inside, Cheshire, or was it the other way round – was as a youngster the first real hook I felt that pulled me into a sense of belonging.
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1946
‘A Plan for Todmorden’ was the enterprising brainchild of town planning consultant Thomas Sharp, commissioned by the Borough Council and published in 1946 in response to the severe difficulties the town then faced. In his 36-page pessimistic report Sharp warned: ‘The town finds itself in a difficult, even desperate situation. It is difficult enough to predict with any assurance the possible future of the cotton industry as a whole; it is even more difficult to attempt to estimate the future of cotton in Todmorden.’ Had the suggested improvements gone ahead the impact would have been tremendous. ‘These improvements would, I believe, give Todmorden a town centre which would not in the least be pretentious or grand, but which would be orderly, efficient in character with the town, and worthy of it,’ concluded Thomas Sharp. The plan came to nothing.
Broadcaster Jimmy Savile is credited as the first modern British DJ, using twin turntables for continuous play after he obtained two domestic record decks welded together. He first used this device to play to the public in 1946 at a nightclub called the Ritz on Whitworth Street, Manchester, which had opened in 1927. Records could bring just as much musical excitement as a live band, a lot more variety and a whole new form of anticipation, rush and noise into a room, a club, a space, an atmosphere.
J. B. Priestley’s Bright Day was published in 1946. He fictionalised Bradford as Bruddersford:
Lost in its smoky valley among the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddersford is generally held to be an ugly city; and so I suppose it is; but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated but often enjoyed; it was grim but not mean, and the moors were always there, and the horizon never without its promise. No Bruddersford man could be exiled from the uplands and blue air; he always had one foot on the heather; he had only to pay his tuppence [two old pennies] on the tram and then climb for half an hour, to hear the larks and curlews, to feel the old rocks warming in the sun, to see the harebells trembling in the shade.
Less than a hundred years earlier, Priestley’s hero and mentor Charles Dickens had fictionalised an amalgamated Preston, Oldham and Manchester as Coketown in Hard Times. Dismissed initially as ‘sullen socialism’, the novel gained new life with F. R. Leavis’s positive critical treatment in The Great Tradition (1948). Leavis considered Hard Times Dickens’s masterpiece and ‘his only serious work of art’. Dickens contributes to many of the subsequent northern stereotypes that follow, as if he invents a myth of the north as much as he invents Christmas – based on definite source material but with inevitable imaginative embellishments.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness . . . it contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
1945
In the 1945 Manchester Redevelopment Plan, the city surveyor R. Nicholas boldly claimed that ‘in many respects the Manchester citizen of 1650 was in a better position to enjoy a healthy life’. He painted a grim picture of the city in which people were condemned to live under a cloud of ‘perpetual smoke . . . which enfeebles the health-giving property of the sun’s rays and lowers our general vitality and ability to resist infection’. Nicholas posed the question: ‘Is Manchester prepared once again to give the country a bold lead by adopting standards of reconstruction that will secure to every citizen the enjoyment of fresh air, or a reasonable ration of daylight, and of some relief from the barren bleakness of bricks and mortar?’
The 1945 Labour government faced the twin problems of modernising the cotton industry and attracting labour back to it. The mills of Lancashire were working flat out to produce exports to save the British economy. The government’s slogan was ‘Britain’s Bread Hangs by Lancashire’s Thread’. In this situation modernisation fell by the wayside. The failure to modernise was not a consequence of entrenched trade union practices but a lack of employer confidence in the future. The return of international competition in the 1950s was the death knell of the Lancashire cotton industry.
In 1965, during the optimistic forward-thinking Wilson era, A. J. P. Taylor completed his boisterous English History 1914–1945, in which he concluded that the Second World War was when Britain had embraced modernity – before the war Britain had relied on its traditions, now it was compelled to develop new industries. ‘Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British Empire declined; the condition of the people improved.’
An Inspector Calls is a play written by J. B. Priestley in 1945 but set in 1912. He penned it in a single week, the very week after the Second World War finished. Priestley chose 1912 because the date represented an era when everything was very different. There are many ways in which it resembles plays set in the north of England in late Victorian times or in the years before the First World War. For example, Hobson’s Choice (written by Harold Brighouse in 1916, set in Salford in 1880) and Priestley’s own When We Are Married (set in his birthplace of Bradford) deal with domineering businessmen and local politicians whose weaknesses and failings of character are exposed. In 1912 rigid class and gender boundaries seemed to ensure that nothing would change, yet by 1945 many of the dividing lines had been breached. Priestley wanted to make the most of these changes. Through An Inspector Calls, written just ahead of the creation of the welfare state, he encouraged people to seize the opportunity the end of the war had given them to build a better, more caring society. Priestley made some trenchant observations about the importance of community, stressing his view that everyone, regardless of class, should look after everyone else.
In the 1945 general election Harold Wilson stood as Labour candidate for Ormskirk and won. The new MP, aged twenty-nine, became parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Works, a major job with so much war damage to repair. Two years later Wilson became secretary for overseas trade and then almost immediately entered the Cabinet as president of the board of trade. He was the youngest minister since William Pitt.
At the start of Blackburn’s July 1945 wakes week, the first since the end of the Second World War, holidaymakers queued at the town’s railway station from early morning to catch one of twenty-three trains. The following week fourteen trains set off from Accrington. It was estimated that 250,000 peo
ple crammed into Blackpool that Saturday.
31
We wrote the end of our address as Reddish, Stockport, Cheshire because Stockport was in Cheshire, and since 1901 Reddish was in Stockport. Reddish, though, was one of those places on the edge of things, in between places, succumbing to the slight but significant border adjustments that ensued over the decades and centuries. Reddish was in Lancashire as much as it was in Stockport, so could seem to be in Lancashire and Cheshire at the same time, or possibly in neither.
In 1974 major changes were made to county borders, and Stockport was transferred into one of the bright new administrative regions, Greater Manchester. A brief call to name this area SELNEC – like something from a Brian Aldiss short story concerning the emergence of a future language or dialect to control perception and expression – standing for South East Lancashire North East Cheshire, came to nothing. The SELNEC PTE – Passenger Transport Executive – had been in operation since 1969, coordinating rail and bus transport in the area. The municipal operators were split into three divisions – Salford and Manchester were Central, Northern included Bolton, Bury, Ramsbottom and Rochdale, and Southern comprised Oldham, Ashton and Stockport. Each division featured SELNEC’s S logo in a different colour – blue for Central, magenta for Northern and green for Southern.
An incongruous post-swinging-sixties orange and white colour scheme was selected for the SELNEC vehicles, and for a few years white or cream – which quickly attracted grime – buses striped with sunglow orange looked right but very wrong charging through the steadfast rain and streets of the area. Right because this was the era of Concorde and glam rock, but wrong because cheerful orange did not bounce well off the standard backdrop to be found within a few miles of Stockport – industrial or rural, the orange did not work. Perhaps it was chosen because the colours used by the eleven fleets absorbed by SELNEC – Manchester, Salford, Stockport, SHMD (Stalybridge, Hyde, Mossley and Dukinfield), Oldham, Ashton, Rochdale, Bury, Bolton, Ramsbottom and Leigh – had covered the more standard red, green, maroon, blue and white. The new organisation wanted to break away, especially from Manchester red and white, and orange was one of the few unused colours. Orange was also appropriated rather awkwardly as a sign of the glittery moving times to represent a modern image by companies such as Sainsbury’s and WHSmith.