The North

by Paul Morley

  The first Manchester air-raid sirens were heard after the surrender of France on 20 June 1940. There were minor German raids on Lancashire, and on 29 July a bomb fell on a hut in Salford at the corner of Trafford Road and Ordsall Lane. Two weeks later, on 8 August, an aircraft dropped Nazi propaganda leaflets on Salford containing a translation of a speech by Hitler.

  In 1940 the band Jack Hylton had formed in 1923 entered the recording studio for the final time. By April seven important members had been called up for war duty and Hylton decided to disband the orchestra permanently. The Second World War accomplished what the Depression had not been able to do. Running a dance orchestra was an expensive and demanding task, but the band had been a magnet for the best musicians in Britain, and the British public knew it. Jack Hylton concluded that once musicians of the calibre he required were no longer available, it was time to give up bandleading. There was never a decline for Jack Hylton’s orchestra; only a peak of perfection and then abrupt silence. Hylton didn’t retire. He had already established himself as promoter and talent spotter as much as performer and conductor, and he went on to become perhaps London’s leading theatrical impresario. His new career began with the promotion of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who were in financial difficulties. Hylton secured them two successful concert tours and ensured their longevity. He would go on to to become an enthusiastic promoter of Morecambe and Wise in their first months, discover Shirley Bassey, develop the early career of Tony Hancock, and become light entertainment adviser for Associated Rediffusion, the London branch of the Independent Television Authority, set up in 1955 in opposition to the BBC.

  During the Second World War J. B. Priestley presented Postscripts, a BBC Radio programme that followed the nine o’clock news on Sunday evenings. Starting on 5 June 1940, Priestley built up such a following that after a few months it was estimated that around sixteen million people, 40 per cent of the adult population in Britain, was listening. He took the raw stuff of the day’s news and turned it into instant history, or legend. Priestley had a deep rich voice, spoke with a marked Yorkshire accent and was a skilful broadcaster aware of how the war was heightening national consciousness and how ‘we are all in the same boat’.

  Only Churchill was more popular with listeners, and Priestley became a potent symbol of resistance to Hitler. He was a wireless superstar who ‘couldn’t walk into a pub without being touched, as if people wanted to see if I was real’. But his talks were abruptly cancelled, apparently as a result of complaints from members of the Conservative Party that they were too left wing. Churchill himself, it was suggested, was jealous of Priestley’s success. Although Priestley is very critical of Postscripts in his autobiography Margin Released (1962), he did acknowledge the role he played: ‘To this day middle-aged and elderly men shake my hand and tell me what a ten-minute talk about ducks on a pond or a pie in a shop window meant to them, as if I had given them the Eroica or King Lear.’

  In one programme Priestley spoke of the horror of seeing his home city, Bradford, damaged. It was far more of a shock to see a few burned-out buildings there than it had been to see all the damage in London. ‘I think the sight made a far deeper impression upon me than all the bombing I had seen for weeks in London, because it somehow brought together two entirely different worlds: the safe and shining world of my childhood, and this insecure and lunatic world of today, so it caught and held my imagination.’

  1939

  John Robert Parker Ravenscroft was born on 30 August 1939 at the Cottage Hospital in Heswall, which is to be found on the west side of the Wirral facing Wales. His father Robert Ravenscroft was a Liverpool cotton broker with the family firm of Strauss & Co., although he was away serving as a captain in the Royal Artillery for the duration of the war, which started the day following John’s birth.

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  I never felt at all loyal to the idea of Greater Manchester, which did not bring with it the same sense of romance, history, geography and presence as the counties it rudely broke up and into. Just the plain name alone seemed to indicate it was the invention of insipid bureaucrats intent on replacing messy, turbulent history – the kind that emerges from energetic planning for the future – with control and order – the kind that rebrands with ambition but is happy to maintain things as they are. Somehow it seemed this change was intended to block the sort of transformation that emerges from within communities. To be suspicious of it, or unmoved, did not mean a reluctance to adopt change, but merely to note that this particular change did not seem to be about progress or improvement, merely moderate correction and legal containment.

  But times change, and nothing lasts for ever. Lancashire as it was had run out of steam – it wasn’t what it was – and Greater Manchester reflected in a practical even prosaic mid-twentieth-century way how the power of Lancashire had ended up residing in what had become during the nineteenth century its spirited and ostentatious capital (Manchester) and the city of disobedience most naturally reluctant to settle down (Liverpool). Preston, Blackburn, Rochdale, Burnley, Bury, Bolton remained solidly Lancashire, impervious, unlike the more easily seduced and gullible Liverpool and Manchester, to fey, fishy new ways. Blackpool had turned itself into its own rusting raving madcap version of a north-western seaside resort lit up with jest and hoopla called Blackpool. Lancaster seemed to have settled contentedly into an even-tempered historic symbol. But although Manchester had grown too big, even in its crushing post-cotton decline, to remain inside Lancashire, Greater Manchester did not and would not have a cricket team in the County Championship, and even if Lowry painted many of his greatest northern works in towns and localities that were now part of Greater Manchester, these paintings trapped and were trapped inside the sentimentally abstracted memory and reality of Lancashire.

  Lancashire and Cheshire were the first social and symbolic constructs I responded to, although I had never committed to either being or belonging to either. I was pulled between the two: Lancashire for the cricket, a game and a team within a couple of short train journeys from where I lived – into Stockport, and then out towards Stretford, via Manchester city centre, or a bus via Manchester Piccadilly – Cheshire because, after all, it contained Alderley Edge, which I found out at a very young age was where King Arthur and his Round Table, overseen by the great local wizard Merlin, waited in mystical limbo before they were called back to life, to save us miraculously from some despicable enemy. Cheshire channelled something of the Welsh magic into the Lancastrian cities of the east and west, influencing their overall personality. It was stranger, somehow more surreal, surreal because of not only Arthur and Merlin and seeming wilder, less tamed than Lancashire, but of course there was Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and there was Crewe Junction, known as the gateway to the north, which put Cheshire at the centre of a nation connected by railway.

  And then, connected by radio waves and even stranger things, there was Jodrell Bank, which took a bit of believing – gigantic, mechanically alien and spectacularly isolated, with a pulse all of its very own, in the middle of the prim gladed Cheshire lowlands, twenty miles south of Manchester. Jodrell Bank placed Cheshire if not at the heart of the universe, then plum at the very edge of outer space, communicating with satellites 400,000 miles in the sky. In 1959 the first pictures transmitted from the dark side of the moon by Lunik 3 were received there.

  Jodrell Bank was the brainchild of cricket-loving idealistic experimental physicist and pioneering astronomer Dr Bernard Lovell, who before the Second World War had studied cosmic rays in the physics department of the University of Manchester. While leading a team developing radar technology during the war – contributing to an eruption of belief in the positive world-changing power of organised science as much as in its dark side – he noticed some sporadic and unexpected echoes. Intrigued as to whether these were caused by cosmic ray particles passing through the atmosphere, once the war was over he set up some surplus radar equipment – including some possibly originating from Germany – in the qua
drangle outside his laboratory in Manchester. Electrical interference from the trams shuffling along Oxford Road nearby made him look for somewhere quiet outside Manchester.

  In 1939 the university’s Botany Department had bought three fields totalling eleven acres of land a mile or so to the north-east of Holmes Chapel at the edge of the Cheshire Plain alongside a riverbank named after the Jaudrell family, descendants of William Jauderell, a fourteenth-century archer who fought with the Black Prince. Lovell had found his site, and dated his initiation into radio astronomy to a foggy day in December 1945, when a trailer loaded with old army gear was driven into these unpromising fields.

  In 1951, now thirty-eight, Lovell was appointed professor of radio astronomy at Manchester University, and a year later set about supervising the building of a fully steerable telescope using such recycled parts as gun turrets from First World War warships, after experiments with scaffolding poles and wire mesh. In austere post-war Britain even a screwdriver was considered a luxury. Lovell had an evangelical, moralistic determination to see his project completed, so powered through problems, including the weather, budget constraints and sundry sceptics. He convinced the local authorities that the telescope would not be a building, because it moved, and so avoided the planning regulations that normally would not have allowed the erection of such a colossal, intrusive structure.

  With the help of volunteers, including a bridge-building engineer from Sheffield, and mostly making it up as he went along, he planned to set what became the Mark 1 telescope on a circular track – a standard-gauge railway track – so that the whole sky could be covered. Even then the design of a facility which would play such a part in the opening-up of the future must have seemed old-fashioned and wonky, but simultaneously looked so out of this world surrounded by winding narrow Cheshire roads, neat and tidy cottages, stiles and watermeadows.

  During a five-year period of intense anxiety as Lovell struggled for finance to finish what seemed to prosaic politicians and committee minds an absurd waste of time and money – it was dismissed as ‘Lovell’s folly’ and a little more affectionately by bemused locals as ‘Lovell’s contraption’ – its budget spiralled over four times the original estimate, but in 1957, when Russia launched the Sputnik satellite, the only apparatus on earth capable of tracking it was Jodrell Bank. Panic about what on, or off, earth the Russians were up to led to a quick change of mind about Lovell’s belligerent, audacious dream. What had been deemed cranky and self-indulgently expensive was suddenly acclaimed as visionary, and possibly as likely to protect the nation as his wartime research into radar. Wiring and electrical work scheduled to take two months were completed in two days, and Jodrell Bank was up and running, and scanning – 3,200 tons, fully steerable and rising 250 feet high above the surrounding trees, as mysteriously still-seeming as the space between stars it stared at, scouring the cosmos, its smooth, serene dish visible for miles around. Sputnik, Lovell said, by a strange irony, saved both him and Jodrell Bank from extinction. If his telescope could detect ‘a wonderful echo of the carrier rocket moving over the Lake District’, then it could detect Russian missiles raining in on the West. Later, Lovell would describe his main radiotelescope as ‘the biggest bargain in the history of science’.

  Since the late 1940s he had lived nearby with his wife Joyce in the tiny idyllic village of Swettenham, discreetly folded into the Dane Valley alongside the A535, also known in its early stages as the Macclesfield Road, running from Holmes Chapel to Alderley Edge. In 1961, already made an OBE after the war for his radar work, Lovell was knighted for his contribution to physics and astronomy. When the Americans landed on the moon, Lovell’s ingenious Mark 1 telescope, improvised in an obscure muddy field out of scraps, great imagination and sheer will, seemed to my twelve-year-old mind to have played a part, so that the route to walking on the moon had begun in the middle of a scented tangle of hedgerow-fringed country lanes in Cheshire. For Lovell, who believed space travel would have a cataclysmic effect on society, the next stage after the moon landing was a man on Mars by the 1980s and a Jodrell Bank observatory in space.

  In 1966, at the height of my temporary interest in collecting stamps, Jodrell Bank featured on a series of issues celebrating recent British technological innovations – the fourpenny Jodrell stamp was the lowest value in the range, which also featured British motor cars including the E-Type Jaguar and the Mini (sixpence), the hovercraft (one shilling and threepence) and the Windscale nuclear reactor, west of the Lake District by the Irish Sea (one and six). The dramatic Jodrell dish was printed in unimaginative black, looking like a plastic toy, on an unimpressive amber background and was only a little bigger than the Queen’s head. (The colour was officially described as ‘lemon’.) The stamp did not do much in representing the mechanical science-fiction immensity of the real thing and its status as one of the world’s great scientific instruments. The thing itself seemed to have arrived from Jupiter, if via the A535, first left after Daisy Bank Farm; the stamp had come through the post without bringing much with it.

  Cheshire and space exploration, Lancashire and cricket – epic space and time turned into a game that represented the rise and fall of a great earth-bound earth-spanning empire – were early influences on the formation of my imagination. Lancashire was my county, perhaps, because Reddish itself was until the early part of the twentieth century a part of Lancashire, even though it had then been moved, given as a gift to Stockport and become part of Cheshire, even if it hadn’t.

  Stockport had become a county borough in 1892, and quickly needed to expand beyond its existing borders. In 1901 the whole of Reddish was absorbed by the borough, and was described as its ‘greatest prize’ even though Stockport had also expanded into parts of Cheadle and Gatley, Hazel Grove and Bramhall, and Brinnington. Stockport repaid the gift of Reddish, its tax income and building land, by supplying it with a library, public baths including a swimming pool, and a fire station, combined in a new red-brick building designed with reserved, dignified Edwardian grandness by Albert E. Dixon and Charles H. Potter, and opened in stages during 1908 – the same year as Stockport Town Hall, which was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales. At the time most houses only had a tin bath, so it was a treat to pay a small fee for a hot soapy wash.

  Reddish, healthily stocked with its library, swimming baths and fire station, and new parkland created as part of its move into Stockport, was right on the edge of the two counties, belonging to both, and neither, and then entering Greater Manchester representing how Manchester itself was, apart from its own independent city-sized identity, a place that contained, or was contained by, elements of both Cheshire and Lancashire. Reddish moved about even as it stayed exactly where it was. Reddish changed shape, but could only change shape so much.

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  1939

  Arthur Lloyd James, a member of the committee set up to determine pronunciation at the BBC, argued in 1939, ‘You must not blame the BBC for killing dialect. The native comedians have done more harm to the cause of the honest English dialect than anybody else . . . the Lancashire comedian has killed the Lancashire dialect, and made Lancashire for ever afterwards impossible for the production of Shakespeare . . . It’s not the BBC.’

  1938

  Following three years of construction, Ringway Airport opened officially in June, after various local short-lived aerodromes had come and gone and twelve years after prescient city fathers decided without a permanent airport the city would suffer commercially. In 1929 Manchester had become the first municipality in the country with its own licensed aerodrome. Following a few false starts – a boggy airstrip in Barton (near Eccles) and in fields around Wythenshawe – suitable land for its location was found in the Cheshire parish of Ringway (circular hedged enclosure).

  Ticket for a David Bowie concert at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1972

  The Apollo Cinema in Ardwick opened in 1938, with a seating capacity of nearly 3,000. It was built in response to the huge demand for films, and
was constructed in a streamlined modern style reminiscent of a giant wireless set, with a luxurious interior.

  In 1938 Christopher Isherwood ascribed W. H. Auden’s low spirits on their China-bound ship to his being uprooted from ‘his beloved chilly North’, and wrote of him, ‘His romantic travel-wish was always towards the north. He could never understand how anyone could long for the sun, the blue sky, the palm-trees of the south. His favourite weather was autumnal, high wind and driving rain.’

  1937

  ‘In advocating wider universal education I received much bitter opposition. Elderly spinners claimed that “learning” only made the youngsters discontented, and taught them to cry for the moon. “What was good enough for me ought to be good enough for my children” was the basis of their belief. The mill owners, too, threw their weight solidly against the unsettling influence of education. They wanted steady workers; it did not suit their ends that the workers should know too much.’ J. R. Clynes, Memoirs.