by Paul Morley
London-based producer and impresario Basil Dean, who had been working with Gracie Fields, hired the Salford-born author of Love on the Dole, Walter Greenwood, to script Formby’s first Ealing film, No Limit (also 1935). This and Keep Your Seats, Please (1936) were both directed by Monty Banks, who later married Gracie Fields. After this a special Formby unit was set up at Ealing, headed by writer and director Anthony Kimmins, to produce his films. These usually conformed to a set pattern: at their centre is Formby, a shy, innocent, gauche, accident-prone Lancashire lad; frequently he is in a skilled trade (photographer, typesetter, gramophone engineer) and lives in the south, either in the suburbs or the countryside, thus nationalising his appeal; he has a bashful courtship with a brisk sensible heroine with an upper-class accent; he is put through a succession of comic humiliations but eventually wins the girl and achieves success in his job or in sport or, later, in war. If Formby could win through against adversity, then anyone could. His eternal optimism was summed up by his catchphrase ‘Turned out nice again, hasn’t it.’ It was partly by becoming a more universal symbol that Formby achieved his success. He was northern and working class but, more importantly, he was the little man who wins through against all the odds, as Chaplin had on the silent screen, and as Norman Wisdom was to do in the 1950s. He was, as Colin MacInnes observed, Everyman: ‘the urban “little man” defeated – but refusing to admit it’.
1934
Born 9 May 1934 in Armley, Leeds, author, playwright and actor Alan Bennett grew up surrounded by gossipy Yorkshire women, who made an indelible impression on him, as did regular holidays to coastal resorts like Morecambe. His first encounter with comedy was via the radio, but he later said that he disliked popular comedians like Tommy Handley and Tommy Trinder for being ‘relentlessly cheerful’; more down-to-earth figures like ITMA’s appropriately named charlady Mona Lott were closer to an already melancholic outlook.
‘I was born and brought up in Leeds, where my father was a butcher, and as a boy I sometimes used to go out with the orders, delivering the meat. One of our customers was a nice woman called Mrs Fletcher, and I used to go to her house and she had a daughter called Valerie. Valerie went to London and became a secretary and she got a job with a publishing firm and did well in the firm, and became secretary to the chairman, whom she eventually married. Now the publishing firm was Faber and Faber, and the chairman was T. S. Eliot. So there was a time early in life when I thought my only connection with literature would be that I once delivered meat to T. S. Eliot’s mother-in-law.’
Gracie Fields, rich, successful and famous, both because of her northern otherness and how she had transformed herself beyond that otherness, considering herself a hard worker just like she had been when employed in the Rochdale mills, told Film Pictorial, ‘I ought to feel right at home, by rights, because here I am back in the mill again – right where I started. I have to get up at six o’clock, only instead of knocking off at five as I did in Rochdale; I work till eight; and instead of cotton fluff, it’s incandescent carbons and dust and grease paint.’ And, instead of a shilling a week, it was two pounds a minute, ‘or so they tell me’.
Sing as We Go is Gracie Fields’ fifth feature film – following Sally in Our Alley (1931), Looking on the Bright Side (1932), This Week of Grace (1933), and Love, Life and Laughter (1933). The greater part of the film’s budget went on her fee. What’s a Lancashire lass to do when the mill closes down? Go to Blackpool to look for work and give us the best portrait of seaside holidays in the thirties: ‘If we can’t spin, we can still sing.’ Seen as her best screen work, and best loved, it was set in Lancashire and directed by Basil Dean from a story by J. B. Priestley (who Robert Graves once described as ‘the Gracie Fields of literature’). Priestley himself once wrote, ‘Listen to Gracie for a quarter of an hour and you will learn more about Lancashire women and Lancashire than you would from half a dozen books on the subjects. All the qualities are there, shrewdness, homely simplicity, fierce independence, an impish delight in mocking whatever is thought to be affected and pretentious.’
Scriptwriter Priestley knew his audience just as surely as Gracie Fields. This is a rose-tinted view of the Depression-hit north based on his childhood memories of early-twentieth-century music hall, but that is exactly what was wanted and suited how Priestley sentimentally but sincerely reflected the struggling 1930s working class. Grace is a working-class hero. She may be poor, but she’s resourceful, optimistic, quick-witted and gloriously stroppy. There’s no forelock tugging here. Fields stood for all that Priestley liked in northern music-hall culture. Presented in terms that still echoed Dickens, she enabled him to refine the myth of Englishness but also appealed to her audience by appearing to be like them. ‘The secret of Gracie Fields’ vast popularity is that not only does she know . . . how to entertain people, but she knows, too, how to represent the people. In a country [in] which privilege is still the rule and snobbery is the most characteristic weakness, the people do not get much of a chance to express themselves. But in Gracie Fields for one they are expressing themselves and that is why she is at one and the same time an admired artist, a symbolic figure and a beloved woman.’ Priestley, a forward-looking nostalgic, used Gracie to personify the fight against a new impersonal world.
By the 1930s, the Rochdale Canal in Miles Platting, set amongst damp, decaying houses as bleak inside as out, was a toxic soup of polluting chemicals leaking from the surrounding factories and sundry debris, consisting of discarded bicycle frames, old rubber tyres and the rotting carcases of dogs.
1933
Walter Greenwood’s 1933 novel Love on the Dole about the crisis of unemployment following the General Strike of 1926 (although the main action takes place in 1931) concentrates on a working-class community trying to come to terms with poverty while retaining its dignity. It was at once recognised as a classic. Greenwood said he ‘tried to show what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth’. Dire poverty haunted Salford, the novel’s setting, where Greenwood also grew up. The first chapter ends: ‘The identical houses of yesterday remain, still valuable in the estate market even though the cost of their building has been paid for over and over again by successive tenants . . . Places where men and women are born, live, love and die and pay preposterous rents for the privilege of calling the grimy houses “home”.’
A lunch hosted by Gracie Fields’ record company EMI in London in 1933 to mark the sale of her four millionth record was transformed into a ‘Lancashire do’. Waitresses wearing clogs and shawls served fish and chips, hotpot, beer and tea to an audience that included industry executives, her parents, the mayor of Rochdale and her first clog maker.
J. B. Priestley was invited by publisher Victor Gollancz to undertake a journey around the country to experience at first hand the life of people in the industrial areas and the plight of the unemployed; but the journey he made in 1933 included much more than that, opening out into an examination of England and the English, praising as well as blaming. English Journey was an exceptional success for a work of non-fiction. Though he was undoubtedly nostalgic for the Bradford of his Edwardian youth, he exploited his memories of this utopia to argue for a classless society and ‘a cleaner, tidier, healthier, saner world than that of nineteenth-century industrialism’. The book captures a country in economic, political and social turmoil, mangled by the aftershocks of the Great Depression. Heavy industry was suffering and unemployment had rocketed, especially in the industrial north. In response, the National Government, formed in 1931, instituted draconian spending cuts and wage reductions. There was political turbulence and polarisation, with the left protesting against unemployment and poverty, and Mosley’s British Union of Fascists paralleling the rise of fascism across Europe.
The 1931 Statute of Westminster, which established the legislative independence of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Irish Free State
and Newfoundland, brought a loosening of the imperialist grip, and the horizons of the British empire began to recede. In a climate of cultural anxiety England’s gaze turned inward. Priestley was no reactionary, however: his nostalgia was not of a mythical pre-industrial Merrie England, but the vigorous England of the Industrial Revolution, and its ‘energy, organisation, drive of purpose’. Under the weather, nursing what could have been a hangover from Manchester, he visited Blackpool out of season. The journey did little to cheer him up. ‘Between Manchester and Bolton the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there.’
Lancastrian working folk had accepted that challenge. ‘They are on active service, and like the frontline troops, they make a lot of little jokes and sing comic songs.’ He wrote of the Fylde’s ‘flat and characterless countryside’. ‘All the roads suddenly become very straight and wide and display vulgar advertisements because they, like you, are going to Blackpool.
‘Even if you did not intend to go to Blackpool, once you had got beyond Preston you would have to go there. These roads would suck you into Blackpool. That is what they are there for. There is no escape.’ The bracing sea air cured his headache and blasted the measly city air from his lungs, giving him his first decent night’s sleep, eleven hours, for weeks. ‘Blackpool the resort was dead,’ he wrote. ‘Even the residential town, of a considerable size, was moribund. Only the weather was awake, and that was tremendously alive. The sea roared in the deep dusk and sent sheets of spray over the glistening wet railings and seats. And this was, for the time being, all the Blackpool I wanted. If you do not like industrial democracy, you will not like Blackpool. I know people who would have to go into a nursing home after three hours of it. (In the season, of course.) I am not one of those people.’
39
In the north-west Reddish pushed up against closely related crowded Levenshulme and scuffed first cousin Longsight, which were themselves piled against the more distantly related and packed-in Burnage, Rusholme and Fallowfield, so lay between these increasingly urban and degenerate places and the open-air rewards and submerged dangers of the Vale. If you went further west, you reached blighted Moss Side, Old Trafford and Whalley Range. (In Mary Barton, published in 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell describes Moss Side, two miles outside the city centre, as a pleasant rural space with green fields and small farms where workers from Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock went as an escape from their hard-working lives.) Further north, you went through Ardwick and Hulme, and beyond the Mancunian Way made it into the compressed, engaged and mercenary Manchester city centre. All this within five miles.
Each dowdy teeming district blended into the next, brick-cobble alleyways, grey back-to-back houses, deserted wasteland and pubs leading to more of the same, held in decaying check under clouds that simmered with age-old resentment, but each had its own special atmosphere, and even though Longsight looked like Rusholme, which quickly became Hulme, and was right on top of it, they were not the same. There were borders, limits to break through, everywhere you looked and travelled, each zone defined and bisected by roads and railways, and those living in Levenshulme felt apart from those in Gorton, if only because it was in a different place, with a different name. Levenshulme was to some extent made up of the bits of older communities left over from Rusholme, Ardwick and Gorton, but as soon as it became a known neighbourhood with known boundaries, it became its own defined territory.
I did not know it at the time, considering only my relationship to a place on earth because of sporting teams that were, it seemed, close by, but I was living in the heart of something unflagging and contrary that you could call the north. It never occurred to me this was something I might make a fuss of, because of how I talked, because of where I was, a couple of hundred yards from the centre of Reddish, Houldsworth Square, under those immense, churlish skies, constantly sending out warnings about what was around the corner.
The walks I took around Reddish would often follow the same route. One walk in particular would take me to where I went to school, and then, in reverse, it would bring me home. It was a relatively straight walk, taking about twenty minutes, along either what was the main road through where I lived, the busy Gorton Road, essentially the high street that channelled right through the centre of Reddish from beginning to end, or the quieter Harcourt Street, where chimney sweep Frank Aspinall lived, at number 77, in one of its square placid semi-detached houses, stuck to each other, with their ageing pleated curtains – a lingering pretension to class – barely hiding pottery ornaments, polished cupboards and wall mirrors, some with truncated porches that fancied themselves grand, alongside the run-down brickworks and rutted grassless sometimes swampy patches of wasteland which tempted a young boy in.
This wasteland led to small dirty ponds graced with wriggling newts, stumpy sticklebacks and queer frogspawn, and a view which offered glimpses of other counties across the viaduct, the weary but lively river and empty railway lines. The counties were a long way off, especially if you were walking and even if you got a train, one or two of which still blasted steam out of their dangerous ancient metal bodies, but they were there, and one day I would get to know their names, and work out how they all fitted together, and what that actually meant. That’s why I walked to and from school, sometimes skipping and hopping on one foot, all part of an everyday performance. To find things out. To find out where I was, and what would happen to me if I followed one of the roads that went that way, or that way. There were a lot of roads, more than you could ever take in your stride, and if you thought about it, in the way you don’t when you are eight or nine or ten, places like Reddish exist so that there is somewhere for the roads to lead to and to leave behind.
If I walked along the Gorton Road, I was perhaps beginning to understand that a road can eventually take you away from where you are apparently for ever. You can head out on that sort of road and never come back. Along the Harcourt Road, the back way to school, you were walking a street that would take you nowhere, or abruptly to another street, an opening to a field, or back where you came. For now I would walk to school along the Gorton Road and back home along Harcourt Street. Or I would do it the other way round. For now the Gorton Road trapped me, because to my young self, as big as the road was, containing cars that brought vague speeding news of an outside world, it only existed inside Reddish, which was the place where I clearly belonged. As far as I knew, as a young boy, glued to humble Reddish as though it was sticky with liquid the consistency of frogspawn, having no choice, I belonged there for ever, and the Gorton Road would never lead me away.
The Gorton Road went in one direction west towards the centre of Stockport, eventually changing its name, becoming the Reddish Road past Houldsworth Square and then Sandy Lane, and you abruptly dropped down Lancashire Hill into the town centre. If you kept going the other side of Stockport, along many roads that kept changing their names, through districts and communities bigger and smaller than Reddish – Cheadle, Altrincham, Lymm, Leigh, Widnes – you could make your way through salty, affluent and hushed, sometimes scruffy and less showy Cheshire, and on to a coast cracked open around spicy loud-mouthed Liverpool, and the Irish Sea, an entry to the whole wide world.
In the other direction the Gorton Road bored its relentless dingy way towards places too small to be towns and too big to be villages, which had names as banal as Reddish but, it turned out, after I had walked far enough and found out various things, were in fact soaked with the past, with history, with work and sometimes with death, or something not quite so bleak, but still bloody. If you kept going in this direction, turning to the east, beyond Gorton and Denton, away from Stockport, away from Manchester, past Ashton under Lyne, Stalybridge or Glossop, you would head towards south-west Yorkshire, over the hills and moors which were always in view and yet inching away, keeping themselves to themselves. When I was ten Yorkshire seemed completely out of reach, out of sight, over there, miles away, hours away, even days, another country, except
when it came to cricket, when it was the enemy or at least a tough imposing rival.
40
1931
Les Dawson was born in 1931 in Thornton Street, Collyhurst, a working-class suburb of Manchester, where his bricklayer father struggled to find work during the Depression. The podgy schoolboy, nicknamed Dossy, dreamed of becoming a famous writer, spurred on by an enthusiastic English teacher. After leaving school at fourteen he got his first job in the parcels department of the Manchester Co-op, and then as an apprentice electrician. Les Dawson spent his schooldays keeping bullies suspicious of his sensibility at bay with his humour.
I was born in Manchester in the Thirties. It was a depressed decade and most of the people who lived in our area were decayed. Our terraced house was so narrow, the mice walked about on their back legs and the kitchen ceiling was so low the oven had a foot-level grill. The place I was born in was called Collyhurst; it lay two miles from the city centre and it was a district of narrow streets and tenements that gazed eyeless on to cobbled roads escorting the warehouses and shops past shadowed alleyways where teeming hordes of ill-dressed children ran amok. But it was a place that held warmth and comradeship in adversity, and there was compassion and love among the inhabitants.
Gandhi came to England in September 1931 as Congress Party representative at the London Round Table conference on Indian constitutional reform. He spent a week of his visit in the cotton districts of Lancashire and west Yorkshire explaining the meaning of his anti-colonialist strategy khadder to those who were likely to be most affected by it. Khadder was his campaign to resist the importation of non-Indian goods, particularly Lancashire cotton; Gandhi argued that cotton should be produced in the impoverished Indian villages.