by Paul Morley
After four years starting in 1963 working at Team Four with his friend the more naturally glamorous Richard Rogers – he toured America with him to find as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as possible – Norman Foster formed his own firm in 1967, today called Foster and Partners. Rejecting the stock concrete shell favoured by most other architects, which had introduced negative brutalist iconography to rushed British post-war modernisation, perversely intensifying rather than remedying the damage of the Second World War, Foster used less aggressive and alienating materials, especially steel and glass, and opted wherever possible for natural light. He set out to reinvent architecture, seeing buildings as permanent performances embedded in articulated environments. He believed that buildings could open up the future, in the process symbolising new ideas, new relationships and the availability of important new information. When he was created a life peer in 1999, he chose the title Baron Foster of Thames Bank, of Reddish in the county of Greater Manchester.
Looking at some of his buildings, like the headquarters of the Swiss Re in London (the Gherkin) and Wembley Stadium in north London – the way they flow above the land and buildings around them, dominant and strangely lucid, filling space and somehow internalising space, bringing intimacy to majesty, inhuman but down to earth, gargantuan but precise – I wonder if he spent time staring at the monumental mills in Reddish near his house and the way they communicated something spectacularly special and announced their impressive, incongruous presence in the middle of the passively routine and forgettable. They were very particular ideas turned into mass, into material with personality.
An apprentice architect wanting to design buildings with a showman’s brashness must have learned much from being surprised when the boldly bulky Reddish mills appeared at the end of an ordinary street, glimpsed between standard terraced-house chimneys from a train passing through the chimneyed, drainpiped and slated plainness reliably unfolding between Stockport and Levenshulme, swelling with uncurbed pomp and pride in the otherwise mediocre middle distance. The mills were spectres from the past destined to expire through sheer bulk alone, but they were once a dazzling sign that the future was on its way, and in my childhood they still lifted themselves above their low thrifty surroundings with an attitude that was as much futuristic as it was dead and gone.
Born twenty-eight years before Foster, on 24 July 1907 in Reddish, Charles Hugh Owen Ferry would write as Hugh Charles the words for two of the Second World War’s most distinctive patriotic songs, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ – songs that travelled beyond those events with memories and feelings stuck fast to them, with the latter often advocated as a new national anthem and ‘We’ll Meet Again’ featuring on the 1962 album Sinatra Sings Great Songs of Great Britain.
Written before the war but shrewdly prepared for the struggle ahead, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ was written to be sung by a soloist in front of a rousing military band, triumphantly leading thousands festooned in flags, blandly but belligerently challenging those who heard it to agree or disagree with how much England means and how much it is worth fighting for. The way the song lightly combined the pastoral – the small cottage on a country lane beside an inspiring field of green – and the urban – the busy street, the turning wheel, a million marching feet – suggests that childhood memories of Reddish lying between crammed, purposeful, mighty Manchester on one side and the exhilarating but ordered and gentle open spaces on the other, had stayed in Charles’s mind as he imagined an idealised England that combined Blake’s romantic pre-industrial green and pleasant land – a vital eternal detail in the wartime construction of a proud unique image of the nation – and the city centres being pounded by German bombs. Reddish, on the border between the big, battling and bustling industrial city and the very English dreamlike hedgerows, stiles, streams and winding lanes, was his template for an England that would always be, half of it wide awake, on the edge of its nerves, fighting for survival, half of it sleepily caught up in its own endless cosy patterns, as close to sedate deadlocked Houldsworth Square as it was to the factories, the town halls, the competing high streets and the relentless snorting trains thundering through its heart.
Houldsworth’s church used brick from Openshaw – two miles east of Manchester city centre between Gorton and Ashton Old Road – and stone from Wrexham, north Wales. The granite columns in the nave were brought to Reddish by narrowboat and taken from the canal wharf by the mill on carts drawn by elephants borrowed from Belle Vue Zoo. Designs for the decoration of the private chapel of Houldsworth’s home in Kilmarnock, Scotland were eventually used inside the neo-Gothic church in Reddish. They were created by Frederic Shields, Hartlepool-born Pre-Raphaelite artist and contemporary and colleague of Ford Madox Brown, whose twelve spirited panels illustrating the history of Manchester decorate Alfred Waterhouse’s Great Hall in the centre of Manchester Town Hall. At Reddish Shields’ stern, impassioned, cosmically religious designs became the stained-glass windows.
Here, a quarter of a mile from my local Essoldo, was more rare vivid colour pressed into everyday Reddish, as if the flushed ghost of William Blake had poured precious liquid drops of his dangerous fiery spirit into this quietly expanding meek little village. Not that I knew at the time. One anxious glance at the church, all that ecstatic pious imagery compressed inside an unashamedly Gothic building representing an exotically charged faith, was enough to propel me a considerable distance from its extravagant doors. In pared-down 1960s Reddish the Victorians’ faith in a higher power and entrepreneurial self-belief – made visible in the buildings around Houldsworth Square, where you caught the coach to see Manchester City or the number 9 single-decker leaving twice an hour to head via twenty-two stops towards Parrs Wood and West Didsbury – would have seemed especially alien.
There would have been no sense in my mind of how the imaginative enterprise involved in the creation of Reddish was the reason it existed. And whatever that imagination and commitment to a new community, most of it had by then drained away. The buildings were still there, adrift in the wrong place and the wrong time. Other mills had landed after Houldsworth’s, including the blandly lofty Broadstone Mill, built by Stott and Sons in 1907. The Houldsworth Mills were intended to form the unintimidating hub of a well-designed, practical and nurturing model estate, but the later ones lacked this community element. For a while Broadstone Mill was the biggest in the country, reflecting the idea that in business size obviously means success. It survived as a working mill for fifty years, but was already defunct by the time I lived in Reddish, as stonily ancient and remotely mysterious as something out of the Bible. It was just standing there, minding its own business.
Cotton production at Reddish Mill continued until the 1950s. It was then sold to a mail-order catalogue company and used primarily as a warehouse. The rampant roar of the Industrial Revolution subsided to a mere croak, leaving behind these mammoth brick carcasses, and all that was left of the great benefactor Houldsworth and his dream of a better way of life in the Reddish he made was his name – a name it never occurred to me at the time was the name of someone who had once lived, who must once have been vigorous, ambitious and stubbornly determined. There were a few signs that Houldsworth was once a real man, the powerful man who made Reddish, but there was no statue.
Houldsworth stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1880, but won three years later and was until 1906 the Conservative MP for the brand-new middle-class commercial constituency of Manchester North West. In 1892 he was the government’s delegate to the European Monetary Conference held in Brussels and the same year opened the Conservative Club in Manchester Road, Denton, ‘a structure of Accrington pressed bricks with ornamental cornices, relieved with Yorkshire stone dressings. It contains a large assembly hall, reading, billiard and other rooms, and is fitted with every modern improvement; the architect was Mr T. D. Lindley, of Ashton under Lyne; the total cost was about £2,300.’
As an MP he was a supporter
of the Manchester Ship Canal, free trade (until 1903, when he came out in favour of tariff reform), the gold and silver money standard and the amalgamation of the cotton industry. He was also actively involved in public institutions in Manchester, including Owen’s College and many working men’s clubs, and was given the freedom of the city in 1905, a further sign he had hauled his way, with the help of Reddish, into history. In the end, though, for all his diligent efforts to leave his mark, he managed to reach only a dim, neglected corridor of history some way off from any of the blazingly illuminated main rooms. Further down the corridor, perhaps in the main room, was much more of a name, and perhaps Houldsworth’s ultimate role in history was to make way for this indelible figure and his close association with the unimaginable tensions, traumas and emergencies of the twentieth century.
His successor in Parliament after winning six elections was Winston Churchill, who represented Manchester North West until 1908 as a member of the Liberal Party. Houldsworth, then a powerful figure in Lancashire politics, had apparently taken Churchill under his wing when he was a twenty-five-year-old Conservative candidate at Oldham in 1899. Churchill was then mainly known as the slick talkative son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a journalist beginning a career as a war reporter for the Morning Post. The Oldham Conservative Party had been keen to present a candidate with his name and connections. Churchill wrote to his mother while in Oldham, describing the area as lacking a hotel, at least to his standards, and noting ‘there is practically no local society, only multitudes of workers’. When Churchill made a campaigning visit to Hollinwood on the western edge of the Oldham constituency, memories of his father provoked a lively someone to heckle, ‘Eh, lad, thou art a chip off t’ owd block.’
At the time Oldham had a population of 150,000, mostly due to its closeness to Manchester, six miles and a few minutes away by train. It was said that Oldham was to Manchester what coal was to a steam train: fuel. It was noted at the time that: ‘No one stops there. Externally, life is here of the plainest drab; everything is for use, nothing for ornament. The town appears to have grown simply by the accretion of mills and works with the necessary streets for the accommodation of the workmen.’
Churchill had failed by 1,500 votes in his attempt to win Oldham in 1899. During the election J. R. Clynes, the secretary of Oldham Trades Council, had led a delegation to challenge him on various labour issues. Clynes would write later, ‘I found him a man of extraordinarily independent mind, and great courage. He absolutely refused to yield to our persuasions, and said bluntly that he would rather lose votes than abandon his convictions.’ A year later, after an escapade in South Africa while covering the Boer War for the Morning Post, Churchill was back. While on the run from the Boers he had been helped by an Oldham man, Dan Dewsnap, who once freedom was achieved, shook Churchill’s hand ‘in a grip of crushing vigour’ and announced, ‘They’ll all vote for you next time.’ Returning as a hero, Churchill wrote about his visit to Oldham in July 1900, when he was welcomed by brass bands and friendly crowds: ‘Oldham almost without distinction of party accorded me a triumph. I entered the town in state in a procession of ten landaus, and drove through streets crowded with enthusiastic operatives and mill girls. I described my escape to a tremendous meeting in the Theatre Royal.’ He told the Oldham voters that the town was exactly the sort of place he wanted to represent – ‘a throbbing, pulsing, living place full of work and working men’.
He did win, making his inaugural acceptance speech from the Old Town Hall, opened in 1841, but mostly stayed in London. Churchill clearly never took to his constituency. ‘There is neither warmth nor comfort in the place. Through the recent frost one of my clerks is dead (pneumonia) and the other has acute bronchitis, and the two illnesses can only be attributed to the absence of any fire or warmth in the office, and to general damp, dark, unsanitary condition.’ He always regarded himself like his father as a ‘Tory Democrat’ and in secret a Liberal ‘in all but name’, defecting during his time as Oldham MP to the Liberals. He stayed on until the next election in 1906, when as Liberal candidate in Houldsworth’s old Manchester North West seat he won easily and became a junior minister. Four years later he was home secretary and between 1940 and 1945 prime minister. He was PM again in 1952 when on 3 October Britain detonated its first atomic device, code-named Hurricane.
Oldham, his first constituency, made him a freeman in 1941, some time before it was clear who would triumph in the Second World War. In later life Churchill sentimentally looked back on the ‘warm hearts and bright eyes’ of the Oldham people, and a little hazily remarked that ‘no one can come in contact with the working folk of Lancashire without wishing them well’.
Churchill, a great man of international history, has been remembered in all sorts of traditional ways, from statues, coins and glorifying hero worship (or corrective contempt) to vast volumes of reverential (or critical) biography and a state funeral. Houldsworth, an early mentor, a great man of Reddish history, has been remembered with a small square – more or less a glorified open-air bus terminus – a golf course that took his name in 1910 – Houldsworth’s extravagant estate and stately home in Ayrshire was once the home of the founder of the British Open – and a fifteen-foot-high clock with fountain erected in the square three years after he died in 1917. He clings on to history by the fingertips; his apprentice Churchill punched history in the face, and was punched back.
Plans for this memorial started soon after the end of the First World War, and a committee formed for the purpose of raising funds had by February 1919 collected £707. This included £250, the largest amount, from the Cotton Spinners Association, £50 from the manager of Houldsworth Schools, £70 from Houldsworth Working Men’s Club and £20 from the Reddish Conservative Club, which had resolved in a special meeting on 23 April 1917 that a letter of condolence be sent to Lady Houldsworth on Sir William’s recent death. (A meeting three days later resolved that the price of tobacco in the club be increased – Rolling Tobacco Twist be raised to sevenpence an ounce, and a packet of Woodbines from twopence ha’penny to threepence ha’penny. A month later it was agreed that as a packet of Woodbines could be purchased around the corner for a penny ha’penny the price be reduced to that amount. It was also resolved that the club would send two representatives to the Houldsworth Working Men’s Club ‘regarding a suitable memorial for Sir William’.)
The location for the memorial had been agreed upon, but not the actual form that it would take. It was eventually decided that it would be a tower with four clock faces and fountain: ‘Plinth with inscription, bronze portrait roundel, fountain niche and bowl on faces, supports clustered columns in pink granite, carved capitals, below block with clock face, gable top and foliated finial.’ It originally included ground-level animal troughs, which were eventually removed. It was unveiled on 20 September 1920 and the inscription read:
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF
SIR WILLIAM HENRY HOULDSWORTH,
BARONET,
BY THE PEOPLE OF REDDISH
IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE
OF THE BOUNTIFUL GIFTS WHEREBY
HE ENRICHED AND ADORNED THEIR VILLAGE
AND MANIFESTED HIS CONCERN FOR THEIR
SPIRITUAL, MENTAL AND PHYSICAL WELFARE.
The original clock was mechanical and needed to be regularly wound. The mechanism was in the cellar of a nearby pub, the Houldsworth Arms, connected to the clock under the ground. An electric drive eventually replaced the clockwork mechanism. Over the years, as Reddish trundled on after the loss of its main creator, asymmetrically settling around his whimsically monumental brick buildings and their towering chimneys, the electrically powered four clocks often registered different times and sometimes stopped altogether. Time and Reddish never quite joined up.
44
1926
The Wilson family went on a trip to Australia. Meeting an uncle who was a politician in Western Australia was something of an inspirational experience, and on his return
home young Harold announced to his mother Marjorie that he was going to be prime minister one day.
1924
J. R. Clynes became leader of the House of Commons and deputy prime minister under Ramsay MacDonald. In 1923, as leader of the Labour Party, he had moved the successful motion of no confidence against Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative administration which led to the appointment of the first Labour government.
1923
George Formby met the woman who would change his life. Beryl Ingham, who with her sister May had a clog-dancing act called the Two Violets, was not impressed with George. She had been a professional for ten years and was one of the most talented performers in her field. She found George’s amateurish, shambolic act painful to watch, but recognised something in him, some quality of which he himself was unaware, and was ambitious enough for both of them to want to exploit it. In September 1924 George and Beryl were married, much to his mother’s dismay. Beryl now assumed professional and financial control over George, modernised his act and set out the future path of his career. Having adopted his father’s stage persona, it took George the younger a while to develop his own identity. This was helped along no end by his marriage to Beryl, who introduced him to the banjolele and carefully honed his act to create the gormless warm-hearted character who would enchant – or infuriate – Britain throughout the 1930s and forties.
1922
Interview with W. H. Auden, 15 November 1971:
‘Did you ever regret becoming a poet, particularly in your early years?’
‘No, not when I started, I must say. I started in rather an odd way. Psychologically I think I can understand it now. In March 1922 I was walking across a field – I was in boarding school – with a friend of mine (a fellow who turned out to be a painter later), and he asked me if I ever wrote poetry. I said no, that thought had never occurred to me, and he said why don’t you?