by Paul Morley
‘I can still remember the last line of the first poem I ever wrote, about a town in the Lake District. The last line ran: “And in the quiet oblivion of thy waters let them stay.” I can’t remember who “they” were.’
Although he lived the greater part of his working life in Hull, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922, the year when the two stream-of-consciousness masterworks (James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) were published.
J. R. Clynes led Labour in the breakthrough 1922 general election, when the party supplanted the Liberals as the official opposition to the (Conservative) government, almost tripling the number of Labour MPs elected.
The BBC was created and started broadcasting in 1922. Two years later it began local radio broadcasts – from Leeds with the official opening of the Leeds/Bradford (2LS) relay station by the legendary John Reith, its first director general. The offices and a studio were at Basinghall Street. The studio was draped with pleated curtains and featured a hair cord carpet with ample underfelt, which helped to muffle every echo. The first station director was G. P. Fox, son of the town clerk of Leeds.
John Braine was born in a small terraced house off Bradford’s Westgate. He was educated at St Bede’s Grammar School, moving to Thackley when his father got a job at Esholt Sewage Works. Thackley was a morose satellite of industrial Shipley, just the sort of place his main Room at the Top character Joe Lampton came from, ‘where the snow seemed to turn black almost before it hit the ground’. His mother gave John an interest in books, and after various jobs around Bradford, from junior salesman in Christopher Pratt’s furniture shop to progress chaser at the Hepworth & Grandage piston factory, he found work as an assistant at Bingley Library.
1921
‘A good clear star has ceased to shine in our firmament,’ wrote Harry Lauder after George Formby Senior died in 1921.
George Junior’s mother Eliza told him that despite his father’s feelings about him ‘treading the boards’, he was to go on stage. When a shy seventeen-year-old ex-jockey called George Hoy took to the Newcastle stage in 1921, it was an inauspicious start to a considerable career. Earlier that same year George had been a spectator at the Newcastle Empire, watching for the first and only time in his life his famous dad in pantomime only months before he died. This was the point when George decided on a career change and, accepting Harry Lauder’s advice not to follow a famous name, he was introduced as George Hoy, taking his mother’s maiden name, by which he had also been christened. As he explained in later years, this was because he did not want to trade on his father’s fame and reputation. Even so, he essentially regurgitated his father’s act. If not trading on his reputation, he was relying on what had gone into building it. And why not? Charlie Chaplin, as a sixteen-year-old, had imitated Formby Senior, who twirled a cane in his song ‘One of the Boys’. Borrowing Formby’s hat, lace-less boots and baggy trousers for a performance, Chaplin never returned them.
‘This is an age of transition between the music hall and the revue. The music hall is older, more popular, and is sanctified by the admiration of the nineties. It has flourished most vigorously in the north; many of its most famous stars are of Lancashire origin. (Marie Lloyd, if I am not mistaken, has a bit of a Manchester accent.) Lancashire wit is mordant, ferocious, and personal; the Lancashire music hall is excessively intimate; success depends upon the relation established by a comedian of strong personality with an audience quick to respond with approval or contempt. The fierce talent of Nellie Wallace (who also has a Lancashire accent) holds the most boisterous music hall in complete subjection. Little Tich and George Robey (though the latter has adapted himself in recent years to some inferior revues) belong to this type and generation. The Lancashire comedian is at his best when unsupported and making a direct set, pitting himself against a suitable audience; he is seen to best advantage at the smaller and more turbulent halls. As the smaller provincial or suburban hall disappears, supplanted by the more lucrative Cinema, this type of comedian disappears with it.’ T. S. Eliot, 1921.
1919
Peace parades were held throughout the land on Saturday 19 July 1919. The Rochdale Observer, reporting the following Wednesday, said, ‘Not since the King and Queen came to Rochdale in July 1913 have there been such vast crowds in Rochdale streets.’ They also reported that ‘at night there were bonfires and flares on the surrounding hills, and they were watched by masses of people from a variety of viewpoints. The old churchyard and slopes formed a capital vantage point for such spectators, who remained in large numbers until a late hour.’
Henry Moore returned to Castleford aged twenty, obtained an ex-serviceman’s grant and became the first ever student of sculpture at Leeds College of Art in September 1919. As he remembered, ‘sculpture was not a popular art form in England in those days’. The college had no department when Moore arrived in 1919, and Reginald Cotterill set one up especially for him in his second year. Collections of African carvings belonging to Leeds University’s vice chancellor, Sir Michael Sadler, sparked his initial interest in primitive art long before it gained general acceptance in England. He continued to live in Castleford, where he attended Miss Gostick’s Peasant Pottery Class in the evenings, travelling to and from Leeds by train each day. At Leeds College of Art Henry Moore met fellow students Barbara Hepworth, Raymond Coxon and Edna Ginesi. All went on to attend the Royal College of Art in London from 1921 to 1925, where, along with Wakefield-born Vivian Pitchforth, they formed what became known as the Leeds table. Moore had a nice Yorkshire analogy for the limited support around for modern art in the 1920s: ‘when you put a tight lid on a kettle you develop quite a head of steam’.
Bassett’s gave birth to the Jelly Baby in Sheffield – first called the Peace Baby to celebrate the end of the First World War.
1917
Physicist Ernest Rutherford discovered how to split the atom at Manchester University. He showed that by firing alpha particles into nitrogen gas a small amount of hydrogen could be produced. This was the first artificial disintegration of a nucleus. His laboratory in Manchester had been the scene of scientific discoveries that were to form the foundations of nuclear physics since 1907.
45
I didn’t think about it at the time, but the north folded out from me, all of me and the house where I lived, in the street where it was, in the district where that was, part of the town it belonged to, which was in a particular county, near a large city in its own county, which connected to other counties, which contained their own districts, regions, cities and towns, their own versions of Stockport and Reddish, and streets and houses and people at the centre of their own north, connected to each other because for hundreds of years there had been plans and ambitions and inventions, and a sense of how to create for better or worse a future. I didn’t realise when I was seven or eight or nine, knowing only that I lived in Reddish, Stockport, Cheshire, but where I found myself was connected to a history of plans, systems and ambitions, highfalutin minds, dreamers and workers – men, women and artists with a distinctive commitment to progress and change, entertainers happy to make things seem better than they were, comedians understanding how it all led to a certain sort of relieving, even inspiring punchline – and to the severe specialness of the landscape where they found themselves, a combination of people crammed together in villages that became towns that became cities that spilled out into towns and villages and empty open spaces.
Once you had passed through Reddish, past North Reddish School and Reddish North station – originally just Reddish, it acquired the ‘North’ in 1951 – meeting eventually the Hyde Road and Davy Jones of the Monkees’ Debdale Park, you were in Gorton; you were in Denton, south of Dukinfield, north of Gee Cross. Despite the pitch-and-putt course and the proper golf course next door, this area seemed harder and tougher to my young mind. It was where the city of Manchester frayed and splattered into dishevelled spiky suburbs, with tighter streets, more cobbles, greyer roofs, gloomier corners, meaner ski
es, harder minds – pushing out towards the sullen darkness of elsewhere where the moors took over.
The Gorton Road plainly ebbed away into the forlorn brickbuilt past, one sullied district dissolving imperceptibly into another and yet another intricate network of distressed undernourished streets diligently holding on to their inhabitants, up to their neck in local business, routine tasks, family tensions and blossoming gossip, and then you were in areas dominated by the lingering presence and foul moods of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (born 23 July 1942 in Crumpsall (crooked field by a river) on the River Irk, next to Blackley, Harpurhey and Prestwich, two miles north of Manchester Cathedral. Crumpsall was described in 1830 as a ‘pleasant village containing several handsome residences belonging to the opulent merchants and manufacturers of Manchester’. Lowry’s shabby subdued abstractions of abandoned streets, people and factories like those around Gorton and Denton were definitely appealing, even soothing cartoons next to the degraded hell-soaked angle of approach that Brady and Hindley took.
They were the repellent child killers who slithered into the national imagination through news reports that were so vile and shocked, even scared stiff, they resembled smoke-stained blood-saturated Gothic fantasy. Their diabolical life’s work stuck to your soul especially once you had seen their stunning police photographs, in which two defiant haunting faces stared straight at you, sizing you up, bringing steaming news of terror from just damp yards around the corner near the chip shop which sold Holland’s pies, by the garage where your dad once went to buy a pale blue second-hand Triumph Herald, a little potential flash of style and difference on the mundane streets comfy with pragmatic Morris Minors, Minis and Prefects and Cortinas, which he couldn’t in the end afford, not by a mile.
Hindley and Brady, charred trapped scraps of frustrated northern will, were some kind of warning to those who might think there must be more to what I am and where I am than this, to those who thought differently. Look what you became if you thought there might be something not revealed by the buses and back gardens, the newsagents and swings and roundabouts; look what would happen if you thought about yourself too much and had ideas above your station, ideas that questioned the view that you were nothing special.
The deadly couple, the psycho-sadist and the battered, damned bully, helping each other out on their way to sordid infamy, intently combining the practical, the perverse and the grotesque, took advantage of the nearby moors, thousands of acres of alienating open land blasted and twisted into apocalyptic austerity by decades of unforgiving industrial activity a few miles away, to bury, once rubbed out, their shy victims, who were about my age, sons and daughters of dads and mums like mine, brutally stripped of their future and shoved into the deep damp mirthless earth. Under the surface, where nothing from above could reach them – no messages, no love – face to face with the brutish end of time, robbed for their innocence and unmarked kids’ skin of the gathering awareness I, close by, unmolested, was slowly getting used to. This abrupt premature end – under the ground, of children coldly tossed inside a slab of rocky muddy country that seemed built by demons to resemble, in the right light, at the wrong time of day, under a desolate stabbing drizzle, the damned middle of nowhere – happened very near to North Reddish, my north Reddish, to North Reddish Infants and Junior School, where I didn’t have a clue, teeming with sons and daughters resembling their mums and dads, who were sons and daughters, and so on.
Reddish was everything, my home and my surroundings, walls and roads, library, baths and classroom, friends and enemies, toys and pets, and I would move around, as far as I could, from day to day and street to street and Sunday to Sunday from park to park, but stay where I was. There seemed no possibility that I would ever leave this place. I don’t think I ever thought it through, and I cannot remember ever thinking this so precisely, but I felt that I was surrounded by people who were staying where they were, busy but planted, essentially obedient, and I would join them, because this was where I was, and therefore who I was. Little came into Reddish but the place itself, as maintained by its position, bricks and mortals under a sceptical sky reflected in glazed puddles that never seemed to disappear even in the summer, which was always, year in year out, doomed to end quickly.
Even now as I consider the possibility that there were things floating through the mental air – words, songs, feelings, history, superstitions, thoughts, facts, myths, births and deaths – and appreciate that by considering this possibility I am actually proving that it was true, forty-five years after I was there, I remember the time when I was no more than a boy, immersed and acceptant in a world that was still made out of steam, church and tradition, which contained immovable ceremonies, duties, routines, unseen stumbling blocks, and the non-stop demands, restrictions, instructions and occasional ferocity, even danger, of adults, who could be kind but were essentially in superior unforgiving control. Adults who promised a future made up of more of where you were and what there was around you because of the way they seemed so stuck inside their own thorough and unchangeable fate. There was too a coldness and darkness, a heavy atmosphere in the house where I lived, that seemed to repel the very idea that you could change who you were and where you were because something outside immensely anchored Reddish might make it through some unreal, invisible opening and into the clear spaces inside your mind.
46
1917
‘[Mancunians] make an affectation of candour and trade a little on their county’s reputation for uncouthness.’ Harold Brighouse, Hobson’s Choice, 1917, set in the soot-sodden Salford of the 1880s.
In July Prime Minister David Lloyd George appointed J. R. Clynes parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Food in his coalition government. Clynes used rationing to save the country from starvation and, according to some, Bolshevism. He is one of Labour’s less well-known party leaders but would have been the first ever Labour prime minister had he not been defeated by just five votes for the party leadership by Ramsay MacDonald.
1916
As well as being one of the first artists to make records, starting in 1907, amiably chatting away to his invisible audience with much of his on-stage sparkle, George Formby Senior was perhaps the first of the northern comics to confirm the stereotype that everyone north of Watford was a slow-witted idiot. One of his first manifestations in the halls down south was as John Willie, up in London for the Cup, with tales of Wigan Pier, a name Formby invented, joking there was a pleasure pier in Wigan leading to a sandy beach, like there was in Blackpool, even if it was actually just a wharf where coal was loaded from trucks on to barges. The reputation of the citizens of Lancashire and Yorkshire has never recovered from what he started, in fact, this notion of backwardness. Formby was never a well man either, which didn’t help the picture. His lungs bore the marks of consumption from breathing in sulphur when as a boy he worked in a Manchester steel foundry, and his trademark cough was as famous in its day as his son’s banjolele would become thirty years later. Indeed George would often break off in the middle of a song to have a hearty cough (‘Coughing better tonight – coughing summat champion’) and have them rolling in the aisles. On stage he was both simple and always ailing, and frequently complaining.
Harold Wilson was born in Cowersley near Huddersfield on 11 March 1916. His father, Herbert Wilson, an industrial chemist, resented the fact that lack of family resources meant, though clever, he was never able to fulfil his potential. Herbert’s son would represent an opportunity to make up for this, and he was given every encouragement by his parents to succeed academically. Harold worked hard, and was an enthusiastic Scout in his spare time, loving all the knots and singing around the campfire.
When writing his pronouncing dictionary in 1916, phonetician Daniel Jones described received pronunciation as the accent ‘most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding schools’.
Stockport Edgeley to Manchester Piccadilly
Since Chaucer’s times and his use of northern clerks from Strother (an imaginary village) as uncouth and slobby comic figures simply because they were from the north, there had been signs of how regional generalisation could be used to fabricate an idea of northernness as a state of otherness – culturally, socially, linguistically, politically, geographically – within the English language and the nation itself. Southern speech, it was implied, if not blatantly stated, had a higher social status and cultural authority than northern speech. An alternative view, a correction, can be made, exploiting generalisations and assumptions in the other direction – that the speech of the south was in fact artificial, fey, alien, linked to the cynical, corrupting worlds of wealth, business and power, and ultimately as unauthorised as northern was considered by the south. The speech of the north was domestic, genuine, virile, blunt, colloquial and rooted in the hard-working endeavours of honest, enterprising, unaffectedly common people. The northern tongue has as much claim to be dominant rather than provincial – to speak for the whole nation – as the southern tongue.
1914
When Britain entered the war against Germany on 4 August 1914 groups of local men signed up all over the country. In Accrington and its surroundings, 36 officers and 1,076 men enlisted in ten days. Their official name was the 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) East Lancashire Regiment, but they quickly became known as the Accrington Pals. Their valedictory service was held at St John’s Church on 21 February 1915. Two days later 16,000 people lined the streets of Accrington to watch the Pals march to the railway station on their way to training in north Wales. In July 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, 230 Pals were killed and 350 wounded in the space of twenty minutes.