by Paul Morley
1914
By 1914 Manchester had 111 cinemas, more per head of population than anywhere in the country.
1912
‘For Manchester is the place where people do things . . . “Don’t talk about what you are going to do, do it.” That is the Manchester habit. And in the past through the manifestation of this quality the word Manchester became a synonym for energy and freedom and the right to do and to think without shackles.’ Judge Edward Abbott Parry, What the Judge Saw, 1912.
1911
The Ford factory at Trafford Park, the first in Europe, opened on Westinghouse Road. Initially the factory built Model T cars using traditional methods. On 23 October 1911 the first British-built Ford was completed. In 1914 the factory began the use of production lines. Although the company had strict rules and regulations, workers were keen to gain employment with the American firm, as Ford paid good wages. The mass production of combustion-engine vehicles saw the start of the demise of horses, canals, trams and ultimately railways for mass transportation.
1908
Surrounded by the heady aroma of herbs, spices and essences from around the world, John Noel Nichols created the original Vimto taste in a wooden barrel in his warehouse at 49 Granby Row in central Manchester in 1908 when he was twenty-four. In the early days Vimto promoted itself not only as a health tonic but also as an ideal temperance beverage. The temperance movement and the passage of the 1908 Licensing Act, which attempted to considerably reduce the number of licensed premises in England and Wales, were the ideal context for the launch of a soft drink.
Alistair (Alfred) Cooke, the graceful and cultured journalist, author, commentator and broadcaster whose Letter from America series of fifteen-minute talks explaining America and Americans ran for fifty-eight years, was born on 20 November 1908 in Salford and grew up in Blackpool, where his parents ran a guesthouse. His father Samuel had previously been an iron fitter and was also a Methodist lay preacher. Alfred went to Blackpool Grammar and won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge and then later Yale and Harvard. He moved permanently to America in 1930, changed his name to Alistair, and after refusing a job offer from Charlie Chaplin joined the BBC in 1934 as a film critic. He became an American citizen in 1941, and lived in New York until his death in 2004, but he once said, ‘I’m still an Englishman in America. An Irish Lancastrian, really. I don’t kid myself that I’m from Arkansas.’
47
There was a grubby small front room in our Westbourne Grove house in Reddish containing bits of junk and old furniture, which embarrassed me so much in front of my friends, none of whom seemed to have rooms as messy, as unused as ours, with such drab peeling wallpaper and a stained carpet curling up at the edges, tired of life the way carpets get, endlessly beaten down from above, that I still redden thinking about it to this day, nearly fifty years later. Even as a young boy yet to form considered opinions or prejudices about how you were meant to live as a family and present yourself to the world, I felt it suggested that we were as a family somehow broken, not finished, not competent enough to be able to make this room what such a room should be – the room that showed off what you were as a family, something tidy, cosy, well kept, the room where you invited guests and visitors, and gave them tea and biscuits, and welcomed them into your home. I was ashamed by this room, but I could never fully explain why. We didn’t go into it much. The door was often shut, hiding the shame, the devastating lack of basic competence.
I got clues about what such a room should be from visits I made to friends’ houses, but mostly my reaction was based on instinct. It seemed wrong to have a room that did not work. It seemed to encourage the possibility that something else would enter this room and make it its own, not necessarily a ghost or anything, but not necessarily something benign and helpful. The room was haunted not by what had once been inside it and was now trapped, but by the inability of us as a family to fully take control of all that it could offer.
I remember sitting in it when I felt particularly sad or not sure what to do with myself. This meant sitting on the floor. I threw a tantrum when I was only about eight in front of some friends after a few hours biking around the streets. One of them must have said something or given me a funny look that seemed judgemental or challenging. I ranted that I knew they thought I was poor, and my mum and dad were poor, and dirty, because we had this unsightly room, which was not used as a room but as a sort of shed filled with the congealed ruins of my contaminated family. My bike was cheap and second hand and I’d painted it myself with thin emulsion so that it was covered with slimy lumps. I screamed at them that it wasn’t my fault. I shouted that actually I was proud that we had a room like that. There was nothing wrong with a room used to store rubbish. I don’t think they knew what I was going on about. I couldn’t talk to them for days. I kept myself to myself and arranged the fine-grained details of a simmering sulk that felt powerful enough to be seen through walls.
Eventually the room was organised, at least so that it had chairs and a rented television and a small picture on the wall, and we had two rooms to live in. We fell into calling the former junk room the front room, as if that was the correct, noble term, and having one elevated us through the ranks of society, corrected our sorry displacement. I am writing this in the front room I now have, outside the north but with a north that I bring with me, just a feeling, which is therefore connected to that front room and all the front rooms I’ve ever had, always called the front room even if in fact not in front, relieved that I have access to such a thing and am therefore a member of the human race.
Before the front room was cleared out and organised, the room at the back was where we all lived, where we functioned as a family to the respective limits of our abilities and hankered after the kind of cosiness that might fix us together. It was where I was, a mite scared, when news came from upstairs, from the back bedroom, where my everyday mum and dad regularly dissolved into obscure secrets filled with unknown unknowable intention, that my new sister, my second, Carol, had been born in what must have been such a night-time burst of blood, fluid and shock that no one ever talked about it. I remember being shell shocked, perhaps not so much by the extraordinary arrival of a new life, but by the fact that I had another sister, and not a brother to play football with. I remember, or it seemed it should be this way, that my dad, faced with what appeared to be my sadness, or actual fear, compensated me with a handful of prized Quality Street chocolates, usually only ever seen at Christmas.
By being born there, in that room, in that house, in Reddish, Stockport, born among rows and rows of brick and numbered doors, houses filled with furniture built to drift into the margins, in between impassive corners around which there was change and no change, under a diligent dove-grey sky committed to bringing showers and sudden downpours, Carol was instantly a northerner, and for all of her life there has never been any doubt that she remains one. Wherever she lives, wherever she travels, it is as though somehow in that miraculous melee of mess and matter in the room upstairs she was stamped with some ancient life force that infected her voice, her manner, her whole approach to the facts of life and the various fusses that ensue.
The Duke of Bridgewater, founding father of the British canal system
By being this northerner, she became part of – without knowing it, at least for a while, in no particular order – the energy, the substance hanging in the air, infused in the cement that jammed all those bricks together, pressed into the cracks between the paving stones that made up the pavements that could take you where you wanted to go and lead you round in circles, rising and falling in the damp and smoke that was never far away. As soon as she hurtled out of astonishing oblivion into this little Reddish room covered in flowered wallpaper the colour of a sticking plaster, the north had rushed into her and influenced her mind as though it alone could represent the difference between not existing and existing. Carol could now be added to a list of northern moments, incidents, personalities, jokes, sentences, routes
that included:
48
1907
Wystan Hugh Auden was born at 54 Bootham, York on 21 February 1907, the youngest son of Dr George Augustus Auden, a general practitioner, and his wife, Constance Rosalie. Between the ages of six and twelve, wrote Auden, ‘I spent a great many of my waking hours in the fabrication of a private secondary sacred world, the basic elements of which were (a) a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the north of England, and (b) an industry – lead mining.’ The Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems. Auden’s first love was the old industrial machinery littering the Yorkshire Dales.
1906
Although Manchester experimented early with the motor bus, it was not until July 1906 that the first Manchester Corporation bus route, between the tram terminus at West Didsbury and the Church Inn at Northenden, began operating, replacing the horse buses that had previously used the route. The residents of West Didsbury were not impressed, and voiced their complaints about the noise and fumes.
‘To see what the people are like you must observe them not only at work in the mill and at home or going to and from work, but also in their leisure time when they go out to enjoy themselves on Saturday and Sunday. This is the most striking feature of our industrial towns as compared with others. On Saturday afternoon you must go to the football field (in the season) to see the men and to the markets to see the women. The scenes presented by these two institutions are remarkable and not to be witnessed in any other country, but they are common to all our manufacturing towns, and are even more striking in Yorkshire than in Lancashire. At the football field there are generally gathered from 10,000 to 20,000 men and lads, nearly all out of the mills and machine shops, tidy, well dressed and well behaved. They pay 6d [six old pence] to go in. There are covered stands at a higher rate and in inferior matches the entrance is sometimes 3d, but 6d is the regular rate money. The spectators stand in serried ranks all around the ground and watch the game with intense interest. They keep up an incessant fire of comments and shout at every stroke or point in the play, which lasts an hour and a half. No better opportunity for observing them and their demeanour could be provided if they were paraded for the purpose. Here is the manhood and the youth of factoryland at the end of their week’s work. They are full of animation and a spirit of sturdy independence; satisfied with themselves and their surroundings they neither fear nor envy anyone. Somewhat rough and blunt of speech they are yet by no means ill-mannered: the stranger will meet with no discourtesy from them if he shows them none.’ Arthur Shadwell, International Competitiveness, 1906.
J. R. Clynes was a talented writer and in the early 1900s became a regular contributor to socialist newspapers such as the Clarion. Secretary of Oldham’s Trade Council, Clynes was invited to be the Labour Party candidate for North East Manchester in the 1906 general election and was the youngest of the twenty-nine Labour MPs elected. He held the seat until 1931, even being returned unopposed in 1918. He won the seat back in the 1935 general election and remained an MP until he retired at the 1945 general election.
1905
Gracie Fields made her first appearance at Th’ Owd Circus in Rochdale, sharing the first prize of ten shillings at the age of seven in 1905. Two years later Charlie Chaplin appeared there in a show called ‘Casey’s Court’, where an unruly gang of children ran wild while music-hall star Will Murray, dressed in drag, failed to keep them in order. The seventeen-year-old Chaplin played a fake medicine seller in his sketch.
49
There was a settee and a table in the back downstairs room, which was next to the cramped kitchen, which was not much bigger than my bedroom. I remember it had a rickety free-standing electric oven, a kettle, but not a fridge. Facilities and equipment were pretty much what they would have been twenty years earlier, after the war. The lino on the floor looked like it had been in the war, on the inside of a tank.
The small main room where we lived, which never had a name like lounge or dining room, was mostly where we gathered to watch television – sometimes whatever kids were allowed in the 1960s, from Andy Pandy and The Woodentops to Blue Peter, sometimes events as unforgettable as the Saturday afternoon final of the 1966 World Cup, which England won with a team that included seven northerners – and get ready for school and work. It was freezing in the morning, not only in the dead of deadly winter but as far into the year as tentatively brightening May and then again by the darker part of September.
A coal fire needed to be quickly built as soon as we woke up, around seven, firmly twisted copies of the Daily Express, my dad’s favourite newspaper, laid on top of a few pieces of coal when we didn’t have Zip firelighters, which was mostly the case. Mum, five foot three inches, sensitive, belligerent daughter with three others, Sally, Jill and Liz, and a brother, David, of a woebegone Hyde cobbler, George Young, and a feisty Wilmslow housemaid, Sarah, was nineteen when she had me, and two years short of thirty when Carol burst forth into the north. Her fine fair hair so set, swept and sixties it was almost a beehive, her broad chin set into a fierce determination I only picked up looking at photographs decades later, she would perform the morning newspaper twisting with a strength that made me think of televised Saturday-afternoon wrestling.
A few damp matches would be struck before there was any sort of ignition. The coal would splutter into life behind the cheap buckled metal fire guard and above piles of soft grey ash from the day before and even the day before that, pathetic little flames forcing themselves into flickering motion soon gaining in confidence and alerting the icy grey room where we were gathered to the benefit of warmth. After early-morning fire duty, perhaps scooping up in a small battered shovel some of the old ash from coal and Daily Express and crushed unknown objects that all ended up mushroom-coloured, my mum would make tea.
My dad took a big dollop of milk and three teaspoons of sugar, probably craving enough energy to get out of the door and head for work and an unnamed occupation which was never clearly described to me, but which, from odd clues I picked up, consisted of hours of paperwork, boredom and irritation in an office. If there was some sort of ladder of seniority, from what I could gather he was at the bottom with no chance of ever being a boss. This, I am guessing, but with what, take it from me, is accuracy generated by hindsight, made him bitter. It was a bitterness that would develop over the years, so that his story, even in 1967, when he was a surely youthful thirty-one, was already well on the way to becoming what you could describe, depending on your point of view, as a disaster, a tragedy, an inevitability, a major upset or one hell of a punchline which certainly pushed boundaries and broke free of the north or plummeted straight down into it. His end was already in sight, as though the clouds – often low and bruised, sometimes high and white above the Reddish house which stooped like a comfortably sad, or sadly comfortable, Lowry person – were also committed to bringing with them a sense of doom personal to us at number 12.
There was no real clue to my future in what I could see and sense from my father’s life, in the way you might expect from the behaviour and demeanour of your dad. This meant I had to look elsewhere to get some sense not only of my future but also my past. My father’s manner was of someone cut off from his own past, and therefore from whatever dimension the future consisted of. He acted as if he had been adopted. His own father was not around – dead, he thought – but actually living in London since the war with a woman not my dad’s mother, out of sight and mind, and dying in the late 1960s without my father knowing he had been alive while he grew up, married and had children.
His mother, my grandmother, confined to a solitary life in Margate, never explained that my grandfather had deserted them when my father was a young boy, during the war. The first real mention she made of him was in the late 1960s to tell my dad that he had in fact now died. This emphasised the distance there was between him and his mother, so that she too to some extent disappeared from his life. She was not someone who prais
ed others much and didn’t seem keen on making people feel good. Victoria Wood has said that this is a northern thing, the grudging handing out, if at all, of encouragement or motivation, but in my grandmother’s case it was a very distant southern Methodist thing, a reluctance perhaps to express love to a human product, a physical reminder, of her wrecked wartime marriage. Moving north was perhaps more an escape from her, and all that shattered past, than it was an embracing of the north. I’m not sure how she treated her other child, Eileen, my dad’s sister, our one aunt on his side of the family, who lived along the coast in Chatham at the top of what seemed the steepest hill in the world. She died in her fifties before I could get to know her properly.
I remember once travelling to Margate for our annual summer holiday, in which pain and pleasure would be mixed up with the Kent sunshine that seemed organised yet again by Enid Blyton. We drove down overnight: Mum, Dad in the front, three kids – eleven-year-old me, eight-year-old Jayne and toddler Carol – jammed into the compact back of a blocky-looking putty-coloured two-door Vauxhall Viva HA, a model launched in 1963 and discontinued by 1966. There was something about the windscreen of this car, the first new small car produced by Vauxhall since 1936, which reminded me of my dad’s firm distinctive forehead, although obviously without the worry lines scored deep into the surface.
We set off from Reddish in the early evening. My dad had overestimated how long the journey would take, so we made it into Margate before dawn, at about 4 a.m. He was too scared to arrive this early at his mother’s house and have to wake her up, so the five us sat, or awkwardly slept, in the Viva parked a mile or so away by Cliftonville’s Dane Park. Seven o’clock was deemed the correct moment to arrive, once his mother had been up and about for a good half-hour. Nothing was mentioned when we got to the house.