by Paul Morley
While my dad was alive I never knew anything more about his father other than that he was dead and then not dead and then dead, really, surely, and then afterwards that he might have moved to north London during the war and built another life with a new wife and possibly children, who might now be alive, with children of their own, southern versions of me, operating elsewhere – Morleys with altogether something else about them. I developed a vague sense that my dad’s dad resembled the cockney spiv in the sitcom set in wartime Kent, Dad’s Army, ducking and diving indifferent miles away from his son, leaving him further and further behind. Perhaps that was too specific – perhaps in the end he was more like one of the extras in Dad’s Army, lined up behind the main characters, never saying anything, commenting on events only through mugging, shrugs and offstage rummaging and mumbling, ultimately disappearing from view, leaving no mark on the plots and progression of the show, permanently nameless and featureless. I wonder how far back in time I would have to go, searching through the male line that led to the Morleys, before I find someone more specific, more dynamic, or were they always floating in the background, teetering on the verge of having something to say, never fully opening their mouths to reveal what was on their minds? And how far would I have to go back to find the first signs of the personality my father had? He seemed to have so much he wanted to say about how he was so much better than someone who always seemed to be down on his luck, but no way of saying it so that people would listen to him.
My dad passed on to me the feeling that your past is of no real help in working out who you are, finding your voice and establishing a steady, mature identity. He didn’t perhaps mean to, but he passed on the notion that to be alive is to be a fraud, adrift from reason and reality. You lie and evade to make people believe in you, and finding your own voice must always be a fruitless task. Perhaps it was this that made me consider being a writer, as though it would actually lead to the finding of a voice, even though as a writer finding a voice becomes even more intimidating. Writing, as a search for the truth about who you are and how you fit into the world and its history, as an invention of your own self that often involves a fair amount of lying and deceiving or at least making things up, means you are always catching sight of your own ghosts, and the ghosts of others, in the gaps between one reality and another, and these ghosts are not necessarily on your side, mainly because they have no idea you exist.
50
1904
George Formby was born George Hoy Booth on 26 May in Wigan, the son of music-hall star George Formby Senior. He was born blind on account of a caul or membrane enclosing his head and was unable to see for several months. He said he owed his sight to a simple sneeze. The young George was educated only to the age of seven at Notre Dame School in Wigan, after which he was sent to train as a jockey, first in Yorkshire and later in Ireland. As a result he was barely literate. While serving his apprenticeship he made his screen debut at the age of ten, playing a stable boy who outwits a criminal gang in the film By the Shortest of Heads (1915).
Wilfred Pickles, actor and broadcaster, was born on 13 October 1904 at 24 Conway Street, Halifax, the second of the four sons of Frederick Pickles (1880–1954), stonemason and builder, and his wife, Margaret (1876–1962), daughter of William and Ellen Catterall. He later recalled in his autobiography that his father – whose amusing, unsophisticated letters from the trenches during the First World War had been published in the Yorkshire Weekly Post – ‘showed a lively wit that made him the immediate centre of attention in any company’. This talent transcended even ‘the worst of our family’s economic troubles’.
1903
Walter Greenwood was born in Salford. He came from a poor working-class family and attended the council school in Langworthy Road. He began part-time work as a milk roundsman’s boy when he was twelve, then worked, again part-time, for a pawnbroker, before leaving school at the age of thirteen. He later worked as an office boy, a stable boy, a clerk, a packing-case maker, a sign writer, a driver, a warehouseman and a salesman, never earning more than thirty-five shillings a week except while working for a few months in an automobile factory. He was on the dole at least three times.
Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield, the eldest child of Herbert Raikes Hepworth, civil engineer to the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his wife, Gertrude Allison. She was educated at Wakefield Girls High School and studied at the Leeds College of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London. It was as a seven-year-old schoolgirl growing up in Yorkshire that Barbara Hepworth was ‘fired off’ as a sculptor. In her classroom at Wakefield High School she listened intently to a lecture on Egyptian sculpture and, from that day on, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘Everything was forms, shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the forms. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of foulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.’
She spoke of Yorkshire as a ‘curiously rhythmic patterning of cobbled streets . . . mostly ungracious houses dominated by . . . slagheaps, noise, dirt, and smell’. These early impressions of the contradictions between industrial town and quiet countryside later became an integral part of her work. ‘Feelings about ideas and people and the world all about us struggle inside me to find the evocative symbol affirming these early and secure sensations – the feeling of the magic of man in a landscape, whether it be a pastoral image or a miner squatting in the rectangle of his door or the “Single form” of a mill-girl moving against the wind, with her shawl wrapped round her head and body. On the lonely hills a human figure has the vitality and the poignancy of all man’s struggles in this universe.’
1900
Arthur Bowden Askey was born in Liverpool on 6 June at 29 Moses Street, only son of Sam and Betsy Askey of Knutsford. After being educated at the Liverpool Institute and singing in the Liverpool Cathedral choir, he entered the Liverpool Education Offices as a clerk. At the age of sixteen, having stopped growing at five feet two inches, he gave this up and began to learn a new trade as an entertainer around the clubs. Arthur soon emerged as a true all-rounder in the grand tradition of the British music hall. When asked why Merseyside produced so many comedians, Arthur Askey replied, ‘You’ve got to be a comic to live in Liverpool.’
1898
Henry Moore was born in Castleford, in a small terraced house in Roundhill Road on 30 July. His father didn’t want his children following him into the pits. To make sure of this, he got Moore and his seven siblings a formal education, despite the family’s constant struggle with poverty. Henry Moore went to the local infant and primary school, and then in 1910 won a scholarship to Castleford Secondary School, which later became a grammar school. At weekends the family would ramble over the moors and surrounding countryside. In later life Moore recalled these walks as a formative influence on his imagination, citing the dramatic forms of Adel Crag near Leeds and the slag heaps – Castleford’s own mountains, artificial mountains, like pyramids, he called them. ‘We played about in them and got very dirty. I remember the street where we lived and the sun just about managing to penetrate the fog.’
Even during these early years Moore was interested in art, and at the age of eleven he decided to become a sculptor after learning about the great Michelangelo. While at secondary school Moore was greatly encouraged by his art teacher Miss Alice Gostick.
Gracie Fields was born Grace Stansfield on a bitterly cold day (9 January) at 9 Molesworth Street over a fish and chip shop in Rochdale. Her mother, Sarah Jane, was nineteen, and Gracie, christened Grace, was the first of four children. Gracie’s father, Fred Stansfield, a former merchant seaman, was a fitter at Thomas Robinsons, engineers, of Milnrow Road. Her mother was stage-struck
and had a strong voice. It was said she could sing better than the local music-hall artistes. Gracie made her first appearance on stage at five years old.
Part Three
13 June 1963
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs doing.
Alan Turing
51
I was not born in the north. Carol was, and I think her birth and first few years in Reddish made me forget that for the first few years of my life I was following my parents around the south of England. I was born in Farnham, Surrey, a few miles from Aldershot, where my father, the Kent man born and raised in Cliftonville, Margate on the Isle of Thanet, was doing his eighteen months National Service, five years before the conscription of young men between seventeen and twenty-one ended, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, leading, effectively, to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, David Bowie, and so on.
My mother was an army nurse from Handforth, near Wilmslow, the first place you come to in Cheshire travelling south from Manchester, with a population of a sheltered few thousand. The brash, vaguely tense twenty-year-old temporary soldier and the shy, slightly dizzy and mischievous Cheshire nurse, a year younger, hit it off to such an extent I was without much of an invitation encouraged to join them in a brand-new late-1950s family. They had been married for six months when I was born. After the army, the three of us stayed with my grandmother in Margate, and in a flat in Dover, before my quick-thinking but underqualified dad got a job as a prison warder at the maximum-security Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.
The first memories I have of light and meaning, Mum and Dad, Christmas and back garden, shoes and clockwork train sets, shops and beach, ferry and washing on the line, snakes and hedges, baby sister and red plastic fire engine fitfully pouring into my mind are from the Isle of Wight, which is so far to the south that it is off the coast of England a few miles from Southampton and all on its island own in the English Channel. We did however live in the north of the island.
There is another world, filled with another reality, where I stayed on the Isle of Wight, and my father gradually rose through the ranks to become governor of the jail in the years when inmates included Ian Brady, the Krays and Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, and was present at the time of the 1969 riot protesting against the conditions with fearsome gangster Mad Frankie Fraser as one of the ringleaders. This would have led, perhaps, to a different book, or no book at all. If there had been a book, there would have been my toughened, hardened, resilient father at the centre of it, efficiently ruling a cruel, disturbing and often brutal inside world, overseeing the constant battle between staff and prisoners, rather than his role in this book, in which he spends most of his time in disorientated, or stubborn, or increasingly resigned exile, in the background, until he disappears altogether, chased into the shadows, as nameless and removed as his father, by ruddy northern bricks and endless smothering rain, falling between the cracks that separate success from failure.
Perhaps this book about the north began when my father, alienated by his strict and frosty mother, stumped by a missing father, rattled and psychically bruised by draining daily confrontations with murderers and sundry violent criminals, disconcerted by hours spent inside a grim prison when he had done nothing wrong, became more receptive to suggestions from my homesick mother that they move north closer to her parents in Handforth near Wilmslow. Our little family, without any input from me or my baby sister Jayne, born on the island in 1960, made plans for my mum to return home and my dad to escape from prison and head north into what for him became another prison.
We moved in time for my first school to be a northern school. A few months were spent in Handforth with my mum’s parents between Cheshire and the traumatised post-war Manchester, and then a move into Salford, into Eccles, four miles to the west of Manchester city centre, so that I landed in the north at four or five right in the middle of an area laced, drenched and reinforced with northern history. Eccles (possibly deriving from the Latin ecclesia meaning church or congregation) stretched back to the misty Roman era, to the time it might well have been founded by refugees from Mamucium (or Mancunium) in the fourth century – Christians fleeing a late purge by the Romans. Then centuries of isolated, slow progress until a handful of hamlets – Eccles, Barton-upon-Irwell, Monton and Winton – became a village and then during the Industrial Revolution a small town.
The district was profoundly altered by the Industrial Revolution, and was itself directly crossed by those important transport developments that transformed the economic potential of south Lancashire in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, its border to the south marked since the 1890s by the Manchester Ship Canal. With a station set on the important, pioneering railway line connecting two of the Industrial Revolution’s star cities, Liverpool and Manchester, Eccles’ rural character was replaced with part of the urban sprawl spreading into and out of Salford and Manchester. Buildings filled the once open spaces around the village centre; streets expanded around the station building, described when it was built as being ‘perched like Noah’s Ark upon the Mt Ararat of the railway station’. Handloom weavers’ cottages gave way to the stubby rows of functional working-class Victorian dwellings that would come to characterise such towns well into the twentieth century.
52
1898
Fairy Soap was launched in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1898. After going green (from its original less likeable brownish-yellow) for its nationwide launch in 1927, green was always the colour of the Fairy brands. Domestos, Be-Ro flour, Andrews, Eno’s Fruit Salts and Lucozade are other firsts for the city. John Crossley Eno, a pharmacist at the Newcastle Infirmary, had a shop in Bigg Market.
1896
By the late nineteenth century the Irish-born and their children formed roughly one third of Manchester’s population. Without the contribution of Irish labour, Manchester could never have become the world’s first industrial city – an achievement which Disraeli considered to be ‘as great a human exploit as Athens’. Yet for the most part the Irish were never fully accepted. They formed their own separate community and, as American academic Gary Messinger points out in his history of the city, they ‘made Manchester into an enclave of Irish political separation second only to London in importance’.
1895
On 29 August 1895 twenty-one clubs met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield and formed the Northern Rugby Union. The Union aimed to support players from the mills and mines who could not afford to take time off work to play on a Saturday without being paid. This highlighted class issues within the game and led to the 1906 separation of the professional rugby league, of the north, and the amateur rugby union, of the south.
The clubs and their years of foundation were: Batley 1880, Bradford 1863, Brighouse Rangers 1878, Broughton Rangers 1877, Dewsbury 1875, Halifax 1873, Huddersfield 1864, Hull 1865, Hunslet 1883, Leeds 1890, Leigh 1877, Liversedge 1877, Manningham 1876, Oldham 1876, Rochdale Hornets 1871, St Helens 1874, Tyldesley 1879, Wakefield Trinity 1873, Warrington 1875, Widnes 1873, Wigan 1879. Dewsbury withdrew a few days later and was replaced by Runcorn (1876).
1894
J. B. Priestley was born John Priestley on 13 September in what he described as an ultra-respectable suburb of Bradford, the son of a schoolmaster. Priestley inherited a ‘public-spirited’ socialism from his family, and he later recalled a happy childhood. He had no memory of his mother, who had died when he was two years old and who was of the ‘clogs and shawls’ working class, but his stepmother, who brought him up, was ‘kind, gentle and loving’. After leaving Belle Vue Grammar School when he was sixteen he worked as a clerk for Helm and Company in Swan Arcade, Broadway, exporters of wool tops, from 1910 to 1914, and commented that he must have been one of the worst wool clerks ever. Already determined to become a writer, he spent his hard-earned money on books, and in his spare time tried different kinds of writing, including a regular unpaid column in a local periodical, the Bra
dford Pioneer.
Priestley’s mother and grandparents on each side were mill workers, a ‘solid steady sort’. His father ‘plucked my mother, my real mother, about whom I know nothing except she was high-spirited and witty’ from a free and easy, rather raffish kind of working-class life, where in the grim little back-to-back houses they shouted and screamed, laughed and cried, and sent out a jug for more beer. He recalled avidly watching the ‘dressing-up, display, showing off, pursuit and capture’ during promenades of ‘lads and girls’ at Bradford’s summer concerts. Priestley defended female mill workers who had raucous fun. As he put it, ‘There was nothing sly, nothing hypocritical, about these coarse dames and screaming lasses, who were devoted to their own men, generally working in the same mill, and kept on “courting”, though the actual courtship stage was over early, for years and years until a baby was due, when they married. They may not have lived happily afterwards, but they saved themselves from some unpleasant surprises.’
Inspired by the enormous cast-iron tower built in the centre of Paris for the 1889 International Exhibition, the mayor of Blackpool, John Bickerstaffe, responded to a financial scam proposing to build replicas all over England by actually commissioning a tower. He invested money in the project himself, and raised money from cotton barons in Blackburn, Bury and Preston. A pair of Lancashire architects, James Maxwell and Charles Tuke, had designed the Blackpool Tower and overseen the laying of its foundation stone in 1891. When the Tower opened on 14 May 1894, 518 feet 9 inches high, a magnificent engineering masterpiece ahead of its time, containing 2,500 tons of steel, able to sway in the winds coming off the Irish Sea, both men were dead, but Mayor Bickerstaffe was on hand to see 3,000 excited customers take the first sixpenny rides to the top.