The North

by Paul Morley

  And: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley moved in together to her grandmother’s Gorton house in June 1963. The next month they killed their first victim as part of Brady’s coldly self-defined ‘existential exercise’, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade – the same age as many of those new Beatles fans chasing liberating, nourishing post-war pleasure – who disappeared on her way to the British Railways Club in Gorton, looking for someone to show her a great night out.

  Welcome to Reddish.

  Welcome to the rest of your life.

  56

  1879

  J. R. Clynes started work in the cotton mills of Oldham. Self-taught using candlelight and second-hand books, he could recite Shakespeare and was one of if not the greatest orator in the Labour movement’s history.

  When I achieved the manly age of ten I obtained half-time employment at Dowry Mill as a ‘little piecer’. My hours were from six in the morning each day to noon; then a brief time off for dinner; then on to school for the afternoons; and I was to receive half a crown a week in return. The noise was what impressed me most. Clatter, rattle, bang, the swish of thrusting levers and the crowding of hundreds of men, women and children at their work. Long rows of huge spinning-frames, with thousands of whirling spindles, slid forward several feet, paused and then slid smoothly back again, continuing the process unceasingly hour after hour while cotton became yarn and yarn changed to weaving material. Often the threads on the spindles broke as they were stretched and twisted and spun. These broken ends had to be instantly repaired; the piecer ran forward and joined them swiftly, with a deft touch that is an art of its own. I remember no golden summers, no triumphs at games and sports, no tramps through dark woods or over shadow-racing hills. Only meals at which there never seemed to be enough food, dreary journeys through smoke-fouled streets, in mornings when I nodded with tiredness and in evenings when my legs trembled under me from exhaustion.

  The Bishop of Manchester noted in 1879,

  Within a radius of five miles . . . there must be aggregated a population of probably 750,000 persons . . . fifty years ago the wealthier merchants of Manchester lived in the heart of the town, in streets in which today there is not a single gentleman’s residence. Tradesmen lived over their shops: manufacturers found existence tolerable under the smoke of their tall chimneys surrounded by the cottages of the people. Now all these conditions are changed. You will hardly find one of our wealthiest men living within two miles of business or of the Exchange. The centre of the city at night is a mass of unoccupied tenements. The working class and the poor still cluster thickly together in some of the murkiest and dismalest quarters of the town . . . The houses in the centre have been removed to meet the exigencies of commerce, and the remainder of the city up to its boundary is now nearly covered.

  On 18 September in Blackpool eight arc lamps are used to create ‘artificial sunshine’ emitting the equivalent of the light from 48,000 candles. The technology is extremely new – only in this year is the first English patent for a light bulb granted. More than 70,000 people travel to Blackpool to see the demonstration.

  1876

  Isabella Banks’s most famous novel was The Manchester Man, serialised first in Cassell’s Magazine between January and November 1874 and published in book form two years later. Banks remembered Manchester before the railways, viaducts and wide roads, and the novel elaborately reconstructs the city at the turn of the nineteenth century. It includes a chapter on the Peterloo massacre of 1819. The hero of the novel, Jabez Clegg, is an orphan, discovered Moses-like on the banks of the Irwell. He becomes a textile worker, marries his employer’s daughter – after various trials and tribulations – and ends the novel as a prosperous and enlightened master. Banks detested the ‘modernisation’ of Manchester happening around her.

  ‘When Pliny lost his life, and Herculaneum was buried, Manchester was born. While lava and ashes blotted from sight and memory fair and luxurious Roman cities close to the Capitol, the Roman soldiery of Titus, under their general Agricola, laid the foundations of a distant city which now competes with the great cities of the world. Where now rise forests of tall chimneys, and the hum of whirling spindles, spread the dense woods of Arden; – and from the clearing in their midst rose the Roman castrum of Mamucium, which has left its name of Castle Field as a memorial to us.’ Mrs G. Linnaeus (Isabella) Banks, The Manchester Man, 1876.

  1875

  George Formby Senior was born as James Booth in 1875 in what was once considered the ‘almost worthless’ Ashton under Lyne on the north bank of the Tame. His mother, Sarah Jane Booth, an unmarried working-class woman, was a prostitute who was convicted of offences 140 times in ten years. She eventually married James’s father, a few months after his birth. However, the marriage was turbulent, and James was often beaten up and deprived of food. Sarah Jane used to sing in the local pub for alcohol, and often ended up being taken off to the police station to sober up. Because his mother was so often absent from home, young James had to sleep outside – in the doorway or the lavatory. Because of this, he developed asthma and became very susceptible to bronchitis and tuberculosis. ‘My childhood was the most miserable that could have happened to any human being.’

  1874

  Received pronunciation was never formally created or enforced as an official form of the national language (unlike in France or Italy); it grew out of a middle-class version of the London/south-east dialect, its rise aided by the increasing social mobility of the nineteenth century, which led people to be concerned about talking and writing ‘correctly’. Dictionaries became popular, learning the grammar of English came to be seen as essential, and regional dialects were despised and even suppressed. Well into the nineteenth century, however, even the upper classes were still talking with a variety of regional accents. The catalyst for the creation of a distinct and universal public school accent seems to have been the 1874 Education Act. As education was now to be available to all, the traditional upper classes and the new rich needed a distinctive cultural badge to distinguish themselves from the masses below.

  57

  Reddish was full of square straight-faced houses on placid streets that all joined up with each other, but, like a small village written into a very English story that was quaint even as it contained a murder or two and the inflexible, darkening pressure of history, there was within a few streets of where I lived, a couple of hundred yards along from the Essoldo and the Conservative Club, a fire station, a police station, a church or two and a library.

  The library was, as it should have been, the quietest place in time and space, tucked next to the swimming baths, the coldest harshest place in time and space, seemingly never warm since they were opened at the beginning of the century. I liked the quiet place more than the cold place lined with dull dazzling tiles that implacably absorbed splashes and wet soiled feet, and filled with icy pale-blue water that stung the eyes and stank of fun, fear and a combination of chlorine and urine. Perhaps this was also because I picked up on how the quiet place contained clues about why I was where I was and how I could explain it and do something about it, in books that were about where people find themselves and what then happens and how they work out a solution or accept their problems. The watery hell hole stripped me near naked and froze me sore to the bone. I like to think the library was where I learned to read, as much as at school, and where without me even understanding what was happening, I began to write, or at least have the thoughts, rooted in the beatific blue eyes of Peter O’Toole as a larger-than-life T. E. Lawrence, who died and then lived, that can become writing.

  At the age of thirteen I remember moving, in a sudden rush, on to George Orwell, leaving behind unbelievable Enid Blyton and her nostalgic glowing settings and the actually more believable Alan Garner and his unsettling secrets. Garner lived in a Cheshire village half a mile from Jodrell Bank, moving the year it was finished into a ramshackle sixteenth-century house called Toad (old) Hall. He wrote enticingly about the areas around where I lived as thoug
h they were next door to the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, where unicorns roamed through a warren of pasty, rayless streets, as if they were wonderful hidden places you might reach using a time machine that was all in the mind, where a shadowy line between reality and fantasy could be crossed using nothing but words and will and the map his books became, describing a dying land that needed to be saved.

  Rochdale Town Hall

  The still, spectral atmosphere inside the chaste library somehow encouraged me to challenge myself, to see what on earth was going on in those apparently forbidden and definitely difficult books that sat composed within themselves on row after row, promising either absolutely nothing, just page after page of pointless print, shapes needing too much hard work to understand, or absolutely everything, each letter on each page promising a mystery of such power it would inevitably lead to another mystery and, now and then, some sort of sensational solution. These single magic letters making up these liberating words inside these tantalising books which were not for me seemed to bring more colours into reticent Reddish than even the Essoldo down the road.

  When I was twelve I took two books by Orwell out of the library – 1984 and one other, which I have forgotten but am convinced, if only for the sake of this story, was a collection of his journalism. I remember feeling absolutely compelled to try Orwell, although I cannot remember what made me so convinced I needed to read him. Perhaps it was the smell of the books, an aroma made stronger when their pages were opened and something unfamiliar and inspiring burst into the air. The smell must have been different to anything I had come across before, something – a smart smell, from out there, in the direction of the possible, where things were different and always changing – sucked into the books, the pages, the words themselves, from the sort of Reddish homes that contained those people, their exotic food and posh cleaning methods, perhaps even pedigree pets, who would take Orwell books out of the library.

  I didn’t understand a word of either book, but this didn’t put me off: I remember thinking they were magnificent. There was something in these books that implied that my library card, which was a small rough scrap of stiff brown card which I wish I still had, was some sort of ticket to the future. I remember thinking that it was a good thing for me to have done: to have opened those books and tried so hard to understand them, to know that one day it would be important for me to recognise each and every word inside them, to know that one day I would understand them in the way that I was beginning to understand and recognise each paving stone and brick wall, each mark in the tarmac, each slight curve in the road, each turning and traffic light, each driveway and chimney pot, each shop window, lamp post and drain along my walk to and from school.

  My bedroom in the corner at the front of the house could just about take a narrow single bed, leaving barely enough floor space for me to get in and out of it. A crude hand-built wooden airing cupboard took up all the wall next to the door, the cupboard itself on top of some drawers so that it was a few feet off the floor. The doors to the cupboard didn’t quite fit together when they were shut. Sometimes I would climb up into the cupboard, which was empty give or take a few boxes of papers and my collection of Beanos and Whizzer and Chips, a football magazine or two, a couple of tattered Enid Blytons and a special, haunting Alan Garner, close the doors and sit in the dark, which didn’t smell of smartness but another, more muddled, vaguely threatening world, with a hint of something nasty, and pretend that I was somewhere else, even someone else. Sometimes I would accept that I was exactly where and what I was: me, eight or nine, jammed inside a bare cupboard in a small room in a small house shared with my family, who I had never properly been introduced to.

  Inside, I could hear myself breathe. I would listen to the rhythm of the falling rain. I would hear elsewhere in the house the raised voices of my parents arguing about a fresh grievance, or an old grudge, fighting between themselves about a life I was part of, their early romance and lust replaced by cramped routine and a bricked-up hopelessness. Arguing, perhaps, because my mum was where she belonged, close to her family, to where she had been brought up, but my dad was a long way from home, stunned by his surroundings, lacking the equivalent sanctuary of my cupboard.

  Outside, elsewhere, the north was gravely collecting itself, gradually correcting itself, and the scattered mills that rose up above the land, those that had survived lack of use, wartime bombing and unsympathetic demolition, were transmitting secret messages, as though they were mysterious obelisks whose real meaning would only reveal itself in decades to come. Locked in my cupboard in my tiny bedroom these secret transmissions meant that even though I knew nothing, about where I was, about the north outside, I nevertheless knew, somehow felt, the following:

  58

  1871

  Urbanisation accompanied the Industrial Revolution, as people moved into the growing towns and cities in pursuit of work. They had little opportunity for leisure at first, but after the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 workers had some free time, and amateur football had become popular. By 1871 many factories were closing at lunchtime on Saturday, giving workers more time to participate in sport, whether actively or as spectators.

  Rochdale Town Hall was opened on 7 September 1871 with a grand ceremony appropriate to this fine building designed by William Crossland and built upon the back of decades of success in the textile industry. It was commissioned by proud citizens who saw their success as on a par with the medieval mercantile achievements of Venice. When proposed in 1864 it was recommended that £20,000 be spent on the building. When it was completed, the remarkable building with its 240-foot wooden spire topped by a gilded statue of St George had cost £155,000. In his speech the mayor vindicated the massive outlay with ‘We cannot have beauty without paying for it.’ Twelve years after it was opened a fire, visible ten miles away, destroyed the tower. The building remained without a spire for four years before Alfred Waterhouse, the architect responsible for Manchester Town Hall, completed a fine stone replacement.

  1869

  Joseph Robert Clynes, the son of a labourer, Patrick Clynes, was born in Oldham on 27 March.

  Whoever has seen Manchester in the solitary loveliness of a summer morning’s dawn, when the outlines of the buildings stand clear against the cloudless sky, has seen the place in an aspect of great beauty. In that hour of mystic calm, when the houses are all bathing in the smokeless air – when the very pavement seems steeped in forgetfulness and an unearthly spell of peaceful rapture lies upon the late disturbed streets – that last hour of nature’s nightly reign, when the sleeping city wears the beauty of a new morning, and ‘all that mighty heart is lying still’ – that stillest, loveliest hour of all the round of night and day – just before the tide of active life begins to turn back from its lowest ebb, or, like the herald drops of a coming shower, begins to patter, here and there, upon the sleepy streets once more; whoever has seen Manchester at such a time, has seen it clothed in a beauty such as noontide never knew. It is, indeed, a sight to make the heart ‘run o’er with silent worship’. It is pleasant, even at such a time, to open the window to the morning breeze, and to lie awake, listening to the first driblets of sound that stir the heavenly stillness of the infant day – the responsive crowing of far-distant cocks; the chirp of sparrows about the eaves and neighbouring house-tops; the barking of dogs; the stroke of some far-off church clock, booming with strange distinctness through the listening air; a solitary cart, jolting slowly along, astonished at the noise it is making. The drowsy street – aroused from its slumbers by those rumbling wheels – yawns and scratches its head, and asks the next street what o’clock it is . . . Then come the measured footsteps of the slow-pacing policeman, longing for six o’clock; solitary voices conversing in the wide world of morning stillness; the distant tingle of a factory bell; the dull boom of escaping steam, let off to awake neighbouring work people; the whistle of the early train; and then the hurried foot and ‘tap, tap, tap!’ of the Knocker-Up.
Soon after, the shutters begin to rattle, here and there; and the streets gradually come alive again.

  Edwin Waugh, ‘The Knocker-Up’, Lancashire Sketches, 1869 edition

  1865

  Music hall emerged from the home-made entertainments of the working class. Groups of people would gather together in private homes or public houses for amusements including listening to local storytellers and singing. The public-house events became known as smoking concerts or free and easies. Jeffrey’s Music Hall was Rochdale’s first, opening on 19 April 1865 on Drake Street. Like Rochdale’s first theatre, the building was originally a chapel. The second was Th’ Owd Circus in Newgate, erected by an acrobat named Ohmy!

  The Lake District was first mapped by the Ordnance Survey between 1856 and 1865.

  1863

  The first fish and chip shop in the north of England is reputed to have opened in Mossely, near Oldham. Mr Lees sold fish and chips from a wooden hut in the market, later transferring the business to a permanent shop across the road.

  1861

  Top ten occupations in Lancashire according to the Census: 1) cotton weaver, 2) servant, 3) housekeeper, 4) labourer, 5) coal miner, 6) dress maker, 7) cotton winder, 8) cotton spinner, 9) carter, 10) agricultural labourer.