The North

by Paul Morley

  ‘As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton, it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic.’ Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 14 March 1861.

  The Lancashire cotton industry was devastated by an event far beyond its control, the American Civil War. In April, President Lincoln ordered a blockade of the Confederate southern ports, the outlet for the raw cotton on which Lancashire’s mills depended. Attempts to find alternative sources of supply from India or Egypt failed. Lancashire’s cotton supplies dried up and many mills closed down. The result was tremendous hardship, with many thousands of workers reduced to grinding poverty, forced to exist on minimal state help and charity soup kitchens. In these circumstances, Lancashire’s poor could have been forgiven had they turned against Lincoln, but the sympathies of the mill workers stayed loyally behind the cause of the slaves. On New Year’s Eve 1862, Lancashire cotton workers attended a public meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. A letter was drafted and sent to President Lincoln. An excerpt reads: ‘. . . the vast progress which you have made in the short space of twenty months fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity – chattel slavery – during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.’ The letter reached Lincoln, and inspired a considered response, drafted by a President at war – all in little over two weeks. Abraham Lincoln’s quick response acknowledged Lancashire’s hardship as a result of the Cotton Famine: ‘. . . I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. Under the circumstances I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom.’

  1859

  ‘The theory of natural selection, it is said, could only have originated in England, because only laissez-faire England provided the atomistic, egotistic mentality necessary to its conception. Only there could Darwin have blandly assumed that the basic unit was the individual, the basic instinct self-interest, and the basic activity struggle. Spengler, describing the Origin as “the application of economics to biology”, said that it reeked of the atmosphere of the English factory . . . natural selection arose . . . in England because it was a perfect expression of Victorian “greed-philosophy”, of the capitalist ethic and Manchester economics.’ Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, 1962.

  Thomas De Quincey dies on 8 December 1859. ‘My life has been,’ he affirms in his Confessions, ‘on the whole the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been.’

  59

  And then I forgot all about it, these details, and incidents, and broken contours, of a north that was life, right and centre, nowhere to be seen, beyond me, everywhere, needing me to activate it. It left some sort of impression, some sort of haunting of the mind, a forming of sensibility, but it would take decades before I could piece it all back together again, reconstruct it, dredge it up from where it had gone, beyond me, in the cupboard, smelling of impertinent otherness, in the dark, in my house, in Reddish, in the north, outside from the start.

  And what else – something else – thoughts, words I shared with myself, a conversation inside myself, a provisional puzzling out of the puzzle that had been handed to me without any apparent consideration of what that might do to my wellbeing . . . I could hear myself think. Some of these thoughts were the silent sound of me growing as a conscious being, getting used to the way that a thought you had came out of nowhere, but the more you thought, the more you had to think about, and once you started, there was no stopping you, and you’d get to understand how those thoughts had in fact come from somewhere. What those thoughts became, what they consisted of, how they would lead to more thoughts filling your head with sense and nonsense, would all depend on the outside help you got, in whatever form that presented it yourself, whether you knew it or not.

  At the time, I was vaguely aware that in the early to mid-sixties my father worked for British European Airways. There was a BEA flight from Manchester’s Ringway Airport to London on the way to our annual summer holiday in Margate when I was five or six, presumably bought at a staff discount price, which is my first real memory of feeling absolute terror. Each abrupt dip of the plane in flight, each shudder, vibration, unexplained noise, shift to the right or left, caused me to scream. I tearfully protested at this ludicrous way of travelling, and when we landed had to be dragged from the plane, a red-faced mess of fear and fury. Research now tells me that my dad must have worked in the BEA sales office at 41 to 43 Deansgate, about as modern an early 1960s Manchester address as you could get, a few steps around the corner from the Granada Television headquarters where Coronation Street was invented and where the street actually existed as a set.

  The office where he worked was designed in 1959 by John Warren Chalk, born in 1927 and educated during the war at Hyde County Grammar School, Hyde being a shabby half-brother of Stockport, five miles north-east, and seven miles east of Manchester, the other side of Denton. It was once a part of Stockport, and therefore Cheshire, with no real identity before the nineteenth-century cotton industry. It’s where my grandfather George, my mum’s dad, was born, to a mother whose maiden name was itself Hyde, so of the Hydes of Hyde, which means I might be able to trace myself all the way back to Matthew de Hyde, born in 1167, father of Sir Robert, himself father of Sir John, born in 1245, companion of the Black Prince. This was a family that ended up with the motto ‘Be steadfast,’ but by the time it reached my grandad George, was not knighted or notable.

  How many of the later, less noble Hydes of Hyde made it on to a Lowry canvas representing his own inscrutable mind, and how many times did my beyond-steadfast grandad, father of four demanding daughters, constantly stooped over an imaginary shoe he was hammering nails into, mooching from one nowhere to another via a possible somewhere, himself feature as a human splinter sloping towards death adrift in Lowry’s painted-up reflection of the abyss, which Hyde could make great claims to be the capital of?

  The earliest references to Hyde come in a book called Forty Miles around Manchester published in 1795, when what was to become the town centre was no more than a group of houses known as Red Pump Street: ‘Near the commencement of the Eastern Horn of Cheshire, which runs up into the wild country bordering on Yorkshire and the Peak of Derbyshire, is Hyde Chapel, or, as it is now called, Gee Cross.’

  Hyde United’s 26–0 hammering in 1887 to Preston North End is the greatest ever defeat in a FA Cup tie. That is one of the first facts I ever learned in a life I eventually realised was made up of a random accumulation of facts you packed around your personality like a protective lining of knowledge, as if knowledge was real strength and gaps in knowledge an unconditional disaster, an emptiness representing pure death, and the thought of it still winds me forty-five years later. The fact seemed stronger, more shattering, because Hyde was near me, and the place had the resigned nature of a town that had never recovered from the size of the defeat.

  Oddly enough, in the first few years of the twentieth century the Hyde Seals water polo team were the best in the world, three times world champions, but that fact has not infected the psychology of the town. Perhaps it is too watery a fact, lacking the near-epic dimension of those twenty-six goals conceded. In 1936, in a complicated exchange of territory that presumably satisfied some local government official trying to balance the books, parts of Hyde were handed to Bredbury and Romiley and Dukinfield, and Hyde was extended to include parts of Comp
stall, Dukinfield, Hattersley and Matley civil parishes. By the end of the twentieth century, certain events that happened in and around Hyde meant that it had a reputation as a town that suited its name, which originally came from the Anglo-Saxon hid (hide), a measure of land that could be farmed with one plough and support one family for a year. A hide was quite a substantial area, varying from sixty to one hundred and twenty acres. The surname Hyde or Hide was often given to the holder of the land and his family, or to a family living near a hide.

  Brady and Hindley lived together in Hyde, and three decades later there would be another series of murders that meant that you could think of Hyde as the Hyde in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, something that is usually normal, ordinary, everyday and can be magical, audacious and even genius, and then something that is grotesque, horrific, rotten to the core, a repugnant latent energy jumping out from thousands of years ago into unsuspecting modern life.

  Harold Shipman was born on 14 January 1946 into a working-class Methodist background, and committed suicide as one of the world’s most prolific convicted serial killers on 13 January 2004. He became a general practitioner in Todmorden (death death wood) in 1974, and was seen by many as solitary, arrogant and inscrutable behind his thick glasses and beard, although patients loved his friendly bedside manner. He enjoyed his little jokes, more amusing to him than to their subjects, but he apparently thought of himself as ‘boring’ and ‘normal’. Fired from Todmorden for writing drug prescriptions for himself, he was not struck off, merely fined £600 and referred to a psychiatric unit, and he re-emerged as the GP for Hyde in 1977. Over twenty years he was responsible for hundreds of deaths, usually older ladies who lived alone, injecting them with opiates. He covered his tracks by altering records and falsifying death certificates.

  A year below John Warren Chalk at the Hyde County Grammar School was a Dukinfield boy born on 13 March 1928 called Ronald Hazlehurst. His dad worked on the railways and his mum was a piano teacher. He left school at fourteen and worked as a clerk in a cotton mill for a pound a week, playing cornet for four times as much in a local band that made regular appearances on the BBC Light Programme. He became a professional musician, and after a few years’ freelance work in Manchester, including time at Granada TV, and in London, he joined the BBC in 1961 as an arranger and conductor. He worked on The Likely Lads (1964) and It’s a Knockout before becoming head of music for light entertainment in 1968. A fan of the Bradford-born Frederick Delius, he could locate, capture and emphasise an atmosphere using melody and rhythm within seconds, which led to his genius as a writer of succinct, instantly catchy television music.

  Ronnie Hazlehurst would write the always entirely appropriate, witty, suggestive theme tunes for Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em (gently strange through the enforced use of economical instrumentation, 1973), The Two Ronnies (cheerfully batty jingle promising contagious naughtiness, 1971), Are You Being Served? (slapstick set in a department store, so neatly featuring cash registers, anticipating Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ by a good couple of years, 1972), Last of the Summer Wine (perversely but accurately mournful and as trippily gentle as the setting, 1973) and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (which naturally, but brilliantly, featured a jaunty but bleak melody that rose and fell, 1976). The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin opened each week with a naked Reggie walking out into the sea to end it all before rapidly rethinking the whole idea, and told the story of a man desperate to escape his loving but dull marriage, disappointing, puzzling offspring and the daily grind of his job. The first series, which finished in October 1976, while undeniably funny was incredibly dark, focusing on a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I remember my dad watching the show and seeming to like it, but what with one thing and another, he didn’t get round to the second series in the autumn of 1977.

  After the war architect John Warren Chalk was sent six miles from Hyde to Stockport College to finish his schooling, a place I too ended up thirty or so years later, also as a sort of punishment for underachieving. After Stockport College, instilled with more purpose and thinking of ways to turn his developing interest in jazz, design, poetry, art and buildings into a profession, he went to the College of Art and Technology in Manchester, where he was torn between painting and architecture. He chose architecture, but didn’t lose his belief in the fantastic and transformative, and combined the reflection of the artist with the action of the architect.

  In 1962, along with Blackpool-born Dennis Crompton, Chalk joined a London-based group of dissident neophyte architects who had founded the playful, pop-art- and futurist-inspired avant-garde architectural group Archigram – short for architectural telegram. They viewed constantly advancing technology as something to be fused with mass culture, space-age surfaces with the natural environment, and were committed to understanding how architecture could keep up with and reflect the rapid social and cultural changes and gathering political discontent. They would have been appalled by the fussy baroque Stockport Town Hall, situated a short way down Wellington Road from Stockport College, a run-of-the mill decorated box designed in 1905 by Alfred Brumwell Thomas resembling a shrivelled-up Buckingham Palace with its tiny columns and insipid scrolls. It was not the sort of structure to interest L. S. Lowry – no seemingly imperishable blend of brick, cement and iron flaunting a genuine monumental air – it never possessed dignity, so there was never any cracked or lost dignity; it was simply a fussy extravagance representing the town’s badly disguised inferiority complex. Perhaps Chalk was so upset by it, he set out to imagine a world that contained breath-taking space-age grandeur and not buildings that seemed to have been excreted rather than designed.

  Perhaps the Merseyway Shopping Precinct was more his concrete and steel cup of tea, except it lacked a soaring sense of wonder, and the tower, with its numberless square white clock face, sheepishly poked up towards the sky with no sense of how the mill chimneys it could have been some sort of tribute to were often indebted to the bell towers of Venetian churches. I liked it at the time because it seemed like something that might have featured in the shakily futuristic Thunderbirds puppet show on TV, but as time has passed the buildings near it constructed a hundred years before have retained their overwhelming and future-minded power, and the clock has come to look cheap and plastic, like it runs on clockwork and the key has been lost. It symbolises a zealous, anxious 1960s, which bulldozed the finicky, embalming and hieratic Victorian and Edwardian past into oblivion but very soon started to look a little dated itself.

  Archigram’s main interest was in seeing the radical changes of the sixties, from J. F. Kennedy to the photocopier, from Bob Dylan and Roy Lichtenstein to the pill, reflected in audacious contemporary domestic architecture. They were happy positioning their experimental thinking inside the burgeoning post-war consumer culture, imagining buildings that mixed novel building materials with swift, ephemeral and dynamic images and ideas taken from science fiction, Dadaism, collage, advertising and toys. The group aimed to transform the world of things into a direct projection of the world of spirit. Lives had been enriched by elements the possibility of whose existence the ancient world had never even suspected. Archigram dreamed of integrating these into everyday life, and of responding to environmental trends and tumultuous changes in fashion, politics and cultural appetites.

  Archigram was also the name of their broadsheet, as poetically inspired as it was technologically enthusiastic, whose strapline proclaimed that it had been ‘founded as an occasional journal/manifesto of dynamic ideas for new architecture’. The first issue in May 1961 was ninepence. The paper had the character of an underground art-scene magazine rather than an architecture periodical: instead of glossy paper, elegant photo series and factual journalism, Archigram featured comic strips, erratic typography, poetry, manifestos and curt, cryptic motivational statements. The print run soon rose from a few hundred to several thousand, and the influence of its ideas spread as quickly.

  One of the founders of Archigram, Peter Cook, would write of Warr
en Chalk, ‘his work is so condensed, accurate and to the point. Yet the culture they represent is a difficult one to recall: something that came out of Britain in the 1950s, which led to satirical comedy, pop art, mixed-media events, the mock architectural movement Bowellism, Archigram – that video-as-rabbit-as-bicycle-as-poem-as-cathedral world which is probably unthinkable right now because of its apparent anarchy or apparent inconsequentiality. It stemmed as much from the world of the art school as it did from the Partisan Coffee Bar in Soho or from Cambridge. Warren was undoubtedly part of the first-named circuit. All along, architecture was learning as much from this as it was from Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller. So lateral thinking was inherent and not just acquired – especially from someone so intelligent coming out of this funny corner of European revival.’

  I had no idea at the time that my dad worked in a building designed by a northern figure with Stockport connections, who built capsule homes inspired by John Glenn’s 1962 first orbit of the moon, who was part of a collective which hated ‘ponderous buildings that just got in the way’ and who would assist in the building of the Hayward Gallery, part of the Southbank Centre arts complex in London. We lived in an extremely average semi-detached, which looked more as if it had been inspired by the turn-ups on George Formby’s grey trousers than anything supersonic, Eurominimalist or brutalist. But something did leak through to me that my father, now in his late twenties, with a lean hopeful look that seemed to belong to tomorrow and aerodynamic slicked-back hair, not Beatles long but post-Teddy-boy cocky, with a neatly combed Brylcreemed dash of 1962 Sean Connery as James Bond, brought back with him from work a sense of something exciting and in keeping with talk of a white-hot technological revolution. A small zip-up bag with the red slightly slanted BEA logo printed on each side in the centre seemed connected to the space age and was definitely a jet-set snippet of glamour in our worn-down house.