The North

by Paul Morley

  We had a basic unkempt working-class house with haggard second-hand cars parked in front, but he didn’t have a job that involved getting his hands dirty. My dad’s work seemed to consist of holding a biro and writing things down and finding extracurricular ways to brighten his routine. He wasn’t part of the traditional local working class he seemed to fear or look down on, but nor anywhere near the middle class to which he craved to belong. He was nothing, belonging nowhere and feeling the pressure. For a while he had a go at moving on from being neither one thing or another, as if his worries would be wiped away by living a comfortable existence further into lighter, leafier Cheshire. No doubt his horror was slipping into Denton, into Gorton, into Hyde, and whatever monstrous void there was beyond that.

  I don’t exactly know what happened to cause him to leave the BEA sales office except that there were rumours in our household that it involved a mysterious woman at work and an affair that motivated my mum to storm Deansgate and bring a little old-fashioned working-class vim to the modernised surroundings. His next job, though, still seemed linked to the technological revolution. He moved to the new computer centre that Shell Mex and BP had built in Wythenshawe to partner a similar complex in Hemel Hempstead. Wythenshawe was part of Cheshire until 1931, when it was transferred to Manchester to help deal with the slum problem. It was planned as a decorative but functional ‘garden city’ to absorb some of the swelling population of inner Manchester. To those moving after the war from the dirty brick tenements and bomb sites of Moss Side and Rusholme, hemmed inside the constant smell of dog dirt and coal smoke, the newly painted houses with three bedrooms, a bathroom and an inside toilet, and oval-shaped plots of land to play on and numerous ponds and brooks filled with sticklebacks seemed like paradise. The paradise wouldn’t last.

  Wythenshawe would become famous in the sixties and seventies for the Golden Garter nightclub, originally a bowling alley, now proudly presented as a theatre restaurant, a deluxe confirmation of that strident northern need for nightclub fantasy. Inside, leaving the pedestrian Wythenshawe Civic Centre well behind you, the carpets were thick, the decor a sumptuous blend of gold and crimson, the tables clothed in white linen. It opened on 7 October 1968, when Coca-Cola seemed as exotic as champagne and a three-course meal was thirteen shillings and sixpence – start with grapefruit cocktail, then the golden-fried scampi, apple pie and cream for pud – coffee one and six extra. Babycham was two and six, a pint of Double Diamond three shillings and the cheapest champagne a tanner under two quid when the average weekly wage was about thirty pounds. Bruce Forsyth was top of the bill and seemed old even then, and the club was the last gasp of the variety era as it metamorphosed into the mongrel cabaret that would become associated in the seventies with chicken in a basket.

  Garter nights were generally rowdy, audiences possessing almost a violent hankering for gaiety and distraction, a relish for racy, rip-roaring fun rooted in centuries of slog and toil, and acts facing their audience through a dense purple haze of smoke behind a solid array of frowning bouncers. There was sexy pop music from the Supremes, Sandie Shaw, Lulu and Dusty Springfield, bawdy comedy from Bob Monkhouse, Cannon and Ball, Les Dawson and Ken Dodd, and haywire comedy groups like the Grumbleweeds and the Barron Knights making a mockery of talent. American superstars Roy Orbison and Eartha Kitt visited, real life verging on visions of the otherworldly fame and fortune the local talent strived for, descending like serene gods as if the Garter really was a paradise, if a fallen one, and the venue where they played truly built out of gold even if it was actually painted and chipped plaster.

  I remember my dad talking about going to the great Golden Garter in the early 1970s, although I found it hard to envisage him eating scampi and downing pints of Double Diamond, but then this was the kind of grown-up haunt kept well away from children, and who knows what he got up to inside this backstreet pleasure palace. He told me about seeing Tommy Cooper, and how rumour had it Tommy had got a taxi from central Manchester, where the hotels were, out to Wythenshawe, and had handed the driver an envelope, telling him, ‘Have a drink on me.’ Once Tommy had gone, the driver ripped open the envelope, expecting from the famous comedian at the very least a crisp fiver, if not a splendid tenner. Even a ten-bob note would have been nice. Inside, there was nothing but a tea bag. I now realise my dad was repeating a joke that Tommy Cooper told against himself, but it was as though somehow Tommy had told it to my father over a three-shilling brandy.

  I never went to visit my dad at his work in Wythenshawe, which remained a mystery. It was a drive from Reddish of about eight miles. If I had, it would have been ten stops on the bus from Mersey Square, Stockport, upstairs for the view – the tops of trees and upstairs windows – rumbling west through Heaton Mersey, Burnage, Parrs Wood in East Didsbury, where the Wilmslow Road begins, along the way north to Manchester city centre after becoming Oxford Road and then Oxford Street (an eighteenth-century route to Oxford), crossing Cheadle Bridge the other way at the Parrs Wood end over the Mersey into Cheadle – a parish created in 1879, the gateway to Cheshire at the southern tip of Manchester, called Cedde in the Domesday Book (clearing in the wood) – Withington, West Didsbury, Northenden (north enclosure) and Baguley. Baguley was one of the nine Wythenshawe areas that had mopped up the Manchester population overspill, along with Benchill, Peel Hall, Newall Green, Woodhouse Park, Moss Nook, Sharston, Northenden – at the edge of affluent Didsbury, where the houses are semi-detached and detached, big enough for attics and basements, and fancying itself as upmarket, before being absorbed by Manchester as an attractive riverside village – and Northern Moor, ancient Cheshire hamlets, townships, communities and parishes on the southern banks of the River Mersey.

  Up until 1964 I could have taken a train from Stockport’s Tiviot Dale station to Baguley, but the station, which had opened on 1 February 1866, was shut to passengers during what were called the Beeching cuts. British Railways chairman Dr Richard Beeching’s reshaping of the network resulted in the closing of 6,000 miles, one third of the total, of little-used mostly rural and cross-country lines, in order to cut costs. Tiviot Dale, near Lancashire Hill, at the bottom of South Reddish, one station down from Reddish North, was one of two stations in Stockport along with Stockport Edgeley. Trains from there ran to Liverpool Central High Level, also shut down as a result of Beeching’s report, and on 30 November 1964 the services between Tiviot Dale and Liverpool and Warrington, via Baguley, were withdrawn.

  In the other direction, trains would steam over to Buxton via New Mills, eight miles south-east of Stockport, its town centre perched above the Torrs, a gloomy steep-sided gorge through which the Goyt and Sett rivers flow. New Mills is on the borders of Cheshire and Derbyshire at the north-west edge of the Peak District, and got its name from a fourteenth-century corn mill. The Manchester-to-Sheffield fast line bypasses New Mills’ two stations, Central and Newtown. Tiviot Dale was finally closed down on 2 January 1967 – freight trains still used the line for a few more years, especially those carrying coal from South Yorkshire to the Fiddlers Ferry Power Station near Warrington – and Edgeley was left on its own, soon becoming simply Stockport now that there was no second station.

  Eventually I would visit all of the places on the bus route from Stockport to Wythenshawe, and on the line to New Mills, and beyond, to Buxton, because it became apparent very early on living in Reddish that one place led to another, and then another, and it was amazing how far you could go if you just kept going. If you didn’t keep going you would stay put for ever where you were.

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  1859

  ‘[A town hall should be] the most dominant and important of the Municipal Buildings of the City in which it is placed. It should be the means of giving the expression to public feeling upon all national and municipal events of importance.’ Sir Charles Barry.

  1858

  Leeds Town Hall was designed by Cuthbert Broderick and completed in 1858. It is the seventh highest building in Leeds (225 feet) and one of the larg
est town halls in Britain. When built the western side of the basement housed thirteen cells, a police office and accommodation for the jailer and his wife (a converted cell). Queen Victoria visited Leeds to open the new town hall. She was accompanied by Prince Albert, and it is said that he remarked that ‘Leeds seemed in need of a good theatre, and that nothing was more calculated to promote the culture and raise the tone of the people.’

  Charles Dickens visited Harrogate in 1858 and noted, ‘Harrogate is the queerest place with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper reading and dining.’

  1857

  Felix Mendelssohn passed through Manchester in 1847, performing with the decidedly inferior orchestra of the Gentlemen’s Concert Club. The director of the orchestra, one of a strong German community in the city, challenged conductor Charles Hallé, born Carl Hallé in Westphalia in 1819, to come to Manchester and improve it. Hallé, previously living and working in Paris but driven to England by the 1848 revolution, a friend and aficionado of Chopin and Lizst, contemporary of Wagner and Grieg, whose musical awareness was formed during Beethoven’s lifetime and extended to the time of Debussy and Satie, accepted.

  Manchester had a lively music scene at the time, and discerning audiences, but lacked a visionary with intimate knowledge of the structure and personality of classical music. Forming Britain’s first permanent professional symphony orchestra in 1857, Hallé spent the next thirty-seven years as charismatic promoter and conductor of the famous orchestra that would take his name. He was driven by intellectual ideals and a deep belief in the civilising influence of music, but possessed a salesman’s commercial energy, familiarising northerners with the orchestral works of all the great composers. This was the time when the idea of a classical music repertoire was being enshrined, the masters being established as mainstream geniuses, with music beginning to symbolise national and civic status rather than remaining mere entertainment. Hallé aimed to do for music what the great galleries and exhibitions had done for painting and sculpture: to organise and define taste, and, exploiting and even shaping the desires and appetites of the new middle class in the first industrial city, create a grand soundtrack to a society that had so recently transformed itself, in the process creating a cultural representation of self-improvement in direct contrast to the raucous reflection of street life in free and easy public houses and music halls. Hallé was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1888.

  1856

  Novelist and chronicler Elizabeth Gaskell wrote of Yorkshire men, ‘Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, perhaps, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life, something be derived from their rough Norse ancestry. They have a quick perception of character, and a keen sense of humour. The dwellers among them must be prepared for certain uncomplimentary, though most likely true, observations pithily expressed.’

  A nineteenth-century marvel and widely hailed as the city of the future, Manchester represented a break from the past. What Manchester did that was so new and different was simple – it specialised. The city threw its lot in with one industry, textiles. To its supporters, Manchester’s textile industry represented the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, the vindication of the division of labour and specialisation. To one detractor, a German writer named Karl Marx, Manchester’s boom period was less admirable. He loathed the inequality he saw – a few wealthy mill owners and thousands of impoverished workers – and deplored the dehumanisation of humans doing repetitive work like machines. But like its supporters, Marx saw Manchester as a precursor of a future in which places consolidate economic activity into a single industry and then produce a single kind of product with terrible efficiency.

  ‘Our journey between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a rich tract of country, but along a valley walled by bleak, ridgy hills, extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands, with here and there a plantation of trees,’ wrote novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby in Liverpool during the mid-1850s. ‘The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the tickets to be taken, just before entering the Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of the famous town of razors and pen knives, enveloped in a cloud of its own diffusing. My impressions of it are extremely vague and misty – or rather, smoky – for Sheffield seems to me smokier than Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham, smokier than all England besides, unless Newcastle be the exception. It might have been Pluto’s own metropolis, shrouded in sulphurous vapour.’

  1855

  It is nearly forty years since Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice, and the social landscape of England is in transition in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South. The aristocrat who lives a life of leisure while his tenants work his fields in southern England is being replaced by the common man who works his way up to a position of wealth and power in the factory towns of the north. First published as a magazine serial of twenty-two instalments in Household Words – edited by her mentor Charles Dickens – North and South was expanded by Mrs Gaskell and published in book format in 1855. The story explores some of Gaskell’s favourite topics: social division and class struggle, religious faith and doubt, and the landscape of mid-Victorian England as it changed from agricultural nation to industrial giant.

  North and South (originally called Margaret Hale after its principal character until Charles Dickens made Gaskell change it) starts in a rose-covered country cottage in the south of England where Margaret Hale lives with her pastor father, her mother and their servants. Margaret loves the outdoors: she sketches nature and spends a carefree and idyllic youth roaming the countryside and helping neighbours with various acts of charity. But towards the end of Margaret’s teens her father announces that he has abandoned the Church, and because of this the family is uprooted to Milton (apparently based on Gaskell’s hometown of Manchester) to start again.

  Starting life anew in Milton comes hard to Margaret. She knows no one and is unfamiliar with the ways of the town, but Margaret Hale is one of the strongest female characters in English literature. She immediately sets to work finding a place to live, puts on a brave face in front of her troubled family and steadies them with her perseverance. Margaret soon makes friends with some of the mill workers and sympathises with their complaints against their harsh employers. This was a turbulent age and climbing the ladder was difficult. Mill hands worked under terrible conditions and often had poor health, while mill masters were sometimes cruel.

  1854

  Queen Victoria visited York, her one and only visit to the city. According to the York Press, ‘She was allegedly asked to pay for her meal at the Royal Station Hotel. She was shocked and said she would never visit York again. Apparently, whenever the Royal train passed through York afterwards she always made sure the blinds were firmly pulled down!’

  1853

  Until 1853 the short drop was used in Lancaster when hanging criminals. This resulted in a slow death by strangulation and was replaced by the more humane long drop. We still use sayings rooted in these practices. To hurry death, a victim sometimes had their ‘leg pulled’ by a ‘hanger-on’, while some people think that the practice of selling the rope after a hanging (by the inch at sixpence a time, as a lucky charm) was ‘money for old rope’.

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  I never clearly understood what it was my dad actually did at BP and Shell Mex, what was going on with the new computers. I think he worked in the clerical department, but I’m not sure what I’m basing that on. The job didn’t seem to turn him on, so he wasn’t likely to talk about it much, except, occasionally, when something good happened – promotion, I think, to something called a team leader, which appeared to involve being in charge of about five people. Whatever it was he did, it lasted the longest of all the jobs he ever had, at least until 1972 or ’73. It was also the last real job he ever had; after that he worked selling things, door to door, which meant travelling the streets of Stockport, facing up to pestered,
irritated people opening and shutting doors in his face, or just humouring him, trying to place his suspect accent. Possibly sometimes he followed in the footsteps of Lowry, briefly glimpsing strange, unknowable other lives, searching for inspiration in the fading, failing world, into streets and alleys which for my dad seemed to take the form of prison bars.

  By the time I was ready to ask him how he spent his days and what his job title was, it was too late for him to tell me. We didn’t talk much about anything outside of football – never had conversations about life or death, or family, or money – and the only time we drifted, or smashed, into anything that might be considered serious was because he was shouting at me about something I had done wrong, or he thought I had done wrong, turning on me with a cornered look in his eyes that came from his mother, and also from the dark that started out deep inside him and increasingly made it to the surface. It was no use arguing back. God knows where that might have ended up, not that in the end the ending could have been any worse. I wonder if this is why I cannot remember what my dad sounded like, except I know for sure, somehow, that he never absorbed any of the accent or slang of the area where he ended up, facing the end. He would withdraw far into himself, as if deep inside he found the best clues about who he was and what to do next.

  For me and my dad, Reddish was mostly a base for talking about and watching Manchester City. Together we watched them rise from the Second Division in 1965 to (surprising) First Division champions in 1967/8; we were there in Newcastle for the final match of the season to see City win the League in a style approaching the delirious, scoring four goals, beginning and ending our long Saturday journey into a far, far north and back at sleepy Reddish North station, which had all the presence of a mumbled aside.