The North

by Paul Morley

  I developed skills in mental arithmetic and by seven could speed through the times tables all the way up to 12 and accurately add up columns of figures faster than my father, who was himself good with numbers. He reckoned this was not because of anything that was happening at school, but because of the imaginary games of cricket I played, using a dice to create the scores and carefully filling out scorecards. He first assumed I was making up the total scores, the 324 for 5s, the 123 for 7s, the bowlers’ figures of 3 for 56 from 9 overs, but one day checked one of my scorecards and was pleasantly surprised to see that it indeed all added up.

  I liked the fact that racing through the times tables and adding up figures seemed to impress adults, and it led to a faint suggestion that in his own quiet way my dad was quite proud of me. Even though day-to-day interaction tended to be either remote or sturdy male closeness when it came to Manchester City, I would ultimately say he was on my side. He wanted the best for me but perhaps wasn’t clear how he could make that happen except by ensuring I took school seriously and didn’t daydream on my own in my bedroom, stuck in my cupboard or in the back garden. I think he imagined I could make it as an accountant, a profession looked upon with respect, and that would give my life a nondescript but pleasing steadiness he never had. To be an accountant would have been his dream, to a point, and under the circumstances – where we lived, who we were, what our background was – it was the very best he could see for me. It was better than working in a prison.

  I wished the sports teacher would treat me with similar hope, but he saw me as the sporting equivalent of someone who could not add up two plus two. He treated me like a plodding centre half, as a sissy when I couldn’t even tackle and head the ball, as someone who fielded not in the glamorous edgy slips but out on the boundary, where you put the kids who couldn’t catch, who lacked agility, who you wanted out of the way.

  There would have been history classes at school, in which I suppose I learned all that I would ever get to know about the Romans, the Vikings, 1066, the stony clichés of history as superficially pressed into young minds already being distracted by sport, TV, pop – distilled rudimentary information that would be the extent of my historical knowledge for decades. No stories of the local heroes and heroines, villains and victims, of the Industrial Revolution, no mention of Sir William Houldsworth, of the history of Reddish, or even of Stockport or Manchester, or the nearby Tame and Mersey, flowing with the grainy dirt and greedy one-way pace of history, through urban blight and glorious views, no sense of how we were, where we were, why we were there, what surrounded us, what those massive buildings were around Houldsworth Square and how they ended up there. If we ever learned about the Nico Ditch a few hundred yards away, it passed right through me, not made into something exciting, but remaining a pointless muddy gash in the ground round the back of the park.

  No northern history seeped through the walls of a school built by Cheers and Smith of Blackburn in 1907 at a cost of £11,000, six years after Reddish was absorbed into Stockport and a year before the library, swimming pool and fire station block was completed. I knew none of that for years, until I found it at the far end of the Internet, over forty years after I had left the school. It is described in a book on buildings in Lancashire and Manchester as ‘A low nicely grouped gabled complex, given distinction by the tall chimneys with flared tops of horizontal channelled brick, and a pretty flèche over the hall with a slender slated spire.’ If you had asked me when I was attending the school how old it was, I would not have known if it had been built in the 1950s, which seemed a lifetime ago, or the 1850s, which seemed a little bit before that.

  There were two playgrounds, one for the infants and one for the juniors, and when I was nine or ten and in the juniors, the children in the infants, on the other side of the wall, seen through a locked gate, just three or four years younger, seemed like babies. They were of no interest to me. But at eleven, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, the girls in my class were becoming of interest, throwing invisible darts of intrigue in my direction, sometimes accurately enough to provoke a deep, amorphous response.

  By the time I finished at the school I was as northern as any of the other kids in my class, in the rest of the school, who came in from around Denton, Longsight, Levenshulme and the rest of North Reddish, where they had been born. Surrey, Kent, the Isle of Wight had mostly melted away into the ground, give or take a lingering fondness for Surrey Cricket Club and its opening batsman John Edrich. I had without knowing it, without being tempted by friends or alienated by the bullies, without anything being explained to me about local history or local people, invented myself as someone from the north: Cheshire to an extent, Lancashire around the edges, Manchester close by, Stockport at the near limits. So of the north – speaking it, living in it, searching through it – that I didn’t even notice, and didn’t notice that people around me spoke in a Stockport accent. What I did notice were the peculiar accents of my dad’s Kent relatives, which seemed stretched out, distended and unlikely compared with the normal everyday way we spoke around Reddish.

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  1848

  The anonymous publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life caused a sensation. This was a year of revolution in Europe, and the novel’s socio-political subject matter marked a major new direction in British fiction, especially fiction by women, to which reviewers responded with either excitement or unease.

  In 1848 the average life expectancy for the poorest people of Preston was said to be only 18.23 years. (Preston has added at least one word to the English language – teetotal. This came from a meeting held at the old Temperance Hall in 1833. Joseph Livesey, a founder of the temperance movement, was leading the meeting when Dicky Turner, who had a profound stammer, stumbled during his oath, ‘total’ coming out as ‘tee-tee-total’.)

  1847

  In July publishers Thomas Cautley Newby accept Wuthering Heights, which is published in December under Emily Brontë’s pseudonym Ellis Bell. Set in eighteenth-century England when social and economic values were changing, patriarchal values are juxtaposed with natural elements. Brontë explores themes of revenge, religion, class and prejudice while plumbing the depths of the metaphysical and human psyche. Brontë’s own home on the bleak Yorkshire Moors provides the setting for the at times mystical passions of the Byronic Heathcliff and Catherine.

  1846

  The history of Blackpool has been largely determined by its position in relation to the heavily populated towns and cities of Lancashire and by rapid changes in transportation and economic conditions. The town began attracting holiday visitors in 1735, when the first guesthouse opened. However it was when the railway arrived in 1846 that holidaymakers began to arrive in their thousands.

  1845

  In a single decade, 1835–1845, scholar Robert Fishman observed in Bourgeois Utopias: the Rise and Fall of Suburbia, ‘Manchester achieved a higher degree of suburbanisation than London did in the whole century from 1770 to 1870.’

  The office in which Friedrich Engels, long-time collaborator of Karl Marx, worked would become the first floor of upmarket department store Kendal’s. Engels was sent to Manchester from Germany in 1842 to be trained in business. His father hoped that his son’s foolish romantic radicalism would be knocked out of him. Instead, the young Engels made contact with the workers’ movement and collected material for his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845. Engels began to collaborate with Marx and together they developed their political views. Engels’ time in Manchester led him to stress the power of the working class, encouraging Marx to shift his emphasis from the study of radical philosophy to ‘political economy’.

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  As well as the school and the local library, both of them sixty years old, I was educated by playing with other children and watching television. TV wasn’t then such a constant distraction from the outdoors as it would become, and I played mostly out on the street with the Co
nservative Club firmly stuck on the corner. We would play cowboys and Indians, in the days when every boy owned a gun – a cap gun to make a bang, a water pistol for laughs, a spud gun if you wanted to shoot something, an air gun if particularly rascally, as if the Wild West had any relevance to our lives in Reddish. When we played Robin Hood, it was as though in the history of the world, he had emerged out of Jesus – who had something to do with the Romans, who had lived in Chester, which had a castle – and had led to cowboys and Indians and perhaps the American Civil War, which had then led to the Second World War, which had led to where we were, seeing it all play out at the Essoldo.

  Pavements were chalked for hopscotch and walls had three white uneven stumps drawn on them for cricket and/or shaky goalposts with a wobbly bar for football. You would be ‘it’ and chase others so that you could touch them, and then he or she would be ‘it’, but you weren’t allowed to touch the person who had just touched you. Yard gates and back entrances along alleyways were used for hide and seek and hiding behind to shoot someone with a small piece of potato.

  The draining reality of limited, limiting wartime rations still hung in the Reddish air at the same time as the shiny consumer world was picking up energy and sounding an ever-present mesmerising chiming in my gullible consciousness. The backdrop to my life through the television, the local shops, kids’ shared excitement and boredom, and scraps of adult conversation made up a world where for mash you got Smash, where beans meant Heinz, where chimps sold you tea, Frosties were grrrrreat, glossy paint was sold to you by a shaggy Dulux dog, Stork and nothing else was what you spread on bread, you put a tiger in your tank, the Milky Bars were on the Milky Bar Kid, who looked like a very clean almost sinister version of some of your friends, hands that did dishes were as soft as your face with mild green Fairy Liquid, hot chocolate again and again whispered like a mantra, drinking chocolate, hot chocolate drinking chocolate hot chocolate drinking chocolate, a Mars a day helped you work rest and play, Milky Way was the sweet they said you could eat between meals but your dad wouldn’t let you, although if you negotiated with him he might let you have an occasional Twix because this counted as a biscuit not chocolate, Colgate toothpaste gave you a ring of confidence, Daz washing powder for some reason gave your wash a blue tinge.

  Berserk television creatures mingled with routine Reddish reality. A pair of hyperactive wooden puppet pigs in waistcoats with strangulated high-pitched voices and dead eyes sang pop songs. Real rats, mice, moles, guinea pigs and hamsters with names like Roderick and Hammy lived in houses on the riverbank in black and white, sailed boats, drove cars, flew planes and had random adventures, told to us by zookeeper turned children’s TV presenter Johnny Morris, who gave each animal its own apparently appropriate ‘human’ voice, and spoke over and over again one word for the owl living in a tree: Who? Who? Who? I never did find out who, but felt vaguely depressed and even disturbed by the clearly rattled animal’s clumsy, nonsensical and finally completely monotonous antics.

  A seedy boisterous fox with a pervert’s laugh, a squirrel called Tufty who was meant to teach us how to cross the road and had a fan club that I joined, or was made to join, a hallucinatory family of poor crackpot American farmers who had struck oil, black gold, Texas style, made millions and moved to a mansion, some other crackpot Americans, stranded on a desert island, both shows featuring dolled-up hair-sprayed glamour girls with unprecedented ways of moving that were almost painfully intriguing to a nine-year-old boy, a smarmy dubious American who lived with a talking horse, another smarmy dubious American, who was married to a friendly witch, the creepily silent Sooty and the honking Sweep, who lived on the ends of a bald man’s hands, a real kangaroo in hot faraway Australia who said as little as Sooty but was more motivated and saved more lives, pink woollen puppets speaking in squeaked tongue who lived on the moon, the incandescently sensible Blue Peter, the even more sensible Jackanory, in which someone read you stories in a voice someone had decided was funny, or soothing, the even more sensible Vision On, which seemed to suggest that art was something you did if you felt a bit ill. Crackerjack combined the sensible with issuing a warning about the perils, and thrills, of intoxication.

  In opposition to the sensible if anxious grown-ups encouraging you to believe that the world was full of fun and things to learn about, the last few minutes before the news – a world where fun and learning had gone very wrong indeed described by elderly men in unwrinkled suits and sober ties apparently there to restore calm – contained a series of five-minute programmes that led you to think the world was not that far removed from your weirdest dreams: Hector’s House, The Magic Roundabout, Captain Pugwash. Or you would find yourself confronted by unhinged cartoon gurus offering oblique advice about logic, mortality and language – Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Top Cat, Yogi Bear, Pixie and Dixie, Scooby Doo, Deputy Dawg.

  The future was either the delirious solemn puppetry of Gerry Anderson – Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Joe 90 – or Dr Who, who was like a cross between God, your teachers and one or more of your older male relatives, but not your dad, who, it seemed, was not particularly in favour of time travel. With your mum and dad, everyone putting away their secretive appetites and instincts, uncomfortably and comfortably sharing an experience you might all enjoy, you watched Morecambe and Wise, Mike Yarwood, It’s a Knockout, Opportunity Knocks, Ask the Family, Dixon of Dock Green, Softly, Softly and Coronation Street, which was like where you lived, but more, and less, so, nostalgic for a close-knit north that never was, but could have been, and sometimes, when you came to think about it, was closer than most things on the telly to the stricken, striving, embattled northern state of play and the streets right outside your door.

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  1844

  As towns expanded with the coming of industrialisation, it became increasingly difficult for ordinary people to buy unadulterated food. In 1844 a group of twenty-eight men in Rochdale formed the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society. Their objective was to open a shop where they could sell wholesome products at a fair price. Each of them contributed twenty shillings, producing an initial capital of twenty-eight pounds. They began in a disused warehouse at 31 Toad Lane on 21 December 1844, opening between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. To start with they sold only five commodities: oatmeal, flour, sugar, butter and tallow candles, although as turnover grew they were able to add other items, including tobacco and tea. They refused to give credit, but for the first time paid customers a share of the profits – a dividend.

  The rules of the society became a model for others, and within a decade there were nearly 1,000 cooperative stores operating on similar principles across the country. The objectives of the Rochdale Pioneers went far beyond running a cooperative store; through the combined efforts of working people they aimed to create manufacturing enterprises and fully self-supporting communities on land which they themselves would own.

  By 1844 there were railway lines connecting Manchester with London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Bolton. French politician and economist Léon Faucher recorded, ‘The Leeds railway connects Manchester with Oldham, which contains 60,000 inhabitants; also with Bury, Rochdale and Halifax, each of which numbers from 24,000 to 26,000 souls; the Bolton railway connects it with Bolton, Preston and Chorley, which together have more than a hundred factories and 114,000 inhabitants. On the Sheffield line a few minutes suffice to reach the establishments of Stalybridge, Ashton, Dukinfield and Hyde, peopled by more than 80,000 inhabitants; the Birmingham line incorporates it with, so to speak, the 50,000 inhabitants of Stockport; that of Liverpool connects it with Wigan and Warrington. Thus we have 15 or 16 seats of industry forming this great constellation.’

  A committee appointed by a meeting of Huddersfield citizens to survey the town reported on 5 August 1844, ‘It is notorious that there are whole streets in the town of Huddersfield, and many courts and alleys, which are neither flagged, paved, sewered, nor drained; where garbage and filth of every descripti
on are left on the surface to ferment and rot; where pools of stagnant water are almost constant, where the dwellings adjoining are thus necessarily caused to be of an inferior and even filthy description; thus where disease is engendered, and the health of the whole town perilled.’

  When in 1844 Leeds first contemplated sewering the town, it was nervous about the high compensation and attendant legal costs that would be incurred, the consequences of diverting water from the all-important factories, the possibility of sewer seepage into cellar dwellings and the costs and problems of processing the sewage at the outfall. Above all, many members of the corporation wondered whether the whole thing would work.

  Léon Faucher: ‘And thus at the very moment when the engines are stopped, and the counting houses closed, everything which was the thought – the authority – the impulsive force – the moral order of this immense industrial combination flies from the town, and disappears in an instant. The rich man spreads his couch amid the beauties of the surrounding country, and abandons the town to the operatives, publicans, mendicants, thieves, and prostitutes, merely taking the precaution to leave behind him a police force, whose duty it is to preserve some little of material order in this pell-mell of society.’