The North
Page 29
‘From Liverpool to Manchester, the land is generally level, and is almost wholly applied to agriculture; but in traversing the country from Manchester to Todmorden, which is on the extreme northern verge of the district, probably not one mile of continuously level ground will be passed over. Betwixt Bury on the western, and Oldham, on the eastern verge, some comparatively level tracts are found, as those of Radcliffe, Whitemoss, and Failsworth; but they are small as compared with the distance, and all the remaining parts of this northern district, are composed of ups and downs, hillocks, and dells, bent, twisted, and turned in every direction. Take a sheet of stiffened paper for instance, crumple it up in your hand, then just distend it again, and you will have a pretty fair specimen of the surface of the northern part of south Lancashire. The hills are chiefly masses of valuable stone and coal; on the north, some heathlands overlap them, but their sides are often brilliant with a herbage that yields the best of milk and butter, while of all the valleys, you shall traverse none where a stream of water does not run at your side, blabbing all manner of imaginary tidings, and asking unthought of, and unanswerable questions.’ Samuel Bamford, Walks in Lancashire, self-published in 1844. Bamford wrote of the bridge which crossed the ‘turbid and black’ Irwell, ‘Venice hath her Bridge of Sighs: Manchester its Bridge of Tears.’
From Cheshire, Lewis Carroll moved at the age of eleven to Croft-on-Tees in north-east England near the outskirts of Darlington – noted by Daniel Defoe on his travels 120 years before as containing nothing remarkable but dirt. Carroll’s father was by then rector of Croft church and archdeacon of Richmond (1843–68). The River Tees is at Croft the dividing line between Yorkshire and County Durham, and on the middle of the bridge which crosses it is a stone which shows where one county ends and the other begins. Carroll’s poem ‘Jabberwocky’ is thought to be based on the legend of the man-eating poisoned-breath dragon of County Durham called the Sockburn Worm, which lived just across the Tees, the story perhaps rooted in a vicious leader of Viking raids.
Much of the two Alice books is said to be set in and around Croft church and rectory. In the church is a sedilia – a seat for the clergy built into the wall – and at one end of it is the carved stone face of a lion. Viewed from one of the pews it has a wide smile, but looked at from a standing position the grin cannot be seen – so it disappears, and then appears, like that of the Cheshire Cat. ‘Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, thought Alice, but a grin without a cat? It’s the most curious thing I’ve seen in all my life!’
Lewis Carroll, descended from two ancient and distinguished northern families with long traditions of service to Church and State, can be claimed as a northerner. His Mad Hatter was perhaps inspired by the effects of mercury poisoning on the central nervous system – confused speech, distorted vision, mental confusion and anti-social behaviour – plus trembling and loss of teeth. Hat makers, typically working in poorly ventilated workshops, cured animal pelts by brushing a solution of mercury compound on fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more efficiently. Carroll was aware of mercury poisoning from living near Stockport, a centre of hat manufacture. From out of his Mad Hatter, rabbit-hole, looking-glass world we can see coming not only such figures as Joyce, Freud, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Benjamin, Nabokov, Beckett, Waugh, Lacan, Borges, Burroughs, Pynchon and García Márquez, but also much of the character, image and mood of twentieth-century popular culture.
67
One day I looked up into the sky, which I often did because above our Reddish heads and houses, you could see the planes coming in over the Pennines on their way west to Ringway Airport arranged inside chain-link fences at the southern edge of Wythenshawe. Now, I couldn’t tell you in detail what was going on in my life during my years in Reddish. Day inevitably followed day, sleep followed sleep, walk followed walk, school year followed school year. I could now only approximate with hindsight when I first went to North Reddish Infants School, or when I moved up a stage into the Junior School, aged seven, sometime in September 1964. I can now look up cricket matches and football games and say, well, I saw my first Manchester City match on Saturday 16 October 1965, and they won 3–1 against Crystal Palace, and I bought my first programme, for sixpence, with a black and white photograph of their empty Maine Road ground set among rows of terraces positioned in the middle of a plainly designed light blue and white cover.
The ground had opened forty-two years before, built on a former brick works in the middle of cramped, boxy Moss Side houses braided with back alleyways and based on Glasgow’s Hampden Park but with a capacity of 80,000, the second largest in England behind the just-opened Wembley Stadium. Maine Road was originally called Dog Kennel Lane, renamed because it was where the temperance movement in Manchester was based in the late nineteenth century, the new name inspired by the law which prohibited the sale of alcohol in the state of Maine in 1851. I didn’t know any of this in the 1960s, and I took the name of the ground simply to mean it was the main place in Manchester to go and watch football, and Manchester United’s ground, Old Trafford, seemed, well, old. Supporting a team playing at Dog Kennel Lane might not have been as alluring.
City were in the Second Division when I started supporting them, as always in the shadow of United, but this was the season where they began a brief but astonishing golden age. They were promoted that year under the inspiring management of wise old Joe Mercer and young wide boy Malcolm Allison – brought in from the south to add otherness and a more continental influence, with a team that starred right winger Mike Summerbee of Preston, centre half George Heslop of Northumberland, left half Alan Oakes and his cousin left back Glyn Pardoe both of Winsfield, Cheshire, Colin Bell of Hesleden, County Durham, right half Mike Doyle of Ashton, goalie Ken Mulhearn of Liverpool, who had replaced stocky, gum-chewing Harry Dowd of Salford and inside left Neil Young of Fallowfield. As with Lancashire County Cricket Club, which had a great side when I followed them, as soon as I started watching City, taken by my dad, they became a great side full of northerners with the odd outsider, just like the England team that won the World Cup in 1966.
I could, then, tell you where I was on Saturday 26 April 1969. I was in the front room at Westbourne Grove wearing my blue and white scarf and ribboned City rosette watching live on television City beat Leicester in the FA Cup Final, with the winning goal scored by lanky Neil Young of Fallowfield. That was more or less the only live match shown on television all season. I could tell you where I was on 22 March 1969. I was with my dad wearing a woollen bobble hat knitted by my mum, standing behind the goal at Villa Park at the City end watching Manchester City beat Everton to get to the final, with a late winning goal scored by big gangly Tommy Booth of Middleton. (Named because it was in the middle between Manchester – four miles to the north-east – and Rochdale – five miles to the south-west. Mid-twentieth-century Middleton, on the River Irk, was typically northern in how it combined three distinct forms of urban–rural living: modern suburbs right next to mill-town terraces and, in between, surviving in areas of near-unspoilt farmland, stray secret lanes of isolated dwellings, these sometimes being imposing Victorian properties with substantial gardens. This created a jumble of workers’ back-to-backs, suburbia containing a more middle-class type and a lingering scattering of farm-working peasant stock tucked away in crooked cottages in sunken lanes.)
I could also tell you where I was at about ten o’clock in the morning on Sunday 4 June 1967. It was three days after the release of Sgt Pepper by the Beatles – which had no impact whatsoever on our home. I was outside the front of our house, mooching about on my own, taking in the air, perhaps making plans for a swoop into the Vale, developing as a ten-year-old useful skills as a daydreamer, and this time I was looking into the sky not expecting to see a plane steadily heading into the airport a few miles behind me the other side of Stockport at a decent, normal height. I wasn’t sure exactly how high decent and normal was, but it was high enough for the planes to mak
e a noise barely louder than a fine even whine.
Alice in Wonderland weather vane at the primary school in Daresbury, Cheshire, Lewis Carroll’s birthplace
But the noise something was making that morning was not some way in the distance; it seemed much closer, but I couldn’t see anything that might be making such a noise. The noise suggested something might be heading right towards me, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I guessed it must be a plane flying low, really low, but there was nothing at all to see. Perhaps finally the mills down the road at Houldsworth Square had come to life again and were making the sort of pained moaning sounds that such vast stranded edifices would surely make if they woke up, wondering what on earth had happened to them, wiping years of sleep from their eyes. Perhaps they were on the move, breaking out of the ground, about to charge up the Gorton Road and make their supernatural escape. The noise got louder. Was it coming from over Reddish Vale? Was it the sound of the viaduct snoring? Had the viaduct got something on its mind it desperately wanted to tell those who lived nearby? Was it trying to speak? Or was it the solitary sleepy Lowry chimney at Jackson’s brickies down Harcourt Street rumbling, about to shoot into the sky, ripping up everything with it, fed up with doing nothing?
I ran inside the house to tell my mum and dad that something odd was happening. No noise this straining and constant that I knew of had ever come this close to Reddish. They were still in bed, having their Sunday lie-in, which allowed my dad, famously grumpy in the early morning, some extra sleep to soothe his accumulating anxieties. (Of course, one-year-old Carol and four-year-old Jayne were in the house as well, somewhere, there to give signs in how they resembled me as to who I might be, but somehow they do not make it into this story, even as extras. In this memory, which seems real but is dreamlike, they would be something of an intrusion and spoil the flow, so the random but functional and precise editing process of memory has made sure they do not feature.) I shouted through my parents’ deeply shut door that something outside was making a funny noise. They seemed to pay no attention. I ran outside again, and by now the noise had passed by. The mills, the viaduct, the chimney had all settled down again, resuming their fixed positions, where, even though they were the largest objects around, they seemed under the surface of Reddish or so visibly from the past they never quite made it to where everyone else was.
When my parents finally got up, I reported the alarming noise, which, as I was already a practised and labelled daydreamer, did not seem to interest them. At some point during the afternoon, the news penetrated – via a neighbour, the radio, the television – that something had indeed happened that morning, a couple of miles away in Stockport, and it was a great deal more than an unexpected noise.
What I had heard was indeed a plane. It was the last flight this plane would ever make, a British Midland flight – Derby Aviation until a name change three years before – chartered by Arrowsmith Holidays. Arrowsmith had been founded in the mid-1940s in Bold Street, Liverpool near Cripps – outfitters for well-to-do ladies of Cheshire and Lancashire – by popular travel pioneer Harry Bowden-Smith. Bowden-Smith helped form the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) in 1950, anticipating the package-holiday boom of the 1960s that doubled airline passengers.
The flight, from Palma, Mallorca (then more usually Majorca with a ‘j’), crashed in the centre of Stockport at seven minutes past ten, plunging into a small scrubby piece of wasteland called Hopes Carr about five miles short of the airport. The plane was a Canadian Air Argonaut C-4, an eighteen-year-old version of the four-engined propeller-driven Douglas DC4, modified to take British Rolls-Royce Merlins – the iconic engine developed in the 1930s used in aircraft like the Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster.
Initially flown by Canadair, the Argonaut was reconfigured for BOAC to carry forty first-class passengers, but when it was sold to British Midland it became a seventy-two seater, and later seventy-eight people would be crammed in. Seeing pictures of it now, it seems far more 1940s wartime than late 1960s jet age with a basic cockpit that verged on the quaint even quirky.
The flight path as the Argonaut made its second approach to Ringway Airport would have been over Bredbury – settled in its ways across the Vale from Westbourne Grove, Reddish. Had I seen it, I may have been tempted to jump on my bike and follow the wounded noise of the doomed plane as it vainly attempted to cross Stockport and keep enough height to get to Ringway. The pilot, forty-one-year-old Captain Harry Marlow, had already attempted to land at the airport, but both starboard engines had malfunctioned and he overshot the runway. Coming round again perilously low to the south-east of Stockport town centre, two of the plane’s four engines abruptly cut out and one propeller started to windmill. One engine failed because of a fault in the fuel system; the reason for the other failure remains unclear. If the problems had occurred at 15,000 feet there might have been a solution, but the plane was now only a dangerous few hundred feet above ground. Problems with the fuel system had caused an incident in 1953 with a BOAC Argonaut, but the information had not been passed on.
Subsequently there was a suggestion that the pilot had been searching for open land away from a populated area, perhaps nearby Vernon Park or Woodbank Park, but the official conclusion was that he was still hoping to make the airport when the engines abruptly cut out over the one empty space in the area. Some witnesses reported that the plane did appear to make a sudden shift in direction before crashing as if the pilot had suddenly spotted the wasteland. However this might have been the plane hitting a three-storey building, which ripped off a wing.
Captain Marlow survived, but head injuries wiped all memories of the crash. He was cleared of blame, the understanding being that he had courageously managed to bring down the almost unmanageably slow plane into the one empty space in the immediate area. His efforts – struggling to hold the plane straight and to maintain height with dead engines, windmilling propeller, low height, slow speed, buildings and ground fast approaching – were such that in a reconstruction the pilot’s seat frame was bent by sheer body pressure alone. A BBC film showed the test pilot moments after he attempted to keep the simulated plane under control – he looked shattered. The sound recording of Marlow himself and the air controller at Ringway Airport dealing with the real events was remarkably calm and low key, but at that point the pilot still felt he might be able to reach the runway. Flying at a mere 800 feet, still eight miles from the airport, two miles outside Stockport town centre, Marlow was asked if he could maintain height. ‘Just about,’ he coolly replied. The complete loss of power to the engines was yet to happen, but when it did, it was right over the centre of town a few hundred yards up the hill from Merseyway.
After hitting the side of a building, demolishing a garage, wrecking some cars and breaking into pieces, the plane burst into flames. Where it ended up on the edge of the scrubland was surrounded by terraced houses, shops, garages, a block of flats and a gas container, next to a police station and mere hundreds of yards from Stockport Infirmary and the town hall. Those swimming at the time in Stockport Baths a few hundred yards down the hill towards Mersey Square at the top of the steps above the old art deco Plaza cinema claimed they felt a rumble through the water.
Incredibly, there were no fatalities on the ground, even though roof tiles were ripped off by the plane’s vortex and people in houses could see those on board through the plane’s windows. Twelve of the eighty-four crew and passengers survived, some, astoundingly, by walking through the holes that appeared in the plane as it initially broke into three pieces, although most were seriously injured. Seventy-two died, people from across the north, from Sheffield, Stockport, Bradford, Leeds, Chester, Newcastle, Middleton, Blackpool, Salford and Cheadle.
Many of those who died survived the actual crash at the back of the plane, which escaped the impact relatively unscathed, but broke their legs on impact. The seats concertinaed together and they were trapped, unable to flee the burning plane, which was engulfed by flames and blac
k smoke, explosions ripping it apart. Local people and members of the emergency services dragged injured and terrified passengers from the mutilated fuselage and attempted to get inside the plane, vicious heat blistering their skin and jagged metal gashing their arms and legs. Some they couldn’t move however much they tried because they were trapped between the seats. Those still conscious were screaming as the remains of the plane were completely engulfed in flames. Rescuers beaten back by the heat could do nothing as people died. It soon ceased to be a rescue and was simply about recovering bodies. Temporary mortuaries were set up at the local Salvation Army citadel, Stockport Sunday School and a garage.
Hundreds of curious if ghoulish people came to see the scene of the crash – someone even turned up with a chair and picnic table – and by the early evening there were ice-cream vans and a hot-dog stand and teeming numbers of press. One photograph of the aftermath as cranes lift pieces of the plane behind an intact section of brick wall in front of forlorn-looking terraced streets has a bank of spectators in sensible hats and coats in the foreground looking at the activity as though they were watching Stockport County – a mile across town, the other side of the station, towards where the plane should have landed if all had been well or at least not so tragically conclusive.
The live coverage on ITN was oddly presented by endlessly cheerful disc jockey, continuity announcer and sidekick of goofy Liverpool comic Ken Dodd, David ‘Diddy’ Hamilton, who stood in neat suit and tie on the cobbles in front of a charred pile of shattered metal laced with bits of corrugated iron, fire hoses and random pieces of splintered wood, wearing an appropriately grave expression. Around him milled sightseers, police and firemen, and a man in a white trench coat sizing up the mangled metal with a fag in his mouth. At the time Hamilton lived in Marple a few miles away, and ITN didn’t have anyone in the area for the live broadcast. When he was told to get to the centre of Stockport as quickly as possible because a plane had crashed, he thought it was his station manager playing a joke on him on his day off.