The North

by Paul Morley

  It was hard to resist a trip to see something that was all over the national news. A peculiar sort of muted carnival spirit developed, a perhaps natural response to something unprecedented happening a handful of streets from where you lived. The fact that people had been burned to death trapped in splintered wreckage probably didn’t immediately register. This was an appallingly unique event. It was the first ever urban plane crash in the country, the second worst ever in the United Kingdom at the time, and it remains one of the worst ever air disasters in Britain. There are two memorials of the crash – one for those who died, and one for those involved in the rescue, who gave aid and saved twelve lives: ‘All were faced with the true horror of tragedy and did not turn away.’ The disaster led to several improvements in airliner design, and as a result crash landings became considerably more survivable.

  For days after, once the fitful smouldering had died down, there was a bulky but very vulnerable-looking tail fin stuck at an angle at the edge of the scrub, near a stiff heavy-hearted Lowry chimney standing guard like some Gothic exclamation mark among the now especially melancholy and seemingly shocked buildings that had somehow been missed. The tail fin, inner framework exposed like some macabre skeleton, poked up towards the sky it had so suddenly fallen out of, a little embarrassed to be so terribly caught out, next to the sort of everyday spiked metal railings Lowry liked to paint. There is no sign of planes in Lowry’s work because his universe existed in an alternative corridor in which the nineteenth century of his birth maintained dogmatic control over environment and atmosphere. But he was painting during these years, and the sight of this charred fin surrounded by bits of an annihilated plane sunk in the midst of packed northern streets moistened by the fire brigade’s desperate efforts and containing a few speechless pin-thin witnesses could easily have become a Lowry canvas. A canvas containing his five cherished wilting colours that conveyed how a fast new world was breaking up the old world so ruthlessly and unkindly.

  There is film footage from a few weeks later of a stunned-looking Captain Marlow – slicked-down short back and sides and three-quarter-length sheepskin coat – being shown the thousands of fragmented pieces of plane that had been put back together as well as possible. He may have survived but looks like he’s not sure that’s necessarily a good thing, at least not while he’s being shown bits of the plane and the huge tears that split the craft apart. Of all the people examining the remains, he does look like the one person who was actually on the bloody thing, even if he can’t remember what happened. Something in his wired, thin-skinned, formal demeanour reminds me of my father in his more troubled moments. Both had a certain amount of trouble dealing with Stockport one way or another.

  Marlow was forced to give up flying on ‘medical grounds’. Bowden-Smith of Arrowsmith completely lost heart seeing so many of his customers killed and in 1969 sold out to cheap-flight pioneer Freddie Laker, acknowledged mentor of Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic. Michael Bishop, born near Ringway Airport, was the manager on duty at the airport that day, and was responsible for informing family members about the crash. ‘If you’re twenty-five and you walk into a room and you have to tell fifty people they’ve lost their husbands, wives, daughters, sons, it has a certain impact on you.’ Two years later he was general manager of British Midland; by 1972 he was managing director. In 1975, Manchester (Ringway) Airport was formally renamed Manchester International Airport, but locals were still calling it Ringway years after, and I still find myself calling it that even though it has been plain Manchester Airport since 1986.

  Back in Westbourne Grove that Sunday, only after an unusually subdued David Hamilton had sent his shaken reports into our cheap seventeen-inch rented television did my dad accept that something shocking had indeed happened in Stockport. As to whether I had actually heard the plane as it droned and groaned through its final few minutes in the sky, he was not convinced. He felt that I was looking for a connection with it, as if somehow this made me feel important, even, in a weird way, glamorous. I was making up a marginal role for myself in the incident, exploiting the tantalising nearness of the disaster, taking my tendency to bend the truth, to make life a little more exciting than it might otherwise be, to new extremes. He became quite angry that I was claiming I had been some sort of witness to what would be called ‘the blackest day in Stockport’s history’. People had died in horrible circumstances, and I shouldn’t be craving some sort of distinction by association. I was not allowed to talk about it any more.

  His anger and distaste, abrasively expressed, distorted my memory of that day, so that ultimately I do not know if I actually did hear the noise and try to raise my sleeping mum and dad, or made it up later in the day when the news rolled in, to impress them or at least put myself at the centre of attention in our house, which my dad and his furies tended to dominate. It certainly increased my self-esteem to feel that at least in our household I had got to something first, that I had actually experienced what was now on our television, the one we watched England win the World Cup on, where the world and history itself seemed to be formed. I was aware that the air crash was the first real thing to enter history that had happened in my vicinity, and something inside me wanted to be part of it. Something inside me felt that if I could somehow enter that history, it might take me with it; it might take me beyond where I had been placed by previous history, a history that had run out of energy. This was fresh, new history, and as much as it contained oblivion, sadness and pain, it was also something that would have an effect on reality itself, and the way that I could make sense of and make changes to that reality.

  My dad simply assumed I was lying. I was living too much in my head, and trying to take this disaster inside myself and play with it, make it part of my life, was a bad sign. Who knew where such thinking, such a self-centred approach to life and death, reality and history and my place in it, would end?

  My dad a little too calmly watched sombre David Hamilton, Ken Dodd’s jolly friend, ask a policeman what time the crash had happened: ‘Shortly after ten past ten as far as I can recall . . . there were two explosions, I think, and then the plane fired and we were driven back by fire from getting any more out,’ then ask a rescuer what he had seen: ‘Well, when I got here the plane was blazing; there was nothing left of the cab, only instruments all over the place,’ and perhaps he thought, This is what happens in Stockport, where I live. Planes can just drop out of the sky and blow a hole in the ground and wipe people out and my son treats it like an adventure that he can make up stories about as if he was somehow involved.

  So, I cannot remember for sure if I actually did hear the plane, or just pretended I had in the hours afterwards, or even slipped the experience over time into a whole new zone of plausible but flexible memory and came to imagine that I had either really heard it, or made it up later in the day, or a few days later. Surely, if a plane crashed near my house, it would have passed very close to that house on its descent, and the noise of its crippled engines, loud and vibrating, could easily have been heard. I would have known about it. It would be something I remember – the moment I brushed against, or wished I had, the shadowy, inexorable, astounding, perplexing, ultimately routine ebb and flow of history. How could I forget?

  68

  1843

  Poet Laureate Robert Southey died on 21 March 1843. Ten days later Queen Victoria sanctioned the lord chamberlain’s letter offering the vacant post to William Wordsworth. He was almost seventy-three and thought of as the greatest living English poet. He initially refused the appointment, pleading old age, but assured by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, that there was no longer any obligation to produce verse, Wordsworth accepted. Two years later he attended his first royal reception. Of this occasion, the painter Benjamin Haydon wrote, ‘What would Hazlitt say now? The poet of the lakes and mountains in bag-wig, sword and ruffles!’

  In the 1840s, Friedrich Engels wrote of the widespread drunkenness that characterised the inhabitants of England’s in
dustrial areas, leading to declining health and morals, poverty and broken homes – ‘the cheapest way out of Bradford, was via a Tankard, jug, or bottle,’ he noted. In the throat-savaging atmosphere of industry, beer and gin were cheap, and certainly safer to drink than the local water. A German friend of Engels, Georg Weerth, worked as a clerk in Bradford between 1843 and 1846, reluctantly locating there from Bonn following ‘an indiscretion’. From the moment he arrived, he hated Bradford and its more wealthy inhabitants. He described Bradford as the most disgusting manufacturing town in England, ‘dirty, foggy, smoky, cold’, the very home of Lucifer himself. He noted that although it had a larger population than Cologne, it had ‘no theatre, no social life, no decent hotel, no reading room and no civilised human beings – only Yorkshiremen in torn frock coats, shabby hats and gloomy faces.’ Feeling trapped inside what he saw as the hypocritical world of commerce, he took an interest in the appalling conditions of Bradford workers. A doctor friend showed him around local slums, work houses, prisons and hospitals. The workers seemed intelligent and energetic, their bosses barbaric money-grubbers enjoying an unfair share of the good things in life. The monied classes were the villains as far as he was concerned, amassing their wealth by ruining the lives of thousands of workers. They treated their workers ‘like beasts, like machines’. A shared interest in the conditions of workers led to a meeting in Manchester between Engels and Weerth. They both believed that England was on the verge of a revolution. Weerth said it would not be against royalty, religion or parliament, but against the propertied classes. ‘The last time there was a revolt in Lancashire and Yorkshire the workers simply grumbled and went on strike. Next time they will attack the homes of the rich and seize for themselves the necessity of life . . . they will go on strike for so long that a complete social revolution will be inevitable.’

  1842

  In William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842) Elizabeth Stone set out to examine the image of Manchester popularised by alarmists about the Industrial Revolution: ‘Cotton bags, cotton mills, spinning-jennies, power-looms and steam engines: smoking chimneys, odious factories, vulgar proprietors, and their still more vulgar wives, and their superlatively vulgar pretensions; dense population, filthy streets, drunken men, reckless women, immoral girls, and squalid children; dirt, filth, misery, and crime; – such are the interesting images which rise “a busy throng to crowd the brain” at the bare mention of the manufacturing districts: vulgarity and vice walking side by side; ostentatious extravagance on the one hand, battening on the miseries of degraded and suffering humanity on the other: and this almost without redeeming circumstances – we are told. Is it so?’

  The first Bassett’s sweets were made in 1842 when twenty-four-year-old wine dealer and lozenge maker George Bassett founded his confectionery company in Sheffield. In 1876 he became mayor of Sheffield.

  1840

  From the moment a railway between York and Scarborough was first mooted, a certain George Knowles had campaigned against the construction of the line, and in 1840 he published a pamphlet in which he protested, ‘Scarborough has no wish for a greater influx of vagrants and those who have no money to spend. Scarborough is rising daily in the estimation of the public as a fashionable watering place, on account of its natural beauty and tranquillity, and in a few years more, the novelty of not having a railroad will be its greatest recommendation.’

  The River Aire at Leeds in 1840 was described as a ‘reservoir of poison carefully kept for the purpose of breeding a pestilence in the town. It was full of refuse from water closets, cesspools, privies, common drains, dung hill drainings, infirmary refuse, waste from slaughter houses, chemical soap, gas, dye-houses, and manufactures, coloured by blue and black dye, pig manure, old urine wash; there were dead animals, vegetable substance and occasionally a decomposed human body.’

  The increasing size of urban populations led to overcrowding in the cities as the poor crammed into what living space they could afford. A new word, slum, passed from slang into orthodox use. Of debatable origin, possibly once signifying ‘sleepy’ areas of ‘slumber’ off the beaten track, it came to describe areas of squalid and deteriorating housing associated with poverty and disease. Although bad housing was by no means a new phenomenon, what differentiated the problem after 1800 from earlier times was its scale.

  1839

  Chartism was the campaign that came together from 1838 in support of a manifesto called the People’s Charter. At a time when the right to vote was severely limited, the Charter demanded the vote for all men. Ashton under Lyne was a Chartist stronghold. In 1838 it was the headquarters of the Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, an ex-Wesleyan minister who had become a national leader of the movement. He was imprisoned in August 1839, and after his release in 1841 did not play a leading part in Chartist activities, although his chapel at Charlestown continued to be a rallying point for the politically active. Chartism is important for three main reasons: it gave birth to the first ever British mass working-class political party, the National Charter Association; it created a political culture that endured for decades; and it paved the way, in terms of ideas and the training it gave to young working-class radicals, for the ultimately successful campaigns for the universal right to vote in the UK.

  Following the development of the camera from 1839, photography played a dominant part in the emergence of a tourism industry in the Lakes and in the visualisation and democratisation of the ‘Lakeland experience’.

  The Corn Laws had been enacted in 1815 to protect British farmers and landowners by prohibiting the import of grain until domestic prices had risen above eighty shillings per quarter, thus ensuring artificially high prices for grain. The Manchester Anti-Corn Law League was formed in 1838, becoming the Anti-Corn Law League in 1839, and was long associated with Manchester in spite of moving its headquarters to London. By 1846, the Anti-Corn Law League was the most powerful national pressure group England had ever known, and its mass meetings, travelling orators, hymns and catechisms provided the model for many later Victorian evangelical, temperance and even trade union campaigns.

  Part Four

  Making it all happen

  There’s some peculiar people in this street.

  Ena Sharples

  69

  Eventually, after being alive for one decade, which left me flat-out northern, I made a move outside Reddish, to the next part of the world. Reddish of Stockport replaced plain Reddish as the centre of my universe. I would catch the 17 bus outside the Conservative Club, head off west past Houldsworth Square, through South Reddish and down Lancashire Hill into the hollow where the centre of Stockport sat with a rancorous attitude of What’s it to you?

  I made it to the steady centuries-old town of Stockport, Cheshire – or, as has also been the case, Stockporte, Mercia and Stockport, Greater Manchester – a town split in personality between being historically of Cheshire, the lower, southier, snobbier, richer part of the north, and mighty time-pressed Manchester, which itself is split between being its own region, broadly speaking running itself, organising its own laws and routines, and being part of Lancashire. Stockport also stands up for itself: it has its own pride, its own districts, which themselves contain areas and neighbourhoods with names that help make sense of how it all fits together.

  Living in Stockport, there was always this tension between the elegance and even primness of the (mostly) lowlands of Cheshire, where posh people lived, bay-windowed and liberally be-gardened, the magnetic power and pull of famous Manchester, and the grain, grit and size of the mighty Lancashire of Blackburn, Preston and Burnley, of Wigan, Bury and Oldham, which heads off to a north that gets darker but more open as it becomes, romantically, the Lake District, which is made up, among other things, of water, verse and history, of parts that seem a mix of the south and Scotland, but which is nonetheless all north, and which leads to the very end of things, the end of the north that concerns us here.

  Stockport, where they made hats because of the dampness in
the air that facilitated the production of felt. Then they stopped making hats, because people stopped wearing hats. (I may well have been one of the last men to have worn a non-sporting hat in 1970s Stockport, having bought a floppy patchwork denim trilby as a sixteen-year-old from the one trendy boutique in early-seventies Merseyway. I fancied it made me look like I might get an invite to meet Jimi Hendrix or even members of the all-female American rock group Fanny, but I now realise it more likely made me look like the love child of Shaggy from Scooby Doo and Andy Capp, the drinking, smoking, gambling, spirited northern loafer, married to Florrie, created for the Daily Mirror by Hartlepool cartoonist Reginald Smythe.)

  Stockport, Cheshire – which is how I thought of it as I grew up there, even though Cheshire with its always confusing borders, and regular border changes, was never considered northern enough to be northern, and bordered Wales, which often seemed to concern it more than the north – was within a mile of Lancashire, which was dripping with north, and also within sight of the Pennines, the Peak District – so sheltered between them and Snowdonia to the west – the right northy Yorkshire and Derbyshire, which drifted south. Stockport is where the north begins, if only my north, the one and only north I know from the inside out.

  Stockport is all north, full of north, as north as the north gets, taking being in the north to require the correct arrangement of geographical and architectural features which incorporate a sense that everything has already happened and everything else is nothing but a long slow slide towards a further long slow slide into the sense that everything has already happened but a surprise is always on the cards. The geographical and architectural features in this case are a mix of doughty Lancashire immensity, tree-lined Cheshire charm and cramped, murky Manchester menace, and include rivers, railway lines, viaducts, mills, bus stops, hedgerows, allotments, lamp posts, masses of housing laid out in chaotic yet highly regulated order and, beyond the town, beyond the busy arrangement of places to live, work, shop, play, drink, eat, walk, hints of fields and hills that the buildings leave alone, reminders of the original natural essence of this island, covered with signs of growth and decay, the peak, stream, heath and tree that the town does not reach, the town which could be defined as ugly, a scattered display of shapes, shops, roads, gashes in the pavements and internal patterns that do not really match, that seem flung together over a period of time with no real organising principle or design, the town which has at its borders natural beauty, signs of what was there before all the people and buildings arrived, covering up the earth with so much care and carelessness.