by Paul Morley
In 1804, while he was at Oxford, Thomas De Quincey first took opium, not for pleasure but to relieve toothache. By 1813 he was a self-labelled ‘regular and confirmed’ opium addict, eventually consuming ten wine glasses of the drug each day. Opium released a storm of memories and provided a route to unique literary power. De Quincey became part of a Lake District literary circle with Wordsworth and Coleridge, retreating from a world that was too rough for him, and lived near Wordsworth before his addictions and irregular habits forced him south to London. His most famous work, the autobiographically hallucinatory Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, described by Borges as one of the saddest books ever written, is about what he knew best, perceptively describing drug addiction and evocatively representing altered mental states. He invents the idea of recreational drug use. It appeared serially in the London Magazine and was eventually published in book form in 1822. The combination of a rich imagination and his ambition to atemporally represent his intense personal experiences – in which space and time were distorted and he could live a hundred years in one night – produced a brilliant, digressive and ardent prose connecting grandiose romanticism and nervy self-conscious modernism, which eventually rippled all the way to post-beat-generation psychedelic writing. He was influenced by Laurence Sterne, the way he joined seemingly discordant elements, and his influence haunted not just Borges but Poe, Stevenson, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Baudelaire, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky and Burroughs – who remarked that he had written the first, and still the best, book on drug addiction. De Quincey continued to contribute to magazines for the rest of his life and never kicked the opium habit.
1821
When the Manchester Guardian was first published in 1821, Manchester had six other weekly newspapers, four published on Saturdays and two on Tuesdays. The Manchester Mercury, Chronicle, Exchange Herald and the British Volunteer supported the Tories, whereas the Manchester Gazette was in favour of moderate reform. The Manchester Observer promoted radicalism, and its circulation of 4,000 made it by far the best-selling newspaper in Manchester, but it had very few advertisers and was constantly being sued for libel. Several of its journalists had been sent to prison for articles critical of the government. With the arrival of the Guardian, the Observer decided to cease publication. In its last edition the editor wrote, ‘I would respectfully suggest that the Manchester Guardian, combining principles of complete independence, and zealous attachment to the cause of reform, with active and spirited management, is a journal in every way worthy of your confidence and support.’
1820
There is no sign of Miles Platting on maps before the 1820s, other than a nameless patch of fields and trees, when the area along the Rochdale Canal, along the Lancashire to Yorkshire railway, a mile and a half north-east of Manchester city centre, clustered next to Ancoats, Collyhurst and Newton Heath, became the home to a number of mills. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a chemical works, gas works and timber yard, and Miles Platting became a venue for intense industrial activity. The Victoria Mill was built by the canal in the 1870s, a sturdy six-storey building with an octagonal chimney dominating the landscape. In operation until the 1960s, it stood guard as Miles Platting, with a population dominated by Irish and Italian Catholics, went through classic, local twentieth-century decline and the closure of most of its factories, leading to its packed, back-to-back, soot-stained, slate-roofed housing becoming slums by the 1950s, and then being demolished in the 1960s and 1970s. The flimsy replacement houses, many built with flat roofs, despite the local rain, fell into disrepair within thirty years.
1819
On 16 August 1819 yeomanry (mounted volunteers) and regular cavalry, acting on the instructions of magistrates, attacked without warning a mass meeting of more than 100,000 people drawn from the industrial centres of Lancashire. The meeting, held on St Peter’s Field in the centre of Manchester, had been organised as part of a national campaign for radical reform of Parliament and measures to improve the lot of working people. Riots and strikes had recently become commonplace, and in the face of such a huge crowd, magistrates panicked and ordered cavalry to disperse the assembly. The troopers rode into the crowd, laying about them with sabres. Around 500 people were injured and eleven killed. The Peterloo Massacre, the name commonly applied to these events, is a bitter reference to the feat of British arms at Waterloo four years before. It first appeared in print in the Manchester Observer on 21 August 1819.
Joseph Johnson, a shareholder in the Observer, wrote of conditions in Manchester in 1819, ‘Everything is almost at a standstill, nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face. The state of the district is truly dreadful.’ Such conditions produced a climate of radical thinking in Manchester, for which no other town in the country was better known.
When Shelley heard about the Peterloo Massacre, he was inspired to write the ‘Masque of Anarchy’, which called on working men to:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few
73
To the south of Stockport town centre, the Stepping Hill (5) area contains Great Moor, Heavily, Offerton and Hazel Grove – which is at the far end of the 92 (until 1969) and then 192 bus route from Manchester Piccadilly, which passes more or less every ten minutes along a straight line for nine and a bit miles through Ardwick, Longsight, Levenshulme, the Heatons, down the hill into Stockport city centre, and then up Wellington Road South past the town hall, the art gallery, the college, the infirmary, Stockport Grammar School, Mile End School and the Davenport Theatre, towards its destination two and a half miles to the south of Stockport town centre on the way to the northern reaches of the Peak District.
Before Hazel Grove was named Hazel Grove, it was called Bullock Smithy, and when John Wesley preached there in 1750 he described it as ‘one of the most famous villages in the county for all manner of wickedness’. It is believed he was referring to the gambling, cock fighting and dog fighting that regularly took place. The town had become well known for its numbers of inns and beer houses, and had a rough reputation. Locals were tired of the town’s uncouth 250-year-old name and the ease with which it could be turned into a joke at their expense, and Hazel Grove, a name (or something like it) used around the area before and borrowed by the locals as a nickname for thirty years, was unanimously selected in a vote in 1836. A large celebration followed. As many as 3,000 people took part in a parade and much drinking and eating. Subsequent celebrations every fifty years were equally as grateful. The new name suggested, as was hoped, a more pleasant, gentle area, although in the twentieth century the craved-for bypass taking the traffic heading south away from the centre never materialised. ‘Hazel Grove’ – filled with a fake sense of salubrious rural history – also looked good on the front of the 192 bus – the one I ended up using the most in my life, and believed to be one of the busiest bus routes in the country.
Sometimes the (1)92 route extended past the Hazel Grove terminus, to reach the gates of Lyme Park, overlooking the Cheshire Plain, a 1,400-acre deer park and estate set on the edge of the Peak District National Park, six and a half miles outside the centre of Stockport. The park’s imposing hall, a stone-built mansion designed in the style of an Italianate palace and the largest house in Cheshire, is close to Disley (from the Anglo-Saxon for windy settlement), where novelist Christopher Isherwood was born in the sixteenth-century Wyberslegh Hall and historian A. J. P. Taylor lived for a while.
Taylor bought his house in Higher Disley in 1933 for £525 so that he could be close to Manchester University, where he was lecturing. It was not far from Buxton, to where his family had moved in 1914, ‘very high and open, miles away from anywhere’, his only neighbours a couple of farmers. One of his students was Anthony Burgess. Grading one of Burgess’s term papers, the great historian wrote, ‘Bright ideas insufficient to conce
al lack of knowledge.’ Burgess in turn was irritated by Taylor’s curt dismissal of James Joyce.
Taylor was visited by Dylan Thomas in April and May 1935, ‘curly haired and not yet bloated, indeed looking like a Greek God on the small scale’. While there Thomas wrote verse in pencil, enjoyed the views from the front windows of the Taylors’ house towards the scoured, craggy plateau of Kinder Scout, over 2,000 feet above sea level, rising like a great brown and green wall, and drank beer at the Plough Boy a couple of hundred yards down the hill. Before Taylor got annoyed with Thomas’s sponging, they would take walks on the relentless ‘dark peak’ that surrounded them, a bleak, treeless, fallen paradise of blasted grass, bog, peat, heather, gravel and exposed rock, stripped into damned submission after a century of pollution carried on the gritty wind from the surrounding industrial areas. There was a devastated beauty all around, but there had definitely been some sort of war that had left its mark.
Taylor and Thomas would still have been trespassing when they walked on Kinder Scout, despite a mass protest that had taken place a few years earlier. In the 1930s rambling became a mass recreation for working-class youth, and the organised left played a decisive role in campaigning against the draconian laws which restricted public access to the British countryside.
The mass trespass on Kinder Scout, held on Sunday 24 April 1932, saw hundreds of walkers stage what amounted to a political demonstration. They had been summoned by hastily duplicated flyers distributed around the Manchester area. ‘If you’ve not been rambling before, start now, you don’t know what you’ve missed. Come with us for the best day out that you have ever had,’ said one, given out in Eccles. The great issue which motivated the protesters was access.
Their favoured local walking area, the Peak District, largely moorland and hills, was poor farming land and used mostly to graze sheep or for shooting game birds. Of this huge area of about 150,000 acres, only 1 per cent was officially open to the public. The rest was owned by water companies and landowners, who protected their land using gamekeepers who carried shotguns. Kinder Scout itself was a grouse moor and worked only around twelve days a year. The rest of the time the land was deserted, but walkers were not allowed.
The trespassers were demanding one simple change: the landowners should open a public path through Kinder Scout, allowing walkers through when the land was not in use. The ultimate aim was to open up all the country’s moorland and hills for walkers. Rambling was one of the few recreations that the poor working class could afford in the 1930s – the others being camping and cycling. After protests from the Hayfield Parish Council, the hikers regrouped at Bowden Bridge Quarry, where they were addressed by political activist and outdoor enthusiast Benny Rothman, whose inspiring speech set the crowd on the way. ‘We ramblers after a hard week’s work, and life in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling on weekends for relaxation, for a breath of fresh air, and for a little sunshine. And we find when we go out that the finest rambling country is closed to us. Because certain individuals wish to shoot for about ten days per annum, we are forced to walk on muddy crowded paths, and denied the pleasure of enjoying to the utmost the countryside. Our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable.’
The trespass proceeded via steep William Clough, named after a local blacksmith, to the plateau of Kinder Scout, where there were violent scuffles with gamekeepers and one of the keepers injured an ankle. The ramblers were able to reach their destination and meet another group from Edale. On their return, five ramblers were arrested, with another detained earlier who had actually gone to the help of the fallen keeper. The five, who included Benny Rothman, were eventually sent for trial at Derby and given custodial sentences of up to six months.
The ramblers at Kinder Scout received massive support, and in 1949 legislation was passed giving limited rights of access to important sites of interest such as Kinder Scout. These rights were extended in 1951, when the Peak District National Park was created. Within a year 5,780 acres of Kinder Scout and Broadlee Bank Tor were available for public use.
I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way,
I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way,
I may be a wage slave on Monday,
But I am a free man on Sunday.
He called me a louse and said ‘Think of the grouse.’
Well I thought, but I still couldn’t see
Why old Kinder Scout and the moors round about
Couldn’t take both the poor grouse and me.
He said ‘All this land is my master’s.’
At that I stood shaking my head,
No man has the right to own mountains
Any more than the deep ocean bed.
Ewan McColl, ‘Manchester Rambler’
A. J. P. Taylor lived in Disley until 1938, when he moved to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a tutor until 1963. The Manchester radical and intellectual celebrity noted, ‘If I had stayed in Manchester, I would never have achieved anything other than a few academic books. Without the contacts I made in London, which is easily reached from Oxford, I should never have become either a journalist or a television star.’
He was born on 25 March 1906 in Birkdale, south of Southport, then in Lancashire, into an affluent but politically liberal Nonconformist family involved in the cotton industry, entrepreneurial but with radical views. Alan was to be the only surviving child. He showed early promise, reading books and newspapers from an unusually young age with a particular liking for the historical novels of Harrison Ainsworth and becoming obsessed with history. He would come to consider that true history began with the novelist Walter Scott, for the way he expressed how the past is really different from the present: ‘he felt himself back in time’.
Throughout his life Taylor made much of his background: the northern upbringing, the family of successful Quaker cotton manufacturers, his parents’ radical/liberal politics. Taylor would describe Manchester as ‘the last and greatest of the Hanseatic towns – a civilisation created by traders without assistance from monarchs or territorial aristocracy’.
In 1953, in an article in the New Statesman, Taylor discussed the nineteenth-century writer and reformer William Cobbett, who had expanded the concept of a religious elite to include those networks of financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite public schools and clubs and publications such as ‘the bloody old Times’. Cobbett labelled this power elite the Thing, maintaining that the aristocracy used it to train and sustain its oligarchical bureaucracy, which ran the British empire.
As Leonard and Mark Silk observed in their book The American Establishment, A. J. P. Taylor adapted Cobbett’s ‘Thing’, which in his article became ‘the Establishment’. Taylor – who would become a millionaire – wrote, ‘The Establishment draws in recruits from outside as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment – and nothing more corrupting.’ Journalist Henry Fairlie refined the term in the Spectator in 1955.
Taylor also relished the Lancashire genius for comedy: George Formby Senior of Ashton under Lyne, Stan Laurel of Ulverston, world-weary Robb ‘Ee, what a to-do’ Wilton of Everton, Frank Randle of Wigan, Ken ‘I won’t take me coat off, I’m not stopping’ Platt of Leigh, Tommy Handley of Liverpool, Ted Ray of Wigan, moving to Liverpool within days of his birth, Eric Sykes of Oldham, Eric Morecambe of Morecambe, Morecambe and Wise writer Eddie Braben of Liverpool, Les Dawson of Collyhurst, Bernard Manning of Ancoats, Jim Bowen of Accrington, Ken ‘I’m too good for this place’ Goodwin of Manchester, George Roper of Liverpool, Mike Harding of Crumpsall – and on it goes to Jack Rosenthal of Cheetham Hill, Victoria Wood of Prestwich, Steve Coogan of Middleton, Caroline Aherne of Wythenshawe, John Cooper Clarke of Salford, Peter Kay of Farnworth, Paul Abbott of Burnley, Frank Cottrell Boyce of Liverpool, and Danny Boyle of Radcliffe, the sentimental but flinty artistic director of the
2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, in many ways the exuberant climax to over a century of sly, protesting, twinkling Lancastrian music-hall mischief-making rooted in Randle, Braben and Kaye as much as Marx, Engels and Clynes, in direct opposition to the ossifying, diminishing idea of the Establishment.
Taylor concluded that there was ‘something in the air’. You could actually connect Lancashire’s defiant sense of humour with the wind coming in from the south-east, from beyond British shores, bringing traces of distant difference, encouraging a certain edgy whimsy, jittery dreams of otherness, a glorious blend of silliness and wisdom, and a general belief that one way of beating the odds, outwitting fate and rising above social inequity was with a gag. Lancashire was where the world’s antic mental energy eventually drifted to, and was absorbed and dispersed with a ruthless sense of timing rooted in fierce centuries of hard labour, defiant love and constant loss. For Taylor’s awkward pupil Anthony Burgess – himself, however bombastic, rhetorical or dyspeptic, a part of that list of Lancastrian comedians, the missing link between Les Dawson and Vladimir Nabokov – this distinctive Lancashire spirit was ‘the bark of the underdog’.
Reddish (6) is part of the Tame Valley area to the east of the town centre with Brinnington (7), ‘Brinny’, a post-war slum clearance area, once open farmland above the Tame Valley where the abandoned and homeless were dumped in hastily built council-owned properties after the war and the fifties and sixties slum clearance, isolated and unloved, the other side of Reddish Vale. Stockport is made up of such extremes that it is possible to go from opulent Lyme Park, SK12, with its medieval deer park, extravagant house and Edwardian rose garden, where they film television productions of Jane Austen, to marooned, treacherous Brinnington, SK5, where you could film dismal, dismembered 1960s Eastern Europe. Compared to Bramhall, there seemed to be whole parts of Brinnington that had just gone missing, or had never been there in the first place. Most of the people living there found ways to deal with where they found themselves, even as it seemed to be disappearing into a hole the shape of a broken window, a portal through which you entered another dimension.