by Paul Morley
Highbrow showman and linguistic illusionist Anthony Burgess was born John Burgess Wilson on 25 February 1917 just over two miles to the north-east of Manchester in Harpurhey – bordered to the north by Blackley, the west by Crumpsall, the east by Moston and the south by Collyhurst – to Catholic parents, a bookkeeper and enthusiastic pianist and the music-hall musician/dancer he met at the Ardwick Empire. His mother died when he was eighteen months old, as the Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide at the end of the First World War, the greatest medical holocaust in history, devastated Manchester. Three years later his father married an Irish widow who ran the large sprawling Golden Eagle pub in Miles Platting.
Burgess was known in childhood as Jack Wilson, Little Jack and Jackie Eagle. At his confirmation the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson, dropping the John and the Wilson as they were too common – one of a succession of shifty go-getting reinventions. He studied at Bishop Bilsborrow Primary School in Moss Side, the Xaverian College and Manchester University, reading English, and lived in the city until he was twenty-three – if not above a pub, he would say later, then an off-licence or a tobacconist’s. After leaving Manchester in 1940, he never returned apart from occasional brief visits, when to him the city shrank from what it had seemed when he lived there, a vast industrial marvel studded with significant cultural landmarks, a city which could actually look down on London, to something much less. He developed a cockiness that was definitely Manchester, but then became too monstrous for it.
He spent six years as a soldier, and then went into teaching, eventually becoming an education officer in Malaya and Brunei. Invalided home in 1959 with a terminal illness, he became a professional writer in the hope that in his final year he could provide some financial security for his wife, Lynne. The diagnosis was wrong, but Burgess persisted with his new career, writing more than thirty novels and other books – including in the months he thought he was going to die, when his mind was concentrated wonderfully, encouraging him to tackle ideas about freedom of choice with psychedelic clarity, A Clockwork Orange. The novel made him as famous as he always believed he should be after it was turned, in 1972, into a notoriously glamorous film by Stanley Kubrick, one that for a while was thought too brutal to show, as if it might pervert young minds.
Burgess was proud of his northern roots, but, as he transformed himself from inquisitive local lad to grand gaudy intellectual, hid them behind a contrived cultured accent, forcing himself to conform, anxious his northerness might make him perpetually provincial, unable to compete with the literary and artistic greats who belonged nowhere and therefore everywhere. He had a strong interest in music, and before he became a writer intended to make a living as a composer, fancying himself a Beethoven before he fancied himself a Joyce. Wherever he lived, there was always a piano. ‘My family were Manchester Catholic. We missed the Reformation, and Catholic citizens of Britain weren’t allowed a higher education until the Emancipation Act. If you had any talent it always went into music. My mother was a singer in a dance band, my father a music-hall pianist. And that’s still there. It’s in the blood and will never leave.’
I was born in Manchester . . . but like many people I left my hometown to join the army when the war started, and after six years abroad you tend to lose your affiliation, lose your roots, and when I came back to England I tended to be nomadic and just get a job where I could. I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I’m still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel. I don’t see myself as a regional novelist now, but I could very quickly become that, given time. I like the idea of a regional novel if the tone of the novel breathes a kind of substitute for the metropolitan. If you can present a town like Manchester or Leeds as being a sort of substitute for London where things go on and culture occurs, and the dialect is a living, intellectual force, then you’ve got something valuable. I don’t think this has been done here yet. It was only done with one writer who’s not highly regarded, that’s Howard Spring. He wrote a book called Shabby Tiger, which was set in Manchester.
Burgess saw Manchester as a writer’s city, and Mancunians as very creative, with a truculence that came from the rebelliousness in their character. He was particularly pleased, if a little alarmed, when some anonymous hate mail was delivered to the Midland Hotel, where Burgess the argumentative cosmopolitan wanderer was staying on a rare visit to his hometown in the seventies – a sign to himself that he had made it, staying in the hotel that had cost a million pounds to build at the start of the twentieth century – his city now a strangely familiar but alien place he recognised more in his idealised memories than in reality. ‘We have reserved three graves for you. One for your body, one for your books and one for your ego.’ He noted on one visit, ‘As a place of civic planning, or rather unplanning, I think Manchester is terrible.’ As far as he was concerned, Manchester had a lot to live up to as the city that gave him his start.
Tough corrupt pop impresario Don Arden, a foul-tempered and -mouthed five foot seven, ‘the Al Capone of pop, the self-styled Godfather of rock, Mr Big, the most feared man in the music business’, the missing link between Bernard Manning and the Krays, was born Harry Levy in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, on 4 January 1926, the son of a worker in a raincoat factory. He changed his name in 1944, having become a singer in local synagogues and a stand-up comedian at thirteen. After leaving the army at the end of the Second World War, Arden worked as an impersonator of film gangsters like Edward G. Robinson and George Raft. His authentic Al Jolson went down particularly well with Jewish audiences. In 1954, deciding there was more money to be made in promotion than performance and with his own act falling out of fashion, he became an agent, putting on his own shows, exploiting the lack of organisation there was in early pop management and accounting before the later reign of lawyers and accountants.
By 1960 he was managing American rock and roll singer Gene Vincent and bringing over to the UK American acts such as Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, claiming to be the man who introduced them to Britain. He considered British rock and rollers wimpy – Cliff was ‘pathetic’, Billy Fury not ‘fit to wipe Eddie Cochran’s arse’. By the mid-sixties he was managing British pop groups, first of all the Nashville Teens and Amen Corner, and then the Small Faces, who he got to number 1 in the charts by paying Radio Caroline to play their song. He perhaps quite rightly claimed that was where they deserved to be anyway. Ten years of legal/financial disputes with the Small Faces followed, and when rival Robert Stigwood expressed interest in taking them over, Arden and three minders turned up at his office and dangled him by his ankles from a fifth-floor window until he changed his mind. ‘I didn’t personally hang him . . . He never bothered me again.’ The stunt earned him the fearsome reputation he craved. What had begun as Arden parodying the crooked, ducking and diving, intimidating music business mogul in the wide-lapelled suit had turned into a reality. When someone tried to take his next group, The Move, away from him, he pressed a lit cigar into his rival’s forehead.
After bullying, boasting, burning, beating, blackmailing and brawling his way to the top, managing Black Sabbath and the Electric Light Orchestra, and launching Jet Records, he moved into Howard Hughes’s old mansion in California, next door to Cary Grant. He died in 2007, over twenty years after his reign of terror had petered out, having gifted the world, as vigorous and provocative, evil-minded jester, his daughter Sharon Osbourne. He said he had never actually killed anyone, but relished his ability to create fear and terror, bragging that those he had scared would have to keep looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
Jean Alexander was born on 24 February 1926 in Liverpool, and began her working life as a library assistant, moving on to acting in 1949 at the Adelphi Guild Theatre in Macclesfield, touring around Oldham, Stockport and York. From
1964 she appeared in Coronation Street as wiry gossipy char Hilda Ogden née Crabtree, devoted to husband Stan, making do, looking after their four children, covering up big Stan’s ample deficiencies, suffering a nervous breakdown in her slippers, stuck in a rut, getting on with things. Hilda blamed their poor run of luck, which lasted most of the sixties and seventies, on the fact their house was 13 Coronation Street. They changed it to 12A, but were ordered by the council to change it back.
Her faded floral pinny, headscarf tightly wrapped around her curlers, desperate cheerfulness, busybody energy, tireless tragi-comic hope that something would turn up despite all evidence to the contrary, sudden snapping bursts of temper, shrill trilling singing voice, ever-present fag dangling from her lower lip, the ‘muriel’ that covered one wall of their downstairs back room with a view of the Alps (or the Canadian Rockies) featuring three flying ducks soaring across the sky, one perpetually crooked – all made her one of the most famous women in the country, at the very opposite end of the spectrum from the Queen. When Stan kissed Hilda, or at least pecked her on the mouth, when she was for once all dolled up, he said, ‘That lipstick tastes funny – what do you call that flavour?’ ‘Woman, Stanley,’ she shot back with a look in her eye that suggested poverty, daily toilet scrubbing and the pitiless exhausting backstreets hadn’t worn down her essential female spark, ‘woman!’
The television dramatist, amateur sculptor, and passionate Manchester United fan Jack Rosenthal was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester in 1931. His father Sam worked for a raincoat manufacturer, his mum Leah was nicknamed Leahy, and after their house was bombed in 1939 he was evacuated to Colne near Burnley, after the war attending the local grammar school. Although only a bus ride from Manchester, Colne was a juddering culture shock. ‘To a city boy’s eyes, a sort of Just William world of chickens, sheep, cowpats, gumboots, allotments, five-barred gates and stiles. I could barely understand a word of the east Lancashire accent. It was like a medieval foreign language. Thee’s and Thou’s and, on that first morning in my new school – the word yonder. I didn’t know what o’er meant and I was completely flummoxed by yonder.’
He worked in a cotton mill making tea after school, where the women workers learned to lip read amidst the constant din, and then studied English literature at Sheffield University, and after National Service in the Royal Navy in 1955, as a Russian translator, he joined the promotions department of the new Granada TV company but left to work in advertising. Five years later, writing in his spare time and watching early episodes of Coronation Street, he wrote to its creator and head writer, Tony Warren, asking if he could write an episode – just as, fifteen years later, Morrissey would also ask.
Rosenthal was given the series’ thirtieth episode to write, which was transmitted on 27 March 1961. ‘Coronation Street was identical to the street in Colne where I lived.’ Jack Howarth, playing definitively grumpy, semi-lovable Uncle Albert Tatlock – not much of a stretch for the actor, born in Rochdale in 1896, son of comedian Bert, schoolfriend of Gracie Fields – who had made his debut in episode 1, already pitting his wits against hairnetted harridan Ena Sharples, was unimpressed with Rosenthal’s first attempt. During a read-through of the thirty-minute episode, when someone wondered if it was too long, he remarked that ‘it was thirty minutes too long’. Rosenthal would write another 129 episodes during the 1960s and become the series’ most famous and successful graduate. Howarth as Tatlock would appear in 1,700 episodes of the soap until just before his death in March 1984.
Rosenthal would contribute to the unwise Coronation Street spin-off, Pardon the Expression, in which Arthur Lowe’s pernickety Mr Swindley went to work in Whitehall. He produced the nicely crude sitcom The Dustbinmen featuring Cheese and Egg, Heavy Breathing and Smellie Ibbotson and their dustcart Thunderbird 3, and the wonderful curse ‘pigging’ while writing the ninety-minute comedy drama There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah. An unashamed, committed television man, he learned his trade on Coronation Street, and his later classic television dramas included The Knowledge, about trainee taxi drivers, Spend Spend Spend, the story of pools winner Viv Nicholson, and The Evacuees – based on his own experiences, which won an Emmy. The title of his brilliant P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang was his school playground gang’s secret password pledging undying allegiance to Burnley FC’s flamboyant late-1940s winger Peter Kippax (Kipperbang).
Rosenthal’s beautifully textured writing displayed his background, enthusiasms, anxieties and his affectionate but unsentimental attitude towards how friends, relatives, accidental colleagues, workers, kids, lovers – bewildered, bruised but determined – battled through the life they’d been given. He was working on Coronation Street in 1969 when he met ebullient Hull-born actress Maureen Lipman in a Manchester pub while she was appearing at one of the city’s theatres. They married four years later, and she was always the friendly public face of the two. Rosenthal recalled, ‘People do sometimes ring up and ask if I’m Mr Lipman, but I’m totally at ease with that.’ Maureen once said, ‘He regarded writing as a job. He had no vanity about it. He was working class, northern and Jewish. He knew he had to make a living and that was what he set out to do.’
Terry Eagleton, literary theorist, was born on 22 February 1943 and educated at the ‘casually sadistic’ but rigorous and scholarly Roman Catholic grammar school De La Salle College and Trinity College, Cambridge. A prolific and imaginative Marxist commentator on British literature and culture with a ‘sheer horror of cliché’, Eagleton’s barbed, lucid Literary Theory: An Introduction was an academic best-seller. This powerful and elegant work was a revelation, but led to him being described in neutralising clichés: ‘the most gifted Marxist thinker of his generation’, ‘the most influential living literary theorist’, ‘one of the world’s leading intellectuals’. His upbringing in Salford in a ‘Catholic ghetto’ during the 1940s and fifties was desperately poor. He was the only kid at school with a coat. His escape from intellectual and physical poverty was literature, especially the collected works of Charles Dickens purchased on credit from a second-hand bookshop by his mum.
At Cambridge he felt ‘as ignorant as a fish’ but never lost his self-confidence and never wandered far from his distinctly Manchester Irish-Catholic background. His early career focused more on theology than literary criticism, although the merging of the two was his stated intention. In 1964 Eagleton was a founding editor of Slant, a journal ‘devoted to a Catholic exploration of . . . radical politics’. ‘I was a socialist, to be sure, but I was anxious to know how far to the left a Catholic could go without falling off the edge.’ The Daily Mail called him ‘a Marxist punk with a chip on both shoulders’ and Prince Charles once dubbed him ‘dreadful’. One of his essential arguments is that postmodernism, with its narcissistic view of the world as fragmented and truth as indeterminate, is an inadequate successor to Marxism, which in its critique of capitalism can offer a more concrete moral vision for society.
(Sir) James Anderton, born in Wigan on 4 May 1932, studied criminology at the Victoria University of Manchester. Proud of his working-class Lancashire roots, he was appointed chief constable – the youngest ever – of Greater Manchester Police, England’s largest provincial force, on 23 October 1976. A lay preacher convinced he had a hot line to God, his fierce Christian beliefs, hard-nosed morality and commitment to duty saw him called both ‘God’s copper’ and a ‘copper’s copper’. Admirers praised his approach to policing and social control; critics questioned his mental health.
On 6 May 1932 John David ‘Jack‘ Bond was born in Kearsley, Bolton. His father had worked as a spinner in the local mill and sat as a Labour member on Little Hulton Council, serving one year as mayor. They turned the front parlour of their house into a fish and chip shop and his mother worked there from Monday to Saturday. Jack started playing for Lancashire County Cricket Club in 1955, and after years of dogged, underwhelming but conscientious hard work became captain almost by default on a temporary basis in the late 1960s. Tough and shrewd
, Bond led Lancashire for five seasons from 1968 to 1972, during which they finished third in the championship in 1970 and 1971. In 1969 the forty-over Sunday League started, and Bond’s talented, gutsy Lancashire were its first winners. ‘Some of the counties, like Yorkshire, weren’t interested at all. They thought it was a bit of a joke. But our success created so much interest. We won the title at Nuneaton. It was a two o’clock start and we had so many supporters come down that they’d run out of pies by one. And they ran out of beer.’ They won the Sunday League again the following year and a hat-trick of Gillette Cups (1970, 1971, and 1972).
(Sir) Peter Maxwell Davies, born in Langworthy, Salford on 8 September 1934, was the son of Thomas and Hilda. After attending Leigh Grammar School, he studied at the University of Manchester and at the Royal Manchester (now Royal Northern) College of Music, where his fellow students included Harrison Birtwistle – born in Accrington, 1934, composing by the age of eleven – Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Together they formed New Music Manchester, a group dedicated to the exploration and distribution of experimental contemporary music influenced by the works of Berg, Bartók, Webern and Schoenberg.
Equally inspired by serialism and medieval music, writer of some of the most beautiful music of the twentieth century, and some of the most challenging, Maxwell Davies ranks among leading contemporary composers such as Boulez, Henze and Carter; he is a successor to the international avant-garde generation of Xenakis, Berio, Takemitsu, Ligeti and Lutoslawski, but also to the heady high-minded British tradition of Elgar, Tippett and Britten. Davies is a freeman of the city of Salford, along with L. S. Lowry.