by Paul Morley
The town planners did not want a Stockport where Lowry with his musty-tinted glasses felt at home, a crooked funereal town swathed in smoke, grime and ash in which the grass was black, the trees made up of soot as much as bark, trapping the town in an eternal past profoundly separated from the pop culture that had popped up as fab as a fable the other end of the Mersey. They wanted a Stockport where traces of the industries that had tired themselves out and failed to keep up with changing trends and minds were obliterated, a Stockport where amnesiac teenagers like me could feel at home without feeling we were disappearing into the static void populated with headstrong loners that Lowry painted. Lowry’s people were standing about, together and separate, avoiding colliding with each other, spilling, scurrying, splintering, grave, acceptant, dazed in the damp cold air, pores packed with grit, gloom at their shoulders, working their fingers, their arms, their legs, to the bone, wondering what it all meant, one foot in the boxed-up nineteenth century, one in Lowry’s own leg-pulling mind.
Into the Lowry space, which he based on his own sense of what had happened to time and people since he was born, popped an incongruous shop – in fact a boutique – called the Toggery, a place where you could buy the sort of clothes that pop stars wore, because, so it was said, although it seems as far-fetched as the thought that Dickens, Darwin and Disraeli bought their hats in Stockport, the pop stars themselves bought their clothes there. The Mersey Square shop was owned by Michael Cohen, the son of an Ashton under Lyne tailor, himself the son of a nineteenth-century Oldham tailor, and Mike adapted his dad and granddad’s tailoring to the needs of the pre-mod, mod and postmod man about town, offering both ready-to-wear and bespoke clothing. He sold Rael Brook and Ben Sherman shirts, Leslie Powell suits and Annello and Davide Cuban-heeled boots.
It was ahead of its time, open by 1961, around the time the odd local cafe might have introduced a jukebox, and before my time, but those who were there speak of a fashionable hangout where the new beat groups from Manchester and Liverpool would buy their emphatically outspoken anti-parent clothes – the sort that by the end of the 1960s I was craving myself – and invent their images. These were dashing, sexually challenging clothes saturated with the confident colour that had drained out of the exhausted post-war environment, influenced by, and influencing, Carnaby Street culture, and in the spirit of Raymond Clark, who was born in Warrington on 9 June 1942.
Evacuated during the war, Clark grew up on the Lancashire–Yorkshire border in his family’s ancestral village, Oswaldtwistle, from which his nickname – Ossie – was derived. A sensitive boy who found refuge with his mother and an art teacher, at secondary school he was encouraged by the teacher to study American fashion glossies instead of textbooks. Clark was often taunted by his classmates. ‘I liked cats and flowers and walked a certain way,’ he later recalled.
Ossie formed an alliance with textile designer Celia Birtwell, born in Bury in 1941 to a housewife/seamstress mum and a dad who was an engineer. She grew up in the Manchester suburb of Prestwich until she was thirteen, when her parents moved to Salford by the East Lancashire Road. As a teenager she studied textiles and pottery at Salford Technical College and was influenced by John Piper, Matisse, Picasso and L. S. Lowry. It was during her years there that she met fledgling fashion designer Ossie Clark, in the Cona Coffee Bar in Manchester. Birtwell remembers what Clark was wearing the first time they met: ‘He had on a V-neck leatherette sweater with a rounded Victorian collar – this was pre-Beatles but it was a very particular look – and very long winkle-pickers.’ In 1961 she headed south, to west London, seduced by the promise of ‘powder-blue winkle-pickers and false eyelashes’.
Clark graduated from the Royal College of Art with a collection inspired by Bridget Riley’s op art, which he discovered during a trip across America with his friend David Hockney. While in America Brian Epstein gave him tickets to the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl show, and he was mobbed by fans mistaking him for George Harrison. Living in London, he had a design room above the fashionable Quorum boutique on the King’s Road, and Celia worked from home on the textiles he used for his clothes. At Quorum he met Mick Jagger, who would dance around Clark’s flat while he sketched. He created the template for Jagger’s jumpsuits. (‘His road manager loved that,’ said Clark, ‘because you could just chuck them in the washing machine after each show.’ By the early seventies Jagger had at least ten Ossie Clark jumpsuits.)
Celia and Ossie moved in together in Notting Hill in 1965 and married in 1969. From 1967 to 1973 they were in their imperial phase, adored by the fashion industry and dressing everyone from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Paloma Picasso, Twiggy and Marianne Faithfull all the way to the British aristocracy. During this time Dave Gilmour drove a van for Ossie before he found fame with Pink Floyd. It was the Clarks who began the modern catwalk show: the previous silent procession of models was set to music, leading London hipsters, trend setters and names were invited, and the shows became events.
In 1970 David Hockney began a double portrait of Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. Hockney started the painting shortly after their wedding, at which he was best man. The couple are shown in their London flat. Hockney made drawings and took photographs there, but they also modelled in his studio owing to the painting’s size. The cat on Clark’s lap is actually thought to be called Blanche, but Hockney felt Percy, the name of the couple’s other cat, sounded better. Hockney struggled with the painting for nearly a year, reworking Clark’s head as many as twelve times. He aimed to capture the couple’s complex and unconventional relationship, along with its tensions. Traditional features of wedding portraiture are reversed, with the man seated while the woman stands. The couple divorced in 1974. Hockney once commented, ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy probably caused it.’
Cohen’s Toggery, a prescient northern outpost of the London bohemianism that Clark and Birtwell plunged into, was rooted in the faded local tradition of cotton and craft, and catered to the new exponents of a domestic showbusiness recently transformed by electric guitars and the unreserved posing of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. He opened branches in Bury and Bolton, the one in Bolton near enough to a nightclub so that he was soon suiting up bigtime singers Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Cohen went on to manage the Hollies, and the group’s sweet-voiced Blackpool-born Graham Nash, who grew up in Ordsall, Salford, singing in the choir at the Friends of St Ignatius church, worked at the Stockport shop for a while, a few years before he was engaged to Joni Mitchell a million or so miles away in California. He formed Crosby, Stills and Nash out there, who first sang together in Joni’s house in 1968.
Cohen was himself part of an early-1960s showbusiness couple, although not quite in the Joni and Graham class, going out with Jennifer Moss, who played rebellious Lucille Hewitt in Coronation Street for ten years beginning in episode 3. Feisty pint-sized Lucille had the name of a local rock and roller, Eddie, tattooed on her arm, and was the soap’s first attempt to react to how the musical sixties, swinging for some, were interacting with the memory lane of cobbles and vicious tongues. Jennifer christened a local group Cohen was thinking of managing the Toggery Five, so the shop even had its own band.
The pop stars – Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, the Swinging Blue Jeans – disc jockeys – Jimmy Savile – and footballers – George Best – turning up at The Toggery, with its green leather suits hand-stitched in Ashton under Lyne and sky-blue and pink button-down shirts, did not turn the unresponsive Lowry’s mighty head. He still wore his heavy black suit and solid sensible shoes with the resigned demeanour of an undertaker even as the flash-forward Toggery signalled his world was about to be almost completely substituted.
Stony worn-out Victorian Stockport was overhauled and propelled into the apparently inviolable modern world, which was, it seemed, as the groovy Toggery predicted, all about a fancy new form of shopping. Planning was still in its post-war period: town centres and areas of working-class housing
were coming under hostile scrutiny, being cleared and rebuilt by architects and planners. The stark speculative modernist structures favoured by planners admiring experimental European developments were completely inappropriate for the districts and traditions where they were built. Civic renewal and pride did not necessarily follow from the insensitive destruction of town centres and landmark buildings with their references to the past, and planning based on ideological zeal for a new modern setting replaced one set of problems with another.
In Stockport the once indomitable seven-storeyed mills and the proud lanky brick chimneys that still lingered seemed to exist more than ever merely to remind people of a past that had nothing to do with the present. The chimneys had no useful function, poignantly strained to impress us with their skyward might and dignity, wanted to be treated like prototype Angels of the North, but did nothing for us, because they dripped with the past, like the past was some sort of perpetual downpour that just made you feel damp and miserable. A listless past that had led nowhere, except to a world where the last reminding signs of an industrial heyday looked sad, useless and weighed down with their own forlorn weight. The finicky patterns and controlling precision of massed Victorian brick began to be replaced with pale grey sixties concrete, fussiness within a basic form of functionalism; the grimy cobbler dissolving into extinction now that shiny Dolcis had arrived, the butcher and the baker buggered by the exceptionally convenient Marks & Spencer. The Toggery was still on the outside, not quite belonging to what was around it, but now it was opposite a bright, busy and modernised Boots the Chemist, which looked like it wanted to be where Herman of the Hermits and Freddie of the Dreamers shopped, not Formby son of Formby. Scrubbed-up Boots would be soon joined by clubs and nightclubs set into the ground, under arches, at the bottom of carpeted steps in the vicinity of the shopping centre, to where you imagine those who bought their clothes at the Toggery would be heading.
These were clubs with names like Mask and Sgt Peppers, where the centre of activity was down further steps and too intimidating for those not yet groovy, or teenage enough, to enter – an underground world with a smell new to Stockport, an aroma equivalent to flared trousers and flowery shirts. Another smoke now drifted into Stockport, this one hanging in the air out of sight of the everyday world, as young people wearing their own brand of mini, maxi, butterfly and tie-dyed clothes found a new way to deal with their circumstances and surroundings and lift themselves out of, or shift themselves to the side of, the doldrums.
At the end of the 1960s, a few hundred yards south up the Wellington Road right next to where the hat warehouses once were, a chaotic-looking boutique featuring space-age circular windows opened, spilling out on to the pavement goods, furniture and clothing unashamedly announcing grooviness with such exhibitionist purpose that I, turning thirteen, was too nervous to enter. The boutique was called Seven Miles Out. Only now do I realise it was called that because it was seven miles out of central Manchester, although owner Miles Baddeley might have been smoking something when he came up with seven, as it is more like six, but maybe he was measuring from the cathedral not the town hall. Insouciant female sales assistants wearing skirts that only just grazed the tops of their thighs and male assistants wearing brightly coloured kipper ties opening up to the width of the front tyre of a Chopper bicycle indicated to me that to enter such a shop would instantly turn me into a drug addict.
I felt the same, but with an additional coating of menace, walking past the Mersey Tavern on the corner of Chestergate at the bottom of sloping Daw Bank in Mersey Square, which seemed to me to be the very epicentre of the underground. Playing inside were bands with names like Regeneration who would never make it bigger than supporting the likes of Edgar Broughton and Caravan in venues sprinkled around Manchester. Mostly though it seemed like a din of iniquity part out of Victorian squalor and part out of psychedelic San Francisco, where oddly coloured evil-seeming smoke would make an escape when the mostly slammed-shut doors were briefly opened. There was a squat one-legged character in greasy denim sporting the first tattoos I ever saw in the flesh who I would spot slowly leaving and entering the pub on his wretched crutch. He seemed to be at least twenty stone, and the thought of him fiercely inching towards the Tavern doors on who-knows-what mission unnerves me to this day. He was known as Hoppy, and rumour had it he was an actual ex-Hell’s Angel, which meant as far as I was concerned he was perpetually stoned, soaked in urine and in possession of both weed and a concealed weapon. It clearly would have taken the combined prose, wit and energy of Charles Dickens and Hunter S. Thompson to fully fathom the life and mystery of Hoppy.
I never made it into these clubs and pubs even when I reached my late teens, as if the lush knockout smell, the silvery shape-shifting dark, the greasy carpeted steps down into the hot, noisy unknown were unofficial barriers to those not qualified, knowing or daring enough, to those still held back by the impressive moral pull of otherwise apparently indifferent parents.
80
1791
Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, a French traveller who visited Newcastle in 1791, described the colliery wagonways in that neighbourhood as superior to anything of the kind he had seen. The wooden rails were formed with a rounded upper surface, like a projecting moulding, and the wagon wheels being ‘made of cast iron, and hollowed in the manner of a metal pulley’ fitted snugly around the rails. The ease with which the coal was thus hauled was strongly recommended by Saint-Fond to his own countrymen.
During the latter part of the 1780s four hotels had been opened in Blackpool to accommodate the town’s ever-growing number of tourists. However, the growth of the town’s economy and population remained slow.
During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!’ Initially he had great hopes for the Revolution and its dreams of universal brotherhood, but he lost his enthusiasm and reverted from keen republicanism to a conservative belief in commitment and the stability and order of England. When De Quincey ran away from school at seventeen – with a copy of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads – he would describe the feeling of liberation in the same way Wordsworth had described the spirit of revolutionary France; ‘the senselessness of joy’.
The shotgun-like blast of innovation that took place in Manchester between 1765 and 1800 should come as no surprise given its impressive pool of talent. Although the architects of the Industrial Revolution lived in relative isolation from each other, the close timing of their breakthroughs in textile, power and transportation technologies is more than a coincidence. The common thread tying these inventors and dreamers together was rising demand for cotton goods in domestic, foreign and colonial markets.
By the late 1780s, the paths of rainwater down the Pennines had begun to define the outlines of a manufacturing district. An interdependent network of urban places was taking shape that resembled several loose strings of pearls stretching up and out from a central intersection at or near Manchester.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Industrial Revolution is that it did not start a full-scale social war. The workers had their example in the French Revolution, which began in 1789, and, heaven knows, they had good reason to rebel. They knew well enough what their labour was worth, and they saw that the profits of that labour were going to the masters and the State. However, a repressive government kept them firmly in their place. Spies roamed the countryside looking for the first signs of rebellion, often inventing them when they couldn’t find them. Any hint of trouble was crushed – the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester being a case in point. The trouble was that the protests lacked a real political edge. Workers could be roused in the bad times but, perhaps understandably, their aims in the early days were always cheaper bread and better pay. When the boom times returned, the fight faded into the city smog.
1789
Author and diarist Hester Lynch Piozzi reported, ‘There is a rage fo
r the Lakes!’; ‘we travel to (the lakes), we row upon them, we write about them.’ The area, more than any other part of England, was the subject of description and illustration in travel books like Piozzi’s Journey to North England and, more notably, William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye. The latter book is credited with initiating the vogue for ‘picturesque tourism’ – for the picturesque tourist the whole world was nothing more than a large garden to explore.
1788
Like all successful politicians born in the eighteenth century, Robert Peel came from a wealthy background. Unlike most, however, the Peel family wealth was neither landed in origin nor of long duration. Sir Robert Peel’s grandfather had been a small independent farmer in Lancashire. His father, also named Robert, made the family fortune in the infant cotton industry during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Peel was therefore the first prime minister to come from an industrial background. He was born in Bury in 1788, the first son of his parents, and, despite an expensive education and a lifetime in the company of the great and the privileged, never entirely lost his Lancashire accent. Peel’s father was extremely ambitious for him, grooming him for politics and buying him his Commons seat. It is claimed that he told his son, ‘Bob, you dog, if you do not become prime minister someday I’ll disinherit you.’
In 1788 the first petition of Manchester folk demanding an end to the slave trade had been presented to Parliament. By 1792 Manchester had produced 20,000 signatures out of a total population of 75,000 people.
1786
In 1786 ‘only one chimney, that of Arkwright’s spinning mill, was seen to rise above Manchester. Fifteen years later the town had about fifty spinning mills, many of them worked by steam.’ The same year Richard Arkwright became the first manufacturer to be knighted.