The North

by Paul Morley

  I did not make the sixth form and A levels, something that must have been spotted very early on, contributing to the school’s lack of interest in me. Stockport Grammar was all about ushering its pampered Cheshire charges into university, preferably Cambridge or Oxford, and a box had been ticked within months of my arrival that indicated I was not university material. I did not develop as the kind of boy they would get behind to motivate and nurture.

  The only history I remember from those five years was the nineteenth-century unification of Germany and Italy, which was conveyed to me in great and pompous if entirely abstract detail. As with most of what was taught me at the time, the rest of whatever I was meant to learn has drained away, reflecting how I was systematically starved of energy and enthusiasm. Since leaving the school, recalling the teachers who ignored or intimidated me, I have felt particularly aggrieved by the headmaster, F. W. Scott, who seemed the king of an array of unpredictable eccentrics shackled inside a series of quirks, mannerisms and idiosyncratic approaches to discipline and education, and by the sense that in this relationship they were the immovable bosses, and we were the disposable often completely worthless child labour.

  Most were in their fifties, and some had started there before the Second World War. A combination of being set in their ways, only interested in the welfare of boys who caught their attention, bored with their own position and routine, and disappointed that they hadn’t done as well in their academic lives as they might have wanted, added up to an ever-present tension. On the other hand, if you were enjoying your time at the school, and thriving, they were demanding, committed and thorough, delivering a high-class education for anyone requiring a certain slate of qualifications. Anyone who couldn’t cope and keep up was quickly left behind. If there was no sense that you were letting the school down, which I was clearly doing, ruining their records with my inadequacy, you were treated with respect.

  Scott left a lasting impression. He seemed a major factor in my maturing sense of inferiority, even though he did not teach me. My encounters with the headmaster were limited to daily morning prayers, which he presided over like an ageing Laurence Olivier playing a pompous, baffled small-town mayor, and an occasional clash in the corridors over the length of my hair, which consistently strayed scruffily over my ears and collar and marked me out as a clear malcontent. During my time there, between 1968 and 1973, the older more formal teachers reacted intolerantly and defensively to the visible signs of teenage rebellion. The one thing about me that got their attention was the length of my hair – or so it seemed to me, although perhaps my apparent indifference, laziness, dirty clothes, spotty complexion, sullenness and increasing stupidity also annoyed them, even though that was more a manifestation of fear and apprehension of the system that had trapped me. I was not particularly naughty, or even mischievous. I would say that I was bland to the point of boring, but the hair was enough for them to believe, even in a world where long hair had clearly replaced hats, that I was trouble.

  Francis Willoughby Scott joined the school as headmaster in 1962. I never thought of him as having a life, a past, a family, a strategy; he seemed to exist in paper-thin form simply in order to terrorise and disorientate me. Now that he becomes a character in a book, written by someone who is out of all the boys who went to that school probably the last person the teachers there would have ever imagined writing a book that contained information about the school, let alone a book that claimed itself as a history book, I know a little more about him. Even the dreaded fusty Scott leaves traces on the Internet, that ever-expanding unlimited storage facility where academia and pop culture, knowledge and trivia, learning and simplification, fact and fiction, teachers and pupils coexist.

  I know now that he was a northerner, a Yorkshireman, born in 1915 in the Hull that Robinson Crusoe yearned for while stranded on his island, the Hull where Larkin lived on the dwindling, strained, provincial edge of things and told Betjeman the most beautiful spot in Hull was Spring Bank Cemetery. When I started going to Stockport Grammar Scott would have been as old as I am now writing this. To me, stared at by his appraising, slightly mocking eyes under straggly blue-grey eyebrows, he was twice as old as I am now. There is, though, now I am that same age, an awareness that I might have been missing out on the ironic relish, incapable of realising he had a sense of humour, interpreting the sparkle in his eyes only as a threat.

  An obituary written in the Independent in 2004 by two ex-pupils, Gordon Marsden and Nicholas Henshall, describes someone who I would like to have known, but my limited understanding of a man wearing a dusty academic gown almost casually falling off his shoulders leaning into me so I could feel his dingy breath and he could contemptuously finger my would-be hippy hair, and his limited understanding that there was more to me than my shyness and chronic lack of academic flair, meant we never really met.

  Apparently, he was a phenomenon with the sort of vital ornate character and mind that Dickens would love to have owned – I did think of him as Dickensian, but not in a good way. He read both English and history at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. I am not sure what he would have made of the fact that my daughter Madeleine attended that same college, studying English, as I am not sure what I think of it myself, let alone that she edited the Cambridge newspaper Varsity in her second year and became Varsity president. Is there some shred of destiny, even a strange culmination of Shaa’s moorland fairy dream, twisting around the fact that the daughter of such an embarrassing academic failure ended up not only at university, or Cambridge, but actually at his college? Does it prove him right about something or other, or prove me right about something else altogether? Is he haunting me more than I could ever anticipate – reaching out to demonstrate that he was caring for me in his own slightly capricious way?

  He only taught sixth formers, and as I never made the sixth form, I never experienced what the obituary calls ‘a roller coaster of ideas and essay construction’. His mind ‘whirred like Dr Who’s Tardis between past, present and future’. He swooped down corridors like a combination of the first two Doctors – shrewd white-haired William Hartnell and scattily wise tartan-trousered Patrick Troughton – but I never thought of him as being magical enough to be the Doctor. A description of his essay technique suggests a real reason for our incompatibility: ‘His formula for crisp prose (short sentences, vigorous verbs and avoidance of the passive) was honed as “Don’t say, ‘Our world is threatened by human pollution,’ say, ‘Man pollutes’ or ‘Man excretes’ – even better, ‘Man sh . . .’” – the Anglo-Saxon expletive lost in the mix of terror and mirth from students wondering how on earth to get away with that in the exam.’ The pious, clipped Scott led the assembled boys day in day out in a mumbling early-morning Lord’s Prayer. The thought of him saying ‘shit’ in front of me would have sent me spiralling through space and time, probably to land in shit in 1555 in a field near where Edmund Shaa grew up by the River Etherow.

  The obituary does admit that the regime at the school did ‘evoke a bygone era’, but there was method to what could appear like the madness of Scott. The Gothic gowns were worn, it seems, to protect the masters’ suits from chalk dust, but also because the heating was poor – when Scott arrived at the school each classroom had its own fireplace. He did run the school like a tyrant, but, it seems, as part of his battle to make it pay as an independent with an illustrious but fading history, and modernise it while maintaining its standards. He prepared the way for new buildings, for the eventual introduction of girls – previously only tantalisingly spotted through gaps in the symbolic hedge along the playing fields that separated the school from the Stockport Convent Girls’ School next door – and there is a suggestion he was aware of useless non-standard pupils like me, limply hanging out at the far end of the school’s vision, out of focus, more or less out of mind: ‘I knew I had one or two pupils who were rogues, but I let them stay – it keeps teachers on their toes and both sides get to learn something.’

  He let me stay, an
d suffer. Meanwhile, on the outside I was building a new identity and continuing my self-education in Reddish Library, on the television, on the two-pound transistor radio that had led me, fiddling with the dial, to scratchy distant Radio Luxembourg. Outside I was finding pop music, and this developing love for music contrasted with how I was taught music, and indeed art, and language, inside the school. Outside my mind was being opened. Inside it seemed to be being shut down. Nobody was taking any interest in me, or what I was interested in, and when it came time to tell Mr Scott what I wanted to do with my life – I was fourteen and had set my heart on being a journalist – I received the kind of derisive snort that founder Shaa had received when he announced his own ambitions for personal growth.

  The music teacher was called Doug Steele, alongside Scott perhaps the most demented of the eccentrics, as far as I could tell. The system was that for the first four years of school you took music, art and religious knowledge – studying the Bible with such flattening intensity the whole epic thing was wiped out in my imagination, leaving yet another hole, another vast negative space that has never been filled. In the fifth year you chose, or had chosen for you, one of the three subjects to take at O level. I ended up in religious knowledge – where inevitably those with no real skills were dumped – to continue delving into the Good Book, full of words that dissolved in your mind as soon as they were read, either by you or to you, by master in charge Mr Gosling in a tone that suggested he had died in the 1930s. There was never a chance that I would do music, because Mr Steele’s teaching technique, the lack of it, made it increasingly difficult to understand what the subject actually was.

  His lessons were wild. Sometimes we would read Marvel and DC superhero comics he had piled on a table. He would play random albums – I remember lessons consisting of listening to the Moody Blues, Jesus Christ Superstar and, with no explanation, the first J. Geils Band album, which sounded great but was put in no context at all. We would sit on low wooden benches in his classroom, which was separated from the rest of the school, leaving us exposed to him roaming around in front of and behind us. When he wanted an answer to any question he would abruptly jam a pointed knee into the base of a boy’s spine. This cannot have been all that happened during four years of alleged study, but it is all I have taken away with me – Superman comics, flashes of temper, the Moody Blues (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, so perhaps he was showing us how to remember the notes on the treble clef) and a bony jab in the back.

  As with Scott, there is a trace of Steele on the Internet, so that he is a wisp or two above disappearing totally into the void. This Douglas Steele is far removed from the spiky, zany character that ran his lessons with a frayed rod of rubber. This Douglas Steele suggests a reason for the gnawing uneasiness that there was in his teaching presence – that his life had not turned out how he had wanted it to, teaching classes of ignorant boys who had no idea who he was and most of whom had no interest in finding out. He was frustrated, sore and highly self-critical, but he adopted a teaching style, at least as far as I was concerned, that was midway between couldn’t care less and what the hell.

  I must have missed the point of what Doug Steele was up to, or was lost in my own fog of sloppy teen prejudices within a general fear and loathing of the school as a whole. I was distracted by how my interests were developing outside the school, how I was piecing together a love for music based on what I was reading in music magazines, seeing on Top of the Pops and hearing on my transistor radio after I had gone to bed. Steele, as a musician and a music teacher, was not engaging me, and he clearly took the decision that as a class – I was emphatically planted in the miserable B stream, those already marked out as second rate – we were not likely to be responsive to his skills and interests. Presumably none of us could play an instrument or sing well enough to join the choir, and so we were of no use to him, and he had no time to waste, and we had other things on our minds. He was perhaps a man who believed in fragile beauty, and we were an ugly, indifferent mob.

  I must have missed the point, because I am now aware of an elegant song cycle that he wrote ‘for the pupils of Stockport Grammar School’, which was first played in the school’s brand-new neo-modernist Hallam Hall in 1969, where Steele had overseen the installation of the organ. He would play this organ every morning as the assembled school staggered through hymns with melodies that seemed made up on the spot, and possibly were, as Steele was fond of improvising. He clearly took morning assembly as an opportunity to please himself, playing flamboyantly in an attempt to drown out the untidy singing making a mumbling mockery of the Lord.

  His song cycle, Autumn Sequence, is whimsically scored for speaker, solo voices and the few instruments available at the school at the time – flute, piccolo or recorder, tubular bells, handbells, tambourine, organ and piano – which must have been another cause for frustration, but the limitations were used in his composition as a challenge. I was at the school, a twelve-year-old, when it was premiered. I imagine attendance was compulsory and something of an event, the music teacher composing a twenty-five-minute piece especially for the school choir to sing. I have no memory of the performance. If I did attend, I assume the bored, snooty me found the music – which his fans, his more affectionate ex-students, would call charming, wistful, occasionally slyly dramatic with a decent dash of Delius – old-fashioned and dull. (As well as Steele’s wired organ playing at assembly, which could cause much sniggering during ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, I remember annual school speech days at the plush but faded 1,750-seat Davenport Cinema and Theatre next door. As we impatiently waited for the prizes to be given – never to me or my classmates, who therefore viewed the whole thing with rejected and childish disinterest – and the invited speaker to bore us with flaccid inspirational words, the highlight would be the moment when the massive theatre organ slowly rose out of the pit. Steele would be in control, and out of control, madly pumping the mighty instrument to the hilt, splashing around the special effects, stamping on the pedals, acting like a nutty combination of Keith Emerson of Nice and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Catweazle, the quaint TV wizard, and Professor Pat Pending from Wacky Races. There was, perhaps, something in him that if he had been born thirty years later might have led to him being in a progressive rock group, possibly Saddleworth’s very own Moody Blues, Barclay James Harvest. Some of his other pieces, with titles like Slow Air, Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes in the Air, The Land of Lost Content, Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind, suggest he could have written a decent concept album based on the romanticised dreams of Edmund Shaa. As Steele charged through his organ repertoire, he would be lustily, slightly ironically cheered, by his restless, listless audience, sensing a peculiar hint of liberation and soul at the heart of this soporific ceremony.)

  Douglas Steele was a northerner, born in Carlisle in 1910, the ancient Roman frontier town, the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, a prize possession fought for by England and Scotland over centuries, where Mary Queen of Scots sought asylum in 1568 and was imprisoned as a threat to English security. Before teaching at Stockport, he had studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, taught at Chetham’s School and was an assistant organist at Manchester Cathedral and director of music at Holy Innocents Church in Fallowfield. After studying in Salzburg, in 1939 he became a ‘talented secretary’ and librarian to entrepreneur, impresario and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, then working at Covent Garden, the founder of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932, closely involved with the Manchester Hallé and the Liverpool Philharmonic, and a celebrated, prolific and spectacular musician with a cavalier brilliance for presenting opera. Beecham was a Hadyn and Mozart specialist who helped introduce Debussy, Sibelius and Strauss to a wider public and who had an extraordinary ability to transform the sound an orchestra made, inspiring even mesmerising his musicians.

  The SELNEC 92 bus from Manchester to Hazel Grove, via Levenshulme and Heaton Chapel, in the 1960s

  Beecham was born in St Helens in 1879, the son of wealthy ch
emist Sir Joseph Beecham, whose father Thomas had been responsible for Beecham’s Pills, which proved to be an excellent patent remedy for indigestion (‘Hark the herald angels sing, Beecham’s pills are just the thing . . .’). Thomas Beecham, born the son of a farm worker in 1820, had spent his youth as a shepherd, and had learned a good deal about herbal remedies. Beecham was said to have had a special knack for healing sick animals and, on occasion, humans. For several years Beecham sold his laxatives at local markets with a sales pitch that included showing off a jar of intestinal worms. In 1847 Beecham began hawking his own brand of pills throughout the town of Wigan and the surrounding countryside. He soon set up shop as a herbalist and grocer in Wigan. In 1859, after mixed results in Wigan, Beecham moved his base to nearby St Helens, where he focused on two products: a cough tablet and the famous laxative Beecham’s Pills, advertised in the local newspaper as ‘worth a guinea a box’. Both products were available through mail order, and Beecham advertised extensively to take advantage of a rapidly growing demand for novel health remedies.

  Thomas Beecham the musician was knighted in 1916 and died in 1961, buried in Limpsfield, Surrey near Frederick Delius of Bradford, who he loved like ‘an alluring, wayward woman’ and had rescued from obscurity with his advocacy. Reading Steele talking about his time as assistant to the haughty myth-making Beecham perhaps provides a clue to his own idiosyncratic approach to life and teaching. He recalled Beecham preparing on the piano for a performance of Wagner at the Covent Garden Royal Opera House, where Steele was expected to turn the pages of the score.