The North

by Paul Morley

  He called me in and said, ‘Have a piece of birthday cake.’ This cake was made for him, so he told me, ‘by a little old lady in St Helens’. Then he said, ‘I want you to turn over for this terrible piece.’ He went over to the piano and the terrible piece was Götterdämmerung. As fast as he roared, coughed, cursed, sang (and what singing!), I turned. When I missed a turn, he cursed, not me, but The Ring. ‘Damn awful thing, what – barbarian lot of Nazi thugs, aren’t they?’ If complications in turning brought us to a stop, he roared with laughter; stopped, told a marvellous anecdote about some accident in performance, and the swearing and the banging on the piano started all over again, along with the terrible, moaning sing-song. The following night he gave an absolutely majestic performance of the work.

  What a comedown I must have been after working with Beecham at the height of his powers, insignificant me representing all small pointless boys, selfishly mooching about like he was just another ageing teacher with no internal life, no experience and no idea how to teach. He had worked with one of the great, notorious and controversial men of classical music, alive with wit and appetite, who once described the sound of the harpsichord as ‘two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof’. Steele had been given a tantalising glimpse into the madness of genius, into an international world of ideas and achievement, and then been removed and eventually placed in an ordinary, unexceptionally eccentric minor grammar school filled with boys becoming more interested as the sixties become the seventies in a seductive and powerful form of music that increasingly marginalised his own.Those pupils and colleagues who were fond of Steele, like he was fond of Beecham, and who curated his memory, organising recordings of Autumn Sequence and some of his other nostalgic, yearning chamber pieces, remember a man ‘held in warmth and affection in Manchester and all areas from Carlisle to Stockport’. A hint of what I experienced in his unsettling classroom comes in a review written by one of his students and friends, Christopher Fifield: ‘Douglas was an eccentric bachelor, with a history of mental breakdowns, but he possessed an impish sense of humour and was hugely gifted as a teacher and musician, a fine organist – in particular as an exceptionally talented improviser – in short a thoroughly likeable man from whom I learned a great deal.’

  I didn’t get his sense of humour, perhaps in the way that I wouldn’t have got Spike Milligan’s sense of humour if he had taught me. My musical education was happening elsewhere. My mind was elsewhere.

  89

  1746

  Sheffield, already for centuries a home of edged-tool manufacturing, had in 1746 about 12,000 inhabitants. It was a plainly built town, which was just beginning, as a result of improvements to the navigability of the River Don, to develop trade with more distant markets and to grow into an important industrial centre for plated goods as well as for the manufacture of iron and steel.

  1742

  In 1742 Thomas Boulsover, a Sheffield cutler, while repairing a silver and copper knife, fused a thin layer of silver to copper, discovered they behaved as a single metal and produced what became known as Sheffield Plate. Other craftsmen in Sheffield began to use this method to produce tableware that looked like silver but at a fraction of its cost. At this time, nearly 100 water mills lined the easily dammed rivers and brooks that flowed through Sheffield, operating grindstones, forge hammers and rolling mills all necessary for knife making.

  1733

  John Kay, son of the owner of a Lancashire woollen factory, patents the first of the devices which revolutionise the textile industry. He has devised a method for the shuttle to be thrown mechanically back and forth across the loom. This greatly speeds up the previous hand process and halves the labour force required. Where a broadcloth loom previously required a weaver on each side, it can now be worked by a single operator. This makes the weaver’s work easier and less tiring, but many fear they will lose their jobs.

  1725

  Whig historian Thomas Macaulay noted the desolate condition of the northern counties at the beginning of his controversial 1848 History of England. This is in stark contrast to Daniel Defoe, who in his Tour through the Whole Island (1725), remarked,

  The country south of Trent is by far the largest, as well as the richest and most populous, though the great cities were rivalled by those of the north. There is no town in England, London excepted, that can equal Liverpool for the fineness of the streets, the beauty of the buildings; many of the houses are all of stone and the rest (the new part) of brick. Newcastle is a spacious, extended, infinitely populous place. It is seated upon the River Tyne, which is here a noble, large and deep river, and ships of any reasonable size may come safely up to the very town. As the town lies on both sides of the river, the parts are joined by a very strong and stately stone bridge of seven very great arches, rather larger than the arches of London Bridge; and the bridge is built into a street of houses also, as London Bridge is. They build ships here to perfection, I mean as to strength and firmness, and to bear the sea; and as the coal trade occasions a demand for such strong ships, a great many are built here. In Newcastle there is considerable manufacture of wrought iron.

  1725

  In 1725 Lancashire’s first turnpike act passed through Parliament. This permitted the businessmen of Liverpool to construct a road linking the coal fields of Prescot with the expanding city. The Wigan to Preston Turnpike opened in 1726, and from 1750, as the cotton industry grew in dramatic fashion, turnpikes punched their way through the valleys, vital routes for trade until the expansion of the railways in the 1840s. The building of canals, which could transport much heavier loads much more easily, was also a factor in the demise of the turnpikes. Road trade fell to such an extent that it became uneconomical to collect tolls. At one time there were some ninety turnpikes in Lancashire, although most were less than ten miles in length and only four exceeded thirty miles.

  1721

  Up to 1700 Britain’s largest and most profitable exports had always been wool fleeces and textiles, but cotton was soon to replace wool. An act of Parliament in 1721 prohibited the import of all printed and painted calicoes and fine pure-cotton fabrics, which came from India and the Far East. This caused consternation among London society and the new fashion houses. Lancashire hand-loom weavers copied the imports, and filled the gap in the market.

  1719

  Robinson Crusoe was, according to north England expert Daniel Defoe, in a book published in 1719, considered by many to be one of the very first novels because it tested the possibilities of extended narrative written in prose: ‘. . . born in 1632, in the city of York, of a good family though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called – nay we call ourselves and write our name – Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.’

  The first book printed in Manchester was John Jackson’s Mathematical Lectures Read to the Mathematical Society in Manchester, printed in 1719 by Roger Adams of Chester, printer of the Manchester News-Letter, later the Weekly Journal, ‘containing the freshest advices, both foreign and domestic’, price one penny, the very start of Manchester newspaper history.

  1718

  Thomas Chippendale Senior was born in Otley, a small market town in the Yorkshire Dales, and was baptised in the parish church there on 5 June 1718. His family had long been involved in the woodworking and timber trades, and he probably received a practical apprenticeship from his father. Not a great deal is known about Chippendale’s life and the work he did until the publication of his ground-breaking book The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director.

  This was published in 1754 and included 161 engraved plates of ‘Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture in the Gothic, Chinese and Modern Taste’. It
was an immediate sellout and a second edition was reprinted a year later. A third edition, with many new plates, appeared in 1762. This work is Chippendale’s enduring legacy, and shows his gift for adapting design styles to the fashion of the mid-eighteenth century. The book was so influential that the name of Chippendale is often indiscriminately applied to mid-eighteenth-century furniture as a whole. From the 1760s Chippendale was influenced heavily by the neoclassical work of architect Robert Adam, with whom he worked on several large projects, notably at Harewood House and Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. In both places he supplied furnishings from attic to basement, which was his preference.

  A 4d stamp from 1966 showing Jodrell Bank

  Chippendale described himself as an ‘upholder’ – which implies that he was able to supply his clients with furnishings of every kind. He was an entrepreneur running a large business employing perhaps as many as fifty in-house craftsmen – including cabinetmakers, upholsterers, carvers, gilders, chair makers, polishers and packers – as well as a number of outworkers. He was the artistic director of the enterprise: supervising the workforce and its production, appeasing clients and always keeping abreast of new fashions. After Chippendale’s death in 1779, the business was carried on until well into the nineteenth century by his eldest son, also called Thomas Chippendale.

  The Leeds Mercury was established by John Hirst in 1718 as a weekly newspaper in the rapidly growing west Yorkshire woollen textile town. It was one of the foremost provincial newspapers, publishing articles by many distinguished writers and gaining a reputation as a leading reporter of liberal politics. The newspaper only had a small circulation in its early years. The Mercury began as a four-page Saturday newspaper, but it gradually increased in size, frequency and popularity, being published daily from 1861.

  1700

  In a time when it took a week to travel from York to London, pioneering traveller and diarist Celia Fiennes rides most of her way from Rochdale between hedges cut smooth and even. She writes, ‘Manchester looks exceedingly well at the entrance. Very substantial buildings; the houses are not very lofty, but mostly of brick and stone; the old houses are timber work. There is a very large church, all stone; and [it] stands so high that walking round the churchyard you see the whole town. There is good carving of wood in the choir.’ After describing the Chetham Hospital and Library, with its curiosities, she continues, ‘Out of the Library there are leads on which one has the sight of the town, which is large, as also the other town that lies below it, called Salford, and is divided from this by the River Irwell, over which is a stone bridge, with many arches . . . The Market place is large; it takes up two streets’ length when the market is kept for their linen cloth [and] cotton tickings which is the manufacture of the town. Here is a very fine school for young gentlewomen, as good as any in London; and music and dancing and things are very plenty here. This is a thriving place.’

  Until about 1700 most English speakers, whatever their dialect, pronounced the letter r very clearly in words where it followed a vowel, such as in farmer and carter (this is known as rhoticisation). After 1700 this swiftly died out and is now virtually unknown in British standard English. It survives, however, in the dialects of the West Country, part of Lancashire and some parts of Yorkshire. It is also a standard feature of Scots, the English spoken in Scotland. Nobody is quite sure why it disappeared from most British English, but its loss was certainly noticed at the time. Some eighteenth-century folk complained about ‘R-dropping’ the way people complain about H-dropping today.

  1698

  Visitors were struck by the menacing quality of the landscape around the Cumbrian lakes. In 1698, Celia Fiennes rode on horseback through Kendal and over Kirkstone Pass into Patterdale. She described it in terms both admiring and forbidding. ‘As I walked down at this place I was walled on both sides by those inaccessible high rocky barren hills which hang over one’s head in some places and appear very terrible.’

  1696

  Chester was chosen over Hereford as one of the locations of five country branch mints, to the delight of local people. This was a period known as the Great Re-coinage, an attempt by the government to renew the currency at a time when people would slice small amounts of precious metal from silver coins rendering them unusable. The Warden of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton, appointed astronomer Edmund Halley deputy controller of the mint to help coordinate the standardisation and milling of silver coins. In the year he spent at Chester Halley wrote in Philosophical Transactions about various things including the discovery of a Roman altar in Eastgate Street, an extraordinary hailstorm and an eclipse of the moon. The Chester mint, the least succesful of the five country branches, was shut down in 1698.

  1673

  Broadsheets in Yorkshire and Lancashire dialect appeared with increasing frequency after the seventeenth century. A York printer, Stephen Bulkley, published the poem ‘A Yorkshire Dialogue in Yorkshire Dialect: between an Awd Wife, A Lass and a Butcher’ in 1673. The poem describes in realistic detail the misadventures of an ox on its way to the slaughterhouse – a subject lacking heroic possibilities but defining dialect’s greatest strength: hard-boiled comedy that did not bow to elitist literacy or flippant social assumptions.

  90

  For a couple of years I obediently caught the bus outside the Conservative Club at about five past eight so I could be at school by a quarter to nine and disappear into my other life – which required a ridiculous uniform – and then the Morley family moved house. We stayed within Stockport, as if despite all the carefully organised transport routes, there was no way out. The move was part of my parents’ thinking that it was important to move up in life – to advance. Clearly it was time to leave cramped, static Reddish, which despite its Cheshire address was really south-east Lancashire, and head over to the other side of the Mersey into Cheshire proper. My father, never a fan of Harold Wilson as prime minister, a guarded, conventional Kent Ted Heath man through and through, never felt at home in Lancashire and craved a move further into smarter, moneyed Cheshire as a reflection of his ambition to join the middle class.

  I felt no regret at leaving Reddish. I had got everything I needed. Reddish had made me what I was: it had formed my identity, created the boy, coated my consciousness with an image of myself that would never leave me, as someone of the north, a fan of Lancashire County Cricket Club, of Manchester City Football Club, someone who was if not born in Reddish then made in Reddish. Wherever I now went, throughout the rest of my life, all subsequent reinventions would be based around that Reddish core. Everything else that happened to me formed around that grave and tangible self-conscious pre-teen centre. If I had left Reddish at eleven or twelve and our family had headed south, perhaps to my dad’s home on the Isle of Thanet by the Channel, I would still have always thought of myself as a northerner, from Manchester, Lancashire, Stockport, Cheshire, never slipping over into a southern map, a non-northern mind. There was, though, some further northern education still to come.

  My dad was in relatively steady employment, and we moved closer to my school, towards Bramhall, but nowhere near in it, more than a mile or so from the splendid black and white Bramhall Hall. We ended up in an area of Stockport called Woodsmoor, prettier than Reddish, but still a lot lower than middle class, the other side of the railway line from Manchester to Sheffield at the bottom of the school’s sports field. It was now a short walk to school. The house was like a sketchy, downmarket version of the kind of semi-detached suburban home my dad truly desired. Nearby there was plain, doughty Davenport, named after the railway station – built before there was any settlement, which in turn was named after the fourteenth-century Davenports who owned the land for 500 years. They were a locally important family which can be traced back to 1066 with a name derived from the Norman French Dauenport meaning the town on the trickling stream. Davenport was filled with larger houses built for the moguls of the Stockport hat industry that was no more.

  My dad now had a garage – for a second-han
d but recent-model gold-coloured Vauxhall Viva HB – a slightly flashy upgrade of the tatty HA Viva he’d driven in Reddish, with American-influenced curved back windows, a relatively fancy front grille and interior, the kind of car he hoped would be good for the ego – and a few yards of drive between the front door and the pavement. It was in this house, while working for BP and Shell in Wythenshawe, that he had a catastrophic nervous breakdown, a phrase we used in our family to attempt to explain how he lost his mind, which contained who he was, as if the effort of the rising and advancing, the move deeper into more wholesome Cheshire, the accumulation of mortgage, hire-purchase agreements, funding a near-new car and maintaining an increasingly complicated marriage was just too much.

  If there was a sigh of relief at leaving Reddish and a feeling of satisfaction at being within a few minutes of lush, melodious Bramhall, whatever it was that had marked him – before he arrived or once he was in the north, absorbing northern history and environment as a deadweight, an offence to his south-eastern sensibility – continued to blacken his being to such an extent he would eventually become a mere shadow and then even more evanescent. An unfillable hole that had opened in my life was caused by opaque, bizarre lessons in Latin and biology. The gaping hole in his life was caused by life itself.

  When my dad was a teenager and a younger man he loved to play table tennis, and there was the odd small silver shield wistfully leaning on otherwise bare shelves around our house that suggested he played well enough to win one or two minor youth tournaments in Kent. He still played occasionally, and I remember how when he wore his short-sleeved dark blue table-tennis shirt and crisply pressed trousers he looked very like how Fred Perry had looked in the 1930s when he was at his peak as a player both of table tennis and tennis. Six feet tall, twelve stone, lean, long legs, an agile, athletic presence, dark hair neatly slicked back with Brylcreem, a solid centre of some confidence, a broad, winning, flirtatious smile: this is how I remember my dad before he was reduced by circumstances and sadness, unable or unwilling to transcend local conditions, and slipped further into the gaping hole inside and out.