by Paul Morley
I always know how old my dad would be if he was still alive because he was born in 1936, which was the year of the three kings, the death of George V followed by the crowning and abdication of Edward VIII, who was replaced by his younger brother, George IV. It was the year that BBC Television officially began and also the last time that a British male won Wimbledon. My dad was born on 10 May, at the beginning of summer, a few weeks before Wimbledon begins. I can keep in touch with my dad’s shadow age by the annual lamentation that it is so many years since Fred Perry was the last British player to win the singles title at Wimbledon. In 2011 it was seventy-five years since Perry won the last of his three Wimbledon titles.
In much the same way I can always remember how old my younger sister Carol is, because she was born in 1966, the increasingly mythical year that England last won the World Cup. So in 1996 it was ‘thirty years of hurt’ since that victory, and Carol was thirty, and in 2011 it was forty-five years since England won what may turn out to be their only World Cup, with Gordon Banks of Rotherham in goal behind the Charlton brothers of Ashington, Northumberland, a central part of the Great Northern Coalfield, once named the largest mining village in the world, fifteen miles north of Newcastle, home to the Pitmatic dialect.
In the nineteenth century Pitmatic – a compound of ‘pit’ and ‘mathematical’ – meant the skill and craft of mining and then came to denote the local dialogue, a dialect within a dialect, a dense insular crush of Old Norse, Scots and Low German that developed around the pit villages of south-east Northumberland and Durham. The term is first recorded in print, in a slightly different form, in an article on a major rally by Bill Lancaster in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle in 1873: ‘A great many of the lads, especially from the Durham district, had evidently never been in Newcastle previously, and the air of wonder with which they gazed at the crowds, at the buildings, and especially at the fine folks who occupied the windows, was very amusing. If the quality criticised and quizzed them, the lads returned the compliment, and it was entertaining enough to catch snatches of criticism on the manners and customs of the upper ten thousand of Newcastle, reduced to the purest “pitmatical”, shouted across the streets, as the men and lads belonging to collieries swept by where I stood in the crowd.’ In his English Journey (1934) J. B. Priestley noted that this ‘curious lingo’, developed within the collieries by colliery men linguistically mapping their own unique underground world, ‘should be an excellent medium for grim tales of accidents far underground, the sagas of the deep pits’.
Fred Perry was born in 1909 in Stockport, in Portwood, close to the town centre near the River Goyt, a couple of miles away from where we lived in Reddish. There is no Perry statue in Stockport, but a fourteen-mile Fred Perry memorial walk opened by Stockport Council in 2002 runs into Reddish from Woodford, passes where the Goyt and Tame become the Mersey, and winds through Reddish Vale up towards Houldsworth Square and Houldsworth Mill.
Fred’s father Samuel Frederick was born in Stockport on 29 June 1877, the son of a cotton spinner, Samuel Ainsworth, born in Hull who later moved to Cheshire, where his family was originally from. Samuel Junior won a scholarship to Stockport Grammar School, but was forced to leave the school at ten because of the death of his father, and work spinning cotton to help feed his family. Frustration at losing out on his treasured place at the grammar school mutated into serious political aspirations, and as a cotton worker he became involved with the Stockport Co-operative Society, elected leader when his abilities became apparent. He married local girl Hannah Birch, and when the Co-operative Party was formed in 1917, Perry became its first national secretary.
Young Fred was nine, and with his father setting up the new party’s headquarters in London, the family moved south – they had already moved via Bolton to Birkenhead as Sam pursued his career – to the Brentham Estate in Ealing, an Edwardian co-operative housing scheme that influenced the design and structure of Hampstead Garden Suburb. For Fred, Brentham was ‘paradise after the bleak streets of the north because everyone in the garden village had use of the Brentham Institute and its cricket field, football pitch, tennis courts, bowling green and – an important thing to me – table tennis facilities. It was there that I first became interested in watching and playing sport, because it was all on the doorstep.’
Perry Senior attempted a return to Stockport when as a Labour Party candidate he contested a by-election in the town in 1920 and again stood at the general election of 1922. He lost both times, but eventually became an MP in 1923 when he was elected for the constituency of Kettering. He lost and regained the seat a number of times between 1924 and 1931, and the Perrys remained in the south. Fred never lost his Stockport edge – living there until seven or eight was enough for him to always retain a scrappy self-contained outsider’s spirit. He fell in love with table tennis at Ealing County School and, inheriting his father’s focus, strength and determination, was the world champion by 1928.
While on holiday in Eastbourne a few years earlier he had noticed some expensive-looking cars lined up near the courts where a tennis tournament was taking place. His dad told him the cars belonged to the players. Fred immediately made up his backstreet mind that he would become a tennis player. Tennis was a game that belonged to the public-school and Oxbridge middle and upper classes and the elitist, enclosed world of Wimbledon, with no easy access for the working class. Provoked by this exclusivity and encouraged by his father, with his own dedication to overcoming the obstacles set in his way by his background, he took up tennis. The competitive Stopfordian spirit of Edmund Shaa penetrated Perry’s psyche – if you were told that you could not do something, this made you even more determined. He practised for hours at a time, but he also had an essential genius for both table tennis and tennis, and an intimidating physical technique combined with superior stamina that was ahead of its time. His table tennis experience and quick, hungry playing style had a positive effect on his speed and reflexes as a tennis player.
His aggression and determination as a player was undoubtedly the result of feeling patronised by the tennis establishment for how he talked and the ungentlemanly enthusiasm and delight he took in playing and winning. His ferocious will to win, addiction to success and the psychological games he played to disconcert and dominate his opponents were considered common. He never shook hands with an opponent before a game, in case, he claimed, he lost some feeling in his hand. His habit of leaping over the net after a win particularly annoyed the powers that were, and refined southern crowds shook their heads in distaste when he changed into fresh kit if a match went to four sets. (In his career he only ever lost two matches that went to five sets.) He had another habit as well – after he hit a winner he would exclaim ‘Very clever’ in a fine Stockport accent guaranteed to irk the All England Club regulars.
‘I made up my mind early on that I wasn’t going to let people order me about,’ he once stated. ‘If they said, “We would rather you didn’t do that,” there was no problem, but if they gave me an outright prohibition then I would deliberately find a way round it. Bloody-mindedness was one of my specialities, and revenge was never against my principles either.’
When he beat Australian Jack Crawford in his first Wimbledon singles final, a Wimbledon official handed Crawford a bottle of champagne after the match while Perry was taking a bath. He overheard the official commiserate with Crawford as ‘this was a day when the best man certainly didn’t win’. Perry’s winner’s tie was not presented to him, but tossed over a nearby chair. A reluctant apology materialised a few days later, but the dislike didn’t go away. A Lawn Tennis Association member once murmured, ‘Not one of us,’ in front of Sam Perry. In 1933 Perry helped Britain win the Davis Cup for the first time in twenty-one years, and he went on to complete his three Wimbledon wins in succession (1934–6), and also the Australian, French and American singles titles to complete the Grand Slam. He completed his break with the proudly amateur British tennis establishment by turning professional in 1936, the
day after his third Wimbledon victory.
Bored with the small-minded, spoiling antics of the British tennis bosses, he had already moved to California, where his blazing self-confidence and unfettered ambition was embraced. He bought into the Beverly Hill Tennis Club, gave tennis lessons to Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn and the Marx Brothers, and had flings with actresses such as Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich. They loved his funny accent and pipe-smoking, especially because they came with a striking physique. For those still looking down on swaggering Perry, he became The Working Class Playboy.
By the early 1940s he was an American citizen, and an elbow injury had led to early retirement. Never a particularly popular hero because of the elitist nature of the game in a pre-television world, he reinvented himself by commentating for BBC Radio after the war and in the late 1940s made his name all over again.
An Austrian ex-footballer, Theodore ‘Tibby’ Wegner had invented an anti-perspirant device worn on the wrist, and approached Perry for an endorsement. Perry didn’t like it, but had some suggestions, and Wegner returned with a neater, more practical sweatband, an invention which led to the founding of Fred Perry Sportswear. Fred’s first thought for a logo was the pipe he loved to smoke, perhaps as an oblique reference to the Stockport of his youth, regularly slumped underneath what was surely the thickest pall of smoke in the country. The pipe wasn’t sexy enough for Wegner, who had his eye on the slick crocodile logo used by the French 1920s Wimbledon champion René ‘The Crocodile’ Lacoste on his fashionable soft-collared cotton shirts. The logo they settled on was the Wimbledon laurel wreath that Perry had proudly worn on his touring blazer and sweater during his peak years. The laurel wreath is a symbol of victory, and looking to one’s laurels means taking inspiration from past achievements to conquer a new task. Resting on your laurels does not.
Perry assumed that the All England Tennis Club, the snobbish centre of a snobbish sport, would refuse permission for them to use it, but the club unexpectedly agreed and released the rights. By 1952 the understated but striking white short-sleeved honeycomb-weave cotton-piqué Fred Perry shirt with three buttons down the front and the wreath logo stitched into the breast was ready for sale. (Fred’s dad Sam died in 1954, having become one of the leading figures in the practical, canny co-operative experiment in self-help.) Soon the shirt spread beyond sport but clung to Perry’s insolent, discreetly showy working-class image, other colours being produced following a 1957 petition from West Ham United fans, and the later dogmatically self-conscious mods desiring a wider range of shades.
The combination of smart, casual, inexpensive and versatile meant the shirt was endlessly adopted by emerging teenage subcultures (as soon as there was a teenage culture), especially if that subculture reflected a certain sort of practical, masculine, comfortable Britishness. Each emerging tribe, from mod to northern soul to skinhead to suedehead to punk to Perry boy to two-tone to Britpop and subsequent nostalgic recreations, read their own interpretations into Fred Perry and the leaves stitched into the clothing, an accumulation of real and imagined myths about the meaning of the brand. The brand became a reflection of its own resilience: it survived endless shifts in fashion and tribal movements, never losing its restrained allure.
A timelessness was pressed into the fabric and the image that never obstructed its fashionableness, as prime adopters wanted at the same time to belong to a certain tribe, but retain an invisibility and yet an individuality. The Fred Perry shirt could satisfy all those requirements, without sacrificing its fundamental message, which again perhaps goes back to the vigorous man and the tough mentality that first inspired it and the subtle symbol of victory, of one-upmanship, stitched above the heart. (The role of Perry’s business partner in the branding of a shirt often favoured by no-nonsense even neo-Nazi English nationalists is more fuzzy. Tibby Wegner was a product of the ‘muscular’ Judaism of Hakoah (the Force) Vienna, part of a sports club formed by liberal Jews as an intellectual experiment in the idea of Jewish sporting superiority. The club was intended as a counterweight to the limp, bookish, stereotype of European Jews in the 1920s and thirties, and its football team was rumoured to be Franz Kafka’s favourite. The Star of David stitched into the breast of the shirts worn by club members probably had no influence on where Perry’s laurel wreath was placed.)
The Fred Perry brand was sold in the early 1960s, eventually ending up as part of a Japanese company, but the name stayed, perhaps because it has a sense of something solid, plain and permanent, uncompromising and unpretentious, which attracts a manly form of dapper fashion follower not interested in the fey and frivolous, but the traditional and utilitarian. It can be at the same time cutting-edge and conservative. It moves with the times, sometimes actively moving them along, but never in a way that seems to sell out its original principles, encouraging a feeling that the brand stands for integrity and authenticity in a world that too easily succumbs to commercially engineered trends.
Perry took the Wimbledon logo and transformed it into the logo of the proletariat the snooty All England Club despised. It became the everyday shirt of the working man obsessed with a certain corner of mass popular culture. It anticipated, created and participated in a gradual shift into a liberated casual world that explicitly rejected the superior-minded formalities and routines of the upper class – a general removing of the tie that was never properly handed to Perry. The clothing brand named after the man who hated doing what he was told was Fred answering back those officials who never looked him in the eye and wished he’d never left the drizzly backstreets of Stockport.
Wimbledon maintained its stiff upper lip as Fred went from vulgar strength to strength, a living legend even after he died, worn on the backs of the common man, and also as no one with the club’s preferred brand of class came along to replace him as the last British man to win its championship. Through gritted teeth they played at being good sports, and eventually a statue was erected to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first win. By then Fred was seventy-four, never to be knighted, and he commented, ‘There will be a few former members of the All England Club revolving in their graves at the thought of such a tribute paid to the man they regarded as a rebel from the wrong side of the tennis tramlines.’
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1670
Rock salt was rediscovered (coal was the intended target) in 1670 near Northwich in the heart of the Cheshire Plain at the junction of the Rivers Dane and Weaver. When the Romans first discovered the salt, Northwich was known as Condate, meaning the confluence, because of its position. Salt was important to the Romans, and is linked as a source to the words soldier and salary. The seventeenth-century rediscovery led to a sudden increase in the town’s prosperity, but transport links were still poor. Salt was carried from the town to other parts of the country by pack pony. At one time salt was highly taxed, and a fair amount of smuggling went on. The traditional method for extracting fine white salt from brine was to boil it up in immense pans until the water evaporated. This meant the town was afflicted by great clouds of smoke and steam, as antiquarian John Leland noted in the sixteenth century: ‘Northwich is a pratie market town but fowle, and by the Salters houses be great stakes of smaul cloven wood, to seethe the salt water that thei make white salt of.’
Northwich is the most northern of the Cheshire ‘wyches’, which include nearby Middlewich and Nantwich. (It is the salt deposits beneath the soils of the Cheshire Plain that give a special flavour to the pasture and therefore the milk and therefore the flaky Cheshire cheese.)
1664
First estimates of population make Stockport the fifth largest town in Cheshire. The population is recorded as 1,400–1,500 in 308 households.
1660
By 1610 a quarter of English maritime trade (by weight) consisted of coal, and this rose to 40 per cent by 1660, three times the size of all other coastal shipping. The coal trade was seen as an ideal training ground for sailors: ‘the principal nursery of English seamen. England is built upon an underground
mountain of coal. Its exploitation was the motor-force in the revolution that created modern industrial society.’
1652
Up to the early-modern period Lancashire was predominantly Roman Catholic, although after the Reformation it developed remarkable religious diversity, particularly after the Toleration Act of 1690. Perhaps the most notable example of this diversity is George Fox, who in 1652, on the summit of Pendle Hill, experienced a vision which later led him to the home of Thomas and Margaret Fell near Ulverston, where the Quaker movement may be said to have been founded.
1650
The people of Manchester are spoken of as the most industrious in the northern parts of the kingdom; the town is stated to be a mile in length, the streets are open and clean, and the buildings good. There were four marketplaces, two markets weekly and three fairs in the year.
Winston Churchill surveying the remains of the Manchester Free Trade Hall, demolished by German bombs at the beginning of the Second World War
1648
The Battle of Preston took place between 17 and 19 August 1648, and effectively ended the second phase of the English Civil War. On one side were the invading Scottish Engagers (supporters of Charles I) under Hamilton. On the other was Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. The raw Scottish recruits, although greatly superior in numbers, were no match for the English veterans. Oliver Cromwell caught up with them at Preston and dispersed them in a series of running battles.