The North

by Paul Morley

  On 5 November 1605 a York man, Guy Fawkes, was discovered about to ignite thirty-six barrels of gunpowder underneath the Houses of Parliament and assassinated the protestant James I. His aim was to spark a Catholic revolution. Fawkes, described by those who knew him well as a courteous, gallant and pious man, was known to have been a brave and resolute soldier with special knowledge of the use of gunpowder. A relatively minor player in the Gunpowder Plot, being caught in the act, about to light the fuse, made him the principal character and ensured his notoriety.

  1603

  The traditional gateway to the north was at Doncaster in north-east England on the River Don. The north began at the point of no return for someone travelling on horseback from London along what had become the main road to Edinburgh, the Great North Road – designated the A1 in 1921. With determined riding you could cover the 170 miles from London to Doncaster in one day. Sir Robert Carey did just this on 24 March 1603, when he rode to take news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to James of Scotland. Once a traveller went beyond Doncaster there was no returning until the following day, and the north had begun.

  Doncaster has long been significant. The Romans set up a forward base there after driving a road north. Later in history many important meetings between north and south took place at Doncaster. This is where northern nobles assembled in 1399 to proclaim Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, as King Henry IV. During the 1536 rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace north once again met south on the bridge over the Don. The Don, like the Danube, takes its name from Danu, the oldest Celtic mother goddess, the power in the land that will never be overcome by mortals. It rises in the Pennines and flows seventy miles east through the Don Valley via Penistone on the northern edge of central Sheffield – where it was once known for entering as a sparkling stream and leaving as a black gurgling mass of pollution – Rotherham, Mexborough, Conisborough, Doncaster and Stainworth before joining the Ouse at Goole in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

  1602

  Entries in the Bispham parish baptismal register mention ‘de Poole’ and ‘de blackpool’, at that time a collection of cobble and clay huts spread along the coast near the Pool. By the end of the century a number of the landed gentry, led by the Tyldesleys of Foxhall, had settled in the area.

  1588

  William Shakespeare roams as far as Newcastle and Carlisle, possibly as a member of the Queen’s Players.

  1586

  William Camden’s Britannia is published. It records, ‘Cheshire Cheese is more agreeable and better relished than those of other parts of the kingdom.’ The 1637 edition refers to cheese making in Cheshire: ‘. . . the grasse and fodder there is of that goodness and vertue that the cheeses bee made heere in great number of a most pleasing and delicate taste, such as all England againe affordeth not the like, no, though the best dairy women otherwise and skilfullest in cheesemaking be had from hence’. It was said to have been the favourite cheese of Queen Elizabeth I. Even the French, not normally known for their enthusiasm for English food, respect Cheshire cheese, and have a rhyme about it: Dans le chester sec et rose, a longues dents de l’anglais mordent (Into the Cheshire cheese, dry and pink, the long teeth of the English sink).

  1580

  In Northumberland the forests were felled to make pit props for the coal industry and to build docks and wharves, barges, lighters and sea-going ships for the coal trade to London, and firewood became scarce. In Bamburgh ‘great woods hath beene, but now utterly decayed and no wood at all remaineth hereon’. William Harrison grimly noted in the 1580s, ‘Of coal mines we have such plenties as may suffice for all the realm of England. And so they must do hereafter indeed, if wood be not better cherished than it is at present.’

  Merchant and philanthropist Sir Humphrey Chetham was born in Crumpsall in 1580, the son of a successful Manchester merchant who lived in Crumpsall Hall. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and made his fortune in the cloth trade, mainly dealing in fustian, a strong fabric made of linen and cotton, to the London market. (From Shakespeare’s time, fustian, also known as bombast, was also used to refer to pompous or pretentious writing, as it was often used as padding.) It was noted that Chetham’s ‘strict integrity, his piety, and works of charity secured him the respect and esteem of those around him’. Chetham’s wealth made him a public figure, although he was a reluctant official, and in 1631 he was fined for refusing a knighthood, not wanting to share his increasing wealth with the crown. Later, he accepted the title. In 1634 he was appointed high sheriff of the County of Lancashire, but refused a second term on the grounds of infirmity and old age. When the Civil War started, he sided with the Parliamentarians. He was responsible for the creation of Chetham’s Hospital (now Chetham’s School of Music) and Chetham’s Library. Founded in 1653 and intended to rival the college libraries of Oxbridge, this is the oldest public library in the English-speaking world. Together with the school, it is located in the centre of Manchester, north of the cathedral. The library was another way of ensuring that the King did not inherit his fortune. With its large numbers of valuable sources, including works by older pioneering English economists, it became a meeting place for Marx and Engels nearly 200 years later. They would study together, analyse Manchester’s particular problems, what Engels called its ‘social war’, and discuss politics at the table next to the bay window in the alcove of the reading room overlooking the pink sandstone school. The stained-glass window, noted Engels, ensured that the weather was always fine there. These meetings and deliberations resulted in their history of human development based on dialectical materialism and a manifesto for international proletarian revolution. Humphrey Chetham died unmarried on 20 September 1653 at the age of seventy-two, and was buried with much pomp and ceremony at the Collegiate Church of Manchester.

  1578

  Guy Fawkes attended St Peter’s School in York in 1578, where he was exposed to Roman Catholicism. St Peter’s previous headmaster, John Fletcher, had been imprisoned for twenty years as a Catholic recusant, and Guy’s headmaster, John Pulleyn, outwardly conforming, seems to have influenced the boys greatly in two ways – drama and Catholicism. He was a brave and powerful character, tall, with auburn beard, brown hair and pale blue-grey eyes. Father Greenway described him as ‘a man of great piety, of exemplary temperance, mild and cheerful demeanour, enemy of disputes, a faithful friend’.

  1571

  Harrogate’s mineral springs were discovered by William Slingsby in 1571. He was a well travelled man and noticed that the water from Trewit (a local name for lapwing) Well tasted like water he had drunk in continental spas. Tradition has it that Slingsby only stopped and tasted the water because his horse stumbled on some marshy ground. Slingsby arranged for the area to be paved and walled, and in about 1596 it was formally called a spa after the town of Spa in Belgium. About eighty further springs were found, and people visited to take the waters. Before Slingsby’s time, Harrogate was merely a village near the historic town of Knaresborough. It was in the early nineteenth century that Harrogate significantly developed as a spa town.

  1570

  The earliest known reference to cotton in the Manchester area relates to Bury in 1570, and by 1630 cotton was being worked in Bolton, Blackburn and Oldham. It was initially a cottage industry based on the spinning wheel and hand loom, and most workers were also part-time agriculturalists. These people lived in small settlements, generally called folds, which appear to have been fairly stable and therefore were able to develop a sense of cohesion and tradition.

  94

  I was working hard, gaining the sort of education that would prove more practical and galvanising than the one being distributed around, above and beyond me at school. In 1973, living in Offerton, now shaving, hair hanging over my shoulders, with my own glam-inspired satin jacket with yellow stitching and trousers as wide at the bottom as the Mersey under the streets of Stockport, I left school with no ceremony, simply a dull final day walking away from the scene of the
disaster, chucking away the ragged ink-stained yellow and black cap I had never replaced since I was eleven. The years of chalk dust and stupor were over. I remained friendly with one or two of the boys in my class for a couple of years, and then that was that. I had made it through school, retaining approximately seven or eight pieces of hard information, without having a girlfriend, without going to a pub, without smoking a cigarette, and certainly without venturing down the stairs of those inscrutable smoke-marinated venues lurking around the edges of Mersey Square that promised a level of intoxication and abandonment I still didn’t understand how to access, even as I was making contact with Marc Bolan and David Bowie.

  My dad was a combination of speechless and furious that I had failed so comprehensively at school, perhaps blaming the late-night concerts I had been going to for my decline. It was no use trying to explain that Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music, Top of the Pops, the New Musical Express and John Peel were preparing me for the future, devoured as though they were an absolute right.

  Hearing my ambition to become a journalist, I was recommended by a weary careers official in a pokey office in Edgeley to use my four hard-won low-graded O levels to get on an Ordinary National Diploma in business studies course at Stockport College along Wellington Road South. He had asked me to fill in a questionnaire to give him an idea of the type of job I was interested in. I completed this, hoping to make it clear through my answers that I did not want to work in an office nine to five, in any job to do with numbers, and that I preferred not to have a boss. I was adamant I was going to avoid the trap my dad seemed to have fallen into. I decided my answers made me seem like someone interested in work that was always different and always on the move, work that required no physical strength and no sticking to a routine, work that would all come from my mind. I think that as far as he was concerned I was another lazy aimless teenager imagining I could somehow earn an income by never actually doing any real work.

  Shorthand and typing were a part of the course he suggested, although it turned out to be for girls only. I think he thought the sort of journalist I wanted to be was a reporter covering local traffic, sport and carnivals for the Stockport Express, but he hid his opinion that this was way beyond my failed grammar school capabilities better than my old headmaster. But I wanted to be a journalist like Orwell, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Angela Carter and Joan Didion, or the rock writers I loved – Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Ian MacDonald – and I felt I was compiling the CV I needed to make this happen. I was sure I could do it – that catching the 192 from Stockport Mersey Square to Manchester Piccadilly, then walking to the Free Trade Hall to watch Van der Graaf Generator was going to help me achieve it.

  Compared to listening to records by Faust and the New York Dolls, the OND in business studies was a little like being told to wash dishes instead of taking a spaceship to Mars. I skinny-drizzled out of the college after a few months, before I was seventeen, and began working in a bookshop at the bottom of a narrow, steep winding hill under Stockport’s ancient market. It was thirty-eight years since Fred Perry had become the last British player to win Wimbledon, eight years since England had won the World Cup – with that Ashton under Lyne hat-trick and commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme, born on 17 July 1920 in Worsley (the cleared place which was settled), Lancashire, in the city of Salford, six miles west of Manchester, at the beginning of the Bridgewater Canal, announcing with timeless timing on the scoring of Geoff Hurst’s third goal and England’s fourth in the final few seconds, as Hurst, racing up the pitch, oblivious to little Alan Ball on his left, aimed to kick the ball as far as he could into the stands, to waste time, ‘There’s some people on the pitch . . . They think it’s all over,’ and as the ball hurtled into the net with the sure force of destiny, ‘It is now.’

  My therefore thirty-eight-year-old dad thought my life was over now that I was working in a shop stuck at the very cobbled bottom of sunken Stockport. Where could I possibly go from there? But I approached the bookshop as a positive part of my further education, surrounded by books for hours on end, occasionally disturbed by customers but able to continue my reading and earn enough cash to pay for albums, singles and concerts. The shop, owned by my first boss, Christine Crowther, stocked money-making mainstream books and soft-porn magazines, but also a large amount of mind-watering radical underground publications, avant-garde science fiction, occult classics, poetry and obscure philosophical books. At the back of the shop there were hundreds of second-hand books including unexpected classics and hidden gems. It was Reddish library a few stages on; I was piecing together my own reading list, jumping about from Rimbaud to Roland Barthes, Sontag to Hunter S. Thompson, Walter Benjamin to Thomas Pynchon.

  A regular customer was a solemnly eerie-looking young man called Paul with eyes cut from coal bracketed by long lank hair parted in the middle, who always wore black; his sickly-pale silent girlfriend floating at his shoulder with a sad red mouth pulled towards the ground always wore all-white, usually in the form of lace and net, possibly stolen from her nan’s bottom drawer. He would bring in copies of a sixteen-page magazine for us to sell which he wrote and printed himself called Penetration, after a song by Iggy Pop. He was a fan of Hawkwind, MotÖrhead and of furtive cultural streams that did not yet have a name but would later pour through punk into the ashen subcult of goth. He looked like he’d been alive since the seventeenth century, had once been an undertaker, and still owned the hat he had worn when he escorted the coffins.

  I asked if I could write something for his fanzine, and ended up producing a few hundred words about savagely satirical American comedian Lenny Bruce and a review of curt, speedy Essex blues group Dr Feelgood at the Free Trade Hall. Now eighteen, I was a published writer, even if only in a local magazine that sold a few hundred copies in the left-wing bookshops around Manchester. Truth-telling Bruce I was following as a doomed, vital prophet of rip-roaring logic-reforming common sense, hounded to death by a society threatened by such presumptions of rebellion and resistance. He was so funny it hurt, and then so funny it wasn’t funny. This was comedy attacking prejudice and ignorance that I didn’t have to share with my mum, dad and sisters on a family Saturday night. He died, from what Phil Spector called ‘an overdose of the police’, at thirty-nine, the year England won the World Cup, with tough-tackling but otherwise toothless Nobby Stiles of dire, dejected Collyhurst, trapped by the Irk a mile to the north-east of Manchester city centre, at number 4.

  I wrote about Dr Feelgood because their lethally austere, extravagantly basic, aggressively self-assured English adaptation of the blues was suddenly refreshing after the raging futurist promise of glam rock had stalled around Bowie’s stranded genius, and the underground music of the Stoneground seemed less experimental, more routine and at the progressive rock end horribly bloated and redundant. Monochrome, manic Feelgood of Essex in their workman’s suits and ties slashing open traditional blues seemed more revolutionary.

  Flattered and excited by seeing something I had written in print, even if it was only a Xeroxed series of A4 pages using a combination of type and Letraset unevenly stapled together in pasty Paul’s surely cave-like bedroom, I planned my own magazine. I wrote pieces on Marc Bolan and Brian Eno, stole an imaginary interview with Bob Dylan written by Paul Krassner, the Brucian founder of the American underground magazine The Realist, and intimately worshipped New York singer Patti Smith, who turned her mind, body, memory, hair and clothes into a mobile history of art, pop, poetry and philosophy that was both a long way from Stockport and also something that made blazing sense to someone working out how to get out.

  It took me about a year of nervous, fussy preparation to get the magazine together, into 1976, but the delays it took to organise what I had entitled Out There, because that’s where I wanted to be, ended up being a positive thing. There was something missing in contemporary popular music at the time, something that was not obviously noticed or diagnosed, because there seemed enough music to find, enjoy, dissect, collec
t, plenty from the past to discover, the weekly New Musical Express was unmissable, and the John Peel show on Radio 1 was mysteriously, pragmatically filled with the endlessly new and the fascinating. What was missing, and what made it just in time just around the edges into Out There, started to appear in the pages of the NME as a rumour, as a concert or two by bands with names more like ruthless revolutionary slogans, names with clear, determined intent a long way from the floppy, hippy Gentle Giant and Juicy Luicy or the prog pomposity of Genesis and Yes, which seemed closer to an Edwardian style of rock and roll than anything that belonged in the broken mid-1970s, which was in something of a predicament.

  What was missing started to travel over from mental unsentimental New York in the choppy bohemian hairstyle and demented symbolist rhymes of Richard Hell, the abstract transcendent guitar of Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith’s continuing explorations into the adventures of language and rhythm. What was missing would turn out to be the universal, and the intensely local, spirit of the city, of the spaces inside and beyond the city, of history, and of what lies in the guts and gore of history.

  What was missing made it to mundane and magnificent, mainstream and underground, fractured and dismantled Manchester in June 1976, with a carousing carnival flourish related to the deviant, dissipated, once-vibrant-now-broken Belle Vue, the revolutionary, protesting, turbulent history of the city, the continuing fight between competing interests representing those in power and those fighting for power, the riotous flash of glam, the disruptive underground scenes of the late sixties and even the paranoid, perceptive mind of Lenny Bruce. And there I was, where I was, which enables me now – in this report of how I ended up there, and where I am now, looking back on it like it never happened but certainly did – to say, strangely, I was there, ultimately so that I could add a paragraph or two of facts and romance to history, which was swirling all around me, because that was my destiny all along, it was where my footsteps had taken me, one after the other, to the end of one journey, which becomes the beginning of another.