Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  You emerge from the station through clusters of acned youths trying to pick up girls via time-honoured and elaborate mating rituals of kicking wastepaper bins and random headlocks. A flurry of signage offers directions to some of Bury's major attractions: the regimental museum of the Lancashire fusiliers, the East Lancashire Railway, the Met theatre. But you could follow your nose to the market, where black pudding, oven bottom muffins and even more arcane delicacies await.

  Everyone in the north-west knows of Bury Market. They come from as far north as Barrow and Kendal and from the south lands of Stafford and Cheshire. They come for Cristiano Ronaldo posters and cheap 'bottom-uplift' knickers, they come for spirit levels and shampoo, for batteries and cut-price trainers. Whatever your heart desires, you can get a cheap version of it with an unconvincing logo at Bury Market.

  'Off the market' has become a sniffy term of abuse these days: a synonym for shoddy, the sort of place where 'sad' kids get fake Adidas gear or rip-off Louis Vuitton. This seems unfair to me. True, I wouldn't buy my new suit for the Oscars from Bury Market, but where else can you get such a bewildering range of produce so flipping cheap? I saw an elderly man buying an old-fashioned shaving brush, an egg-timer and a quarter of humbugs from two adjoining stalls. Now that's what I call one-stop shopping, Mr Bluewater.

  Where Bury Market excels, though, is food. In the new Fish Market (built on the site of the old NatWest bank) you can gaze, slightly unnerved, at the dead, sightless eyes of row upon row of sea bass and snapper, mackerel and trout lying in state on funeral dais of crushed ice and parsley. The stalls are staffed by either blonde girls in full make-up who you just know are dying to get out of that white coat and into their skimpy glad rags this weekend or cheery rubicund men holding up what look like conger eels and joshing in ribald style with housewives. All of them adhere to Maconie's first law of market trade: cheeriness is proportional to the gruesome nature of the wares being handled. The grislier the fare, the gayer the banter.

  Feeling a little weak, I decide to have a nice sit down and a cup of tea at Big Jim's Cafe. It's directly opposite the market barbers where dour men reading the Daily Mirror and lads in snide tracksuits get their hair cut under pictures of male models.

  From the stonewash and Jason Donovan barnets, these pictures have remained unchanged since 1987. Then, running a finger down their collars for stray hair, they go to Big Jim's for a mug of scalding, dark tea, a buttie and the sports pages. Bliss.

  I feel a bit out of place in Big Jim's, though. My clothes are ever so slightly too smart and I'm carrying the manbag and a notebook and I'm the only person in the place not smoking. I wait self-consciously in the queue and read the signs behind the counter. One of them, apparently quite seriously, warns the staff against describing a pictured food item as 'a meat and potato pie'. It looks to me very much like a meat and potato pie but because of its composition, it seemingly can't be described as such for fear of contravening EU takeaway food regulations. It is, in fact, 'a potato and meat pie', and must be announced as such. Heads have rolled at the Ramsbottom branch over this, it seems.

  I decide to order an oven bottom muffin, Bury's second greatest contribution to world cuisine. Quite why the oven bottom should be such a superb point of origin for muffins I don't know. Strictly speaking, I wouldn't even call them muffins. They're more like floury, fluffy baps. But whatever the provenance, the people of Bury are fiercely proud and enormously appreciative of them. At Big Jim's, they come with a range of fillings of varying degrees of calorific clout and grease factor, each looking appallingly tasty and artery-furring. I plump, and I feel that's the operative word here, for a Breakfast Special – an oven bottom muffin filled with bacon, sausage and egg. Furnished with this, I squeeze on to the corner of a table occupied by a clutch of goths. The place is full, crammed with representatives from every section of Bury's working classes: schoolkids, pensioners, young mums, burly middle-aged blokes, couples with buggies. I can't help thinking that this isn't how things should be in the middle of a Thursday afternoon but my glum reverie is suddenly, excruciatingly, interrupted when I take a bite and a geyser of searingly hot yolk erupts, scalding the roof of my mouth. All attempts at blending into the background are now scuppered as I swear unintelligibly through a cauterised mouth of oven bottom muffin and incinerated pig. A few people even look up from their Daily Mirrors. Silently weeping, I pretend to have an urgent appointment with a new socket set at the discount hardware stall.

  Even oven bottom muffins play second fiddle in Bury's culinary orchestra to the food that made Bury great and that Bury makes great. It is a delicacy that sorts the men from the boys, the lads from the jessies, the north from the south. In Bury, they say that you can still see kids in buggies eating them in their hands like huge dark ice lollies. The French know it as boudin noir. It's morcilla in Spain, biroldo in Italy and kashanka in Poland. But we know it as black pudding. To paraphrase Dick Emery, ooh, you are offal ... but we like you.

  It crops up in Book 18 of Homer's Odyssey and in his Iliad when the Greek general Agamemnon was said to have fed his army on blood and onions, a powerful combination of iron, protein, carbohydrates and sugars. The Romans' skill at engineering displayed itself in their terrific aptitude for sausage making. They took the blood and onions recipe, put it into skins and thus introduced the black pudding all over their empire with each country developing its own regional variant on the blood sausage. Ours is very akin to the German Bludwurst and our undisputed capital of the cult of the black pudding is Bury.

  There are black pudding outlets all over Bury Market. I buy a bagful at an indoor stall that promises Chadwicks Original Black Pudding. The lads on the stall inform me, though, with a touching earnestness and clearly very keen not to take any false credit, that they do not make these famed black puddings. No, they are merely licensed to sell Chadwicks puddings in the indoor market. Chadwicks themselves, the Leonardo da Vincis of the blood sausage, can be found outside.

  I don't need to ask directions. I just look for the queue. I had intended to do an interview of sorts with the proprietor but soon realise I have no chance. It would be like interviewing Pele mid-dribble or Mozart mid-sonata. Every shred of concentration front of house (presumably somewhere else unspeakable things are happening in huge vats) is taken up serving at breakneck speed the blood-crazed townsfolk of Bury. I slip in line and quickly learn the lingo. 'Lean' means without those white bits of fat studded through the pudding. Each to their own, of course, but for me if you're tucking into a membranous bag of congealed animal blood I reckon it's a bit late to start going all macrobiotic. A 'two' is two puddings linked together, a 'four' naturally is four, a six is presumably for parties. I buy two fours of fat and a two of lean for when I next have a waifish supermodel over for full English breakfast. By the time I leave the market, I feel slightly queasy, like a portable abattoir, weighed down with carrion, gore and carnage.

  If you want to know just how seriously Bury folk take their puddings, here's a couple of titbits for you. The regular test for colorectal cancer – there's no easy way of saying this but it's to do with blood in stools – is basically unreliable in Bury as the natives eat so much black pudding that their tests are often falsely positive. Also, if you have an afternoon to spare, you can find online all twenty-six pages of fine print documentation referring to a dispute between Chadwicks Original Black Pudding Company and a company with the temerity, it seems, to call themselves The Bury Black Pudding Company. Chadwicks acolytes from around the globe were outraged. Fortunately the courts settled the matter before blood could be spilled. Well, more blood, anyway.

  But I would leave Bury even more burdened with exotic fare. On the edge of the market is a delicatessen. Not any old delicatessen, though. Maybe the best deli I'd ever seen. My eye was caught by the queues and bustle and pavement tables and a sign promising two lunchtime specials: Lamb Kleftiko and Wiener Schnitzel. I had to take a look.

  It felt like I'd strayed into a proper kafenion in
the back streets of Nicosia, Warsaw or Istanbul. I half expected leathery old fishermen playing with worry beads and sipping tar-black coffee or mint tea or Ouzo. There was every kind of spicy sausage from kielbasa to chorizo to braunschweiger. There were glistening honeyed baklavas, rich, custardy Galaktoboureko and slices of plum cake that you could put on weight just looking at. There were cheeses from Cyprus, Bulgarian brandies and hams from Spain. There were even tubs of schmaltz, the rendered chicken fat that's indispensable to real Jewish cooking, all being snapped up by the cosmopolites of Bury. I had to find more space in my manbag, I can tell you.

  Outside the shop, a tanned man in his sixties was diligently and paternally arranging the pavement tables in neat rows. I knew that this had to be the proprietor. George Katsouris came to Bury Market from Cyprus thirty-five years ago and is now a fixture, no, make that a treasure, in the town. 'We sell anything a little ethnic and we sell to anyone and everyone. Lancashire people, people from far away who are homesick, people who are curious.'

  If this deli was in Camden or Brighton, we northerners would never hear the last of it. Smug Sunday broadsheet columnists would be forever telling us how popping down there was part of their Sunday morning routine, how they couldn't knock off their 500 words without some of George's Hungarian poppy seed cake and real Turkish coffee. As it is, it's in Bury so you'll never read a word about it in the Observer. Maybe that's for the best.

  The lovely ladies at the tourist information centre didn't have to ask me where I'd got my baklava from. Everybody knows George, it seems. Those columnists from Brighton and Camden probably find the very fact that Bury has a tourist information centre rather hilarious, but apparently it needs one. 'We're perfectly situated for a weekend. If you like the outdoors, we're in the foothills of the Pennines, and if you like shopping and clubs, we're a tram ride from Manchester.' While I was browsing the souvenir pencils and postcards of Sir Robert Peel's birthplace, an American couple came in, researching their family tree. Bury native Henry Wood was a Quaker who, escaping religious persecution, left Lancashire by boat in 1683 at the age of eighty to set up a community in the New World with his family. Combining his surname with that of his home town, he called that new community Woodbury. It's now a city of 11,000 people, the county seat of Gloucester County, New Jersey, and Bury has become a prime destination for genealogists in baseball caps and big shorts.

  I wend my way back to the tram, sorry, Metrolink stop, via the old railway station, now home to the East Lancashire Steam Railway and one of Bury's top tourist attractions. It looks good from the top of Bank Street steps if you're a trainspotter looking for a snap. I was rather distracted by the fact that an old boy in a Bury FC replica shirt fell spectacularly down these steps while I was admiring the view. By his vague yet voluble demeanour and florid complexion, I guessed 'Tommy' had spent the afternoon on licensed premises. It's very easy to do that in Bury – there's a pub every few yards, it seems. As with every city-centre pub in the north, most go through a name change every few months in a desperate attempt to appear new and hip and 'cutting edge'. Thus, proper pub names – those evocative pairings of Fox and Hound, Eagle and Child, Bird and Bee, those mythical Red Lions and Golden Hinds, those obscure dukes and earls – are disappearing. They're being replaced by weird, unattractive appellations designed to appeal to Lynx-wearing Smirnoff Ice drinkers. The Royal – good solid name, steeped in history, places the pub as central to decent civic life as a hospital or school – is now called S77. Why? It sounds like some bloody form you'd fill in to get inoculated against diphtheria. I'm actually surprised there isn't a bar here called Diphtheria. There's one called Siberia, formerly Peelers & Waldo Peppers. Apparently, as it's in a basement, it has to close for several weeks every winter due to flood damage. But the advantage is that the decor is always brand new.

  The north can make no claims on exclusivity where pubs are concerned, obviously. The Rovers Return might be Britain's most famous pub but it is surely run a close second by the Queen Vic. Southern pubs used to be different in my experience – dimple glasses, pictures of the queen, agricultural implements – but these days the British pub has become homogenised from Newquay's Steam Lagers to Newcastle Brown. It's one long pub crawl from Fleece and Firkin to Slug and Lettuce and they all look the same.

  No, where the north does stand out is in the matter of the working men's club. The south has clubs, of course, but they are more likely to revolve around golf or tennis or some other sport, or perhaps the services, such as the British Legion or maybe the Conservative Party. The working men's club is essentially northern in character and image. Odd because they were started by a southerner.

  Henry Solly (1813-1903) was born in London, the son of a successful railway mogul. His father wanted him to work in business too but Henry, bless him, was 'conscious of intolerable disorder all around me, and an overpowering desire to right all the wrongs in the universe'. One of these wrongs, as he saw it, was widespread 'wretched and degrading bondage to the public house' among the working classes and out of this grew the invention of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union in 1862. These were 'dry' venues which Solly believed would provide recreation and create an informal teaching situation, 'where more serious matters could gradually be introduced'.

  Eventually, though, under pressure from the working men themselves, who were working up quite a thirst during all this gradual introduction of serious matters and informal teaching, Solly gave in on what became known as the 'The Great Beer Question'. After 1865, booze became available in working men's clubs, fortunately for Bernard Manning.

  Southern in origin, it was the north that embraced these clubs enthusiastically. In fact they eventually became synonymous with the northern night out, chiefly because of a TV show called The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club.

  On reflection, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club was the kind of meta-textual, high-concept, reflexive irony that could have E4 or BBC3 schedulers of today drooling. It simultaneously mocked and celebrated the institution of the working men's club, managing to have its cake and yet eat it with gusto. Actually, it wasn't cake, it was pies. At some point in every show, Colin Crompton, as the morose, flat-capped concert chairman, would clang his bell and announce, 'T'pies have come,' a moment of fleeting pleasure in what you felt was a bleak night out.

  But the genius of the show – and I think genius isn't too strong a word – is that while holding up the institution of the working men's club to general ridicule, it simply shoved out an hour's worth of club-style entertainment and got ten million viewers. Bernard Manning telling mother-in-law jokes. Bradfordian Afro-Caribbean comic Charlie Williams with routines that were essentially a modern version of 'spookin' it for de white folks', mute magicians in scarlet sequinned jackets who were always putting their fingers to their lips, girls in plunging necklines with pageboy cuts singing '(I Never Promised You) A Rose Garden'. Rubbish, really, but immensely popular and the sort of stuff Garry Bushell is always trying to get back on telly, inexplicably.

  As a small and impressionable boy I quite liked The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club because I was a devotee of Crompton. Resembling a suicidal stand-up in a Samuel Beckett play, he made Archie Rice look like Norman Wisdom. Jowly and hang-dog, with a disastrous, wispy comb-over and permanently 'dripping' Number 6, he would deliver material that extracted bitter mirth from the futility of existence and the impossibility of happiness. One of my favourites was his long riff on the grimness of the dying Lancashire seaside resort Morecambe where 'they don't bury their dead, they stand them up in bus shelters' and the town turned out every Wednesday afternoon to watch the bacon slicer, 'lovely girl'. Chief among the town's attractions were boat trips around Heysham Head. 'They don't come back,' said Crompton in a tone of nihilistic resignation. 'They don't want to.'

  The Wheeltappers, though, a world of yellowing Formica tables, bingo callers and pie and pea suppers, was a very particular and partial picture of clubland. If you had visited Ba
tley Variety Club in the early seventies you might have thought you'd stepped through a wormhole in space from a small mining town in Yorkshire to Las Vegas. It was the Broadway of the north, a huge purpose-built club in a Yorkshire mill town (foundation stone laid by The Bachelors, Christmas 1966) that played host, in its heyday, to stars like Shirley Bassey and Louis Armstrong. They would have been driven down the A653 by proud owner and larger-than-life bingo baron Jimmy Corrigan. Rumour had it that he offered Elvis a hundred grand for a week at Batley in the late sixties. Colonel Tom Parker replied that £100,000 suited him but what about Elvis's fee? Gracie Fields was coaxed out of retirement twice – a dubious achievement, if you ask me – and Roy Orbison played there several times, on one trip acquiring a wife in Leeds. Maurice Gibb married a waitress at the club. It was the Caesar's Palace of the West Riding. Corrigan wanted to give people what was for the time high-class entertainment at Yorkshire prices. He was forever encouraging staff to 'sell' the chicken in a basket as it was about the only source of profit.