I notice a few camera crews and young women in smart suits talking earnestly into radio mikes. As the report on the Oldham riots of 2001 is out today, the media has come to town getting their 'today Glodwick is peaceful but five years ago, these streets were the scene of some of the worst rioting in British history as simmering racial tensions erupted in this quiet Lancashire mill town' pieces done for the six o'clock news.
For the record, and it'll have to be a pretty vague kind of record, I'm afraid, what did happen five years ago is still somewhat murky. An old chap did get horribly, comprehensively battered by a gang of Asian youths but it's by no means proven that it was a racist attack. Some say that in the ensuing mayhem an Asian woman was attacked too. What's indisputable is that a mob of Asian youths attacked several pubs in the Glodwick area. 'There was just a big gang of them,' said Paul Barrow, landlord of one. 'They all charged in, kicking us, punching us and then proceeded to attack all my customers with whatever they had in their hand – stools, bottles, glasses.' A firebomb came through the window causing panic among the regulars, some of whom were elderly ladies. The landlord was quick to add, though, that his clientele included Asians. 'They were absolutely disgusted. They had to defend themselves like everybody else.' The pub, by the way, is called the Live and Let Live.
As I nibble my pakora, I watch a smartly dressed Asian man being interviewed by one of the equally presentable young women reporters. She calls him a community leader, which always makes me tremendously suspicious, whatever the community being led – white, black, gay, straight, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, traveller or whatever. Having never seen the job of 'community leader' advertised in a job centre, I assume now it's a euphemism for 'busybody', a type common to all communities. For some reason, they've moved on to the subject of the so-called 7/7 London bombings and he's trotting out the now obligatory line about 'the need to understand the root causes of this problem. What makes these young men so desperate that they must blow themselves up'. Oddly, I don't seem to recall any such hand-wringing about the motives of the IRA. Maybe I missed it but I don't remember seeing government spokesmen talking of the need to understand 'what makes these young working-class Catholics blow up soldiers'. In fact, I distinctly recall that 'stringing the bastards up' was 'the only language they would understand'. How kindly and thoughtful we have become.
I leave Glodwick in another minicab, this time with an Asian driver, hired from a run-down office next to a halal takeaway on the Glodwick Road. My driver's name is Ahmed and he tells me that Glodwick isn't as bad as people make out. 'There's good and bad everywhere, my friend. People are basically the same.' I notice his Magic Tree air freshener and the sweltering heat of his cab and reflect that he's right.
I pop back into the library and see if the riots and their aftermath are being addressed here in any significant sense. They aren't, which perhaps isn't surprising. It's a tough subject to turn into an attractive exhibition or snappy theme week. 'Oldham: Lancashire's premier racial trouble spot! Try our fun quiz and treasure hunt!' Dialect poetry is less problematic and altogether more cuddly and Lancastrian. Leafing through a book of it, I find this:
To some folks things are never reet
but as have alwus towd um
They'd seech a while afire they leet
On owt as grand as Oldham
Could you follow it? The gist is that you'll go a long way before you encounter anything as fine as Oldham. I can't say I'm completely convinced but I do like a bit of civic pride. I sit in the blue Ikea chair and look out across the town again. Beyond the houses and chimneys and mosques, the Pennine moors rise under what is now a glowering sky. Beyond those lonely hillsides lies Yorkshire. For a Lancashire lad, it's a slightly troubling prospect. There are ominous clouds over Saddleworth Moor. It's where I'm headed next. It's dark up there.
Cardboard Box? You Were Lucky
So Seth retires from the colliery in Barnsley after forty years working underground and his wife Mavis decides he deserves a really special treat. At great expense, she organises a trip to Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, to see Bob Hope, acknowledged as the world's greatest stand-up comedian. After a sumptuous meal in their five-star hotel, they take their seats for what turns out to be the night of a lifetime. Hope is on fire, at the top of his game; wisecrack follows wisecrack, one-liners and ad libs pour from him. The audience is in tears and, after two hours, many of them are faint with laughter. Bob leaves the stage to wild applause, returns, does a half-hour encore of never-before-heard material and then announces that tonight will be his last performance. He leaves again to a twenty-minute standing ovation.
In the hotel bar later, over a fine old Scotch, Mavis says, 'Well, what can you say? Las Vegas. Bob Hope. That has to be the night out of a lifetime, eh, love?' Seth pulls a face and shrugs. 'Ah well, I suppose it were alreet for them as likes laffin.'
I love this joke. So do all my friends. However, you may not even get it, particularly if you're from Yorkshire. Because it's a joke 'for them as likes laffin'. Good-humoured, twinkling, charming people with joie de vivre and an appetite for the finer things in life. Lancastrians, in other words.
The rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire is not like the rivalry between, say, Arsenal and Spurs or Cardiff and Swansea. It's not merely a petty neighbourly dispute about overhanging leylandii or a childish piece of civic grandstanding. The Lancashire/Yorkshire vendetta has its roots in a war. A proper war, with armies and battles and pikestaffs and axes. Forty years of bloodshed and mayhem. Cities ransacked and looted. A seventeen-year-old Yorkist earl beheaded and his noggin placed on a spike on the gates of York. At the Battle of Towton, near York, 20,000 men were killed, the greatest recorded single day's loss of life on English soil. The country was plunged into anarchy from the walls of London to the bridges of Berwick-upon-Tweed. It prompted our greatest writer, old Willy Waggledagger himself, as my English teacher used to rather racily call him, to write in King Henry VI Part I, 'And here I prophesy: this brawl today shall send, between the red rose and the white, a thousand souls to death and deadly night.'
You can read all about those crazy feuding Plantagenets and Tudors, Lambert Simnel and princes in towers in proper history books. It's a hell of a story; a bloody gory one too. All things considered, though, what's amazing is not that the rivalry persists half a millennium on but that it is now largely a matter of jocular banter and cricket matches rather than Molotovs and hand-to-hand combat in the streets of Halifax and Burnley.
In these quieter days, Lancashire and Yorkshire rub up against each other uneasily and awkwardly like big, jealous, brawling, north country brothers. They sulk and sneer at each other across the wildest, most romantic countryside in England and bridle when the boundaries shift and one of them loses a village or river to the other.
We each nurture deeply held prejudices against one another. They think that we are soft and a bit silly. Easily led and somehow lightweight. We think they are humourless and mean-spirited, arrogant and dull. Compared to us Lancastrian bons vivants, we say, waving our pints for emphasis, they are suspicious and cold. At which, they slam down their tankards and declare that they are simply shrewd, self-reliant and nobody's fools. They storm out in a huff and a harrumph and we realise that they never bought a bloody round. Typical.
Let's be honest, many of these traits and impressions 'tykes' seem only too keen to cultivate. These are a race, after all, who say of themselves with apparent pride, 'Yorkshire born, Yorkshire bred, thick in the arm and thick in the head.'
I like to think of myself as a man of the world, a cosmopolitan free-thinker unshackled by petty prejudice. I like to think of myself as this, much as I like to think of myself as a skilled and breathtaking lover, an unsung song-writing genius and the best attacking midfielder England never had. In fact, I know that I nurture some awful prejudices. Should the personal defects of anyone from a rogues' gallery of Britain's most appalling individuals be mentioned, from Sir Bernard Ingham to Jeremy Clarkson, Jimmy Savile t
o Peter Sutcliffe, Paul Daniels to Geoffrey Boycott to Peter Stringfellow, I simply shrug and say 'Yorkshireman' in the belief that this will explain everything. I will not accept that John Humphrys is Welsh or that Jeremy Paxman is, well, whatever he is, until I see birth certificates. Listen to them. Look at them. They just have to be Yorkshiremen.
But, honestly, Seth, I'm joking. Really I am. What are these churls set against Jarvis Cocker, Alan Bennett, Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage, Paul Heaton, Mick Ronson and the other sons of York who I love and admire? Maybe these are the few dozen exceptions that prove the rule.
For better or worse, and I have to say it's the latter, Yorkshire has become emblematic, axiomatic, symptomatic of the north in the hearts and minds of the south. It speaks of bullishness, lack of sophistication, dour self-sufficiency. The words that spring to mind are 'bluff' and 'no nonsense'. And that is a myth. Billy Liar? Peter Tinniswood? Penny Lane? Morrissey? The Happy Mondays? Alan Garner? Wordsworth? The north is a land of dreamers.
I'm not saying it's all Yorkshire's fault but Yorkshire has built a cottage industry – it's a little cottage on t'edge o' t'Dales, nowt fancy but it's grand, lad – on singing its own praises in a queer, back-handed way. From Gervais Phinn and his wholesome homilies of Dales schools to Bernard Ingham's canonical claptrap about the Yorkshire spirit to Roy Hattersley's florid reminiscences, Yorkshire is happiest when talking about Yorkshire, using 'plain language' and 'speaking as they find'. What some might call meanness, they call 'being careful'. They enshrine these values in folklore about themselves, like the Yorkshire Prayer:
Hear all, see all, say nowt.
Eat all, drink all, pay nowt,
and if thy ever dus owt for nowt,
All-us do it for thee-sen.
And in this apocryphal note left for a Wakefield milkman:
When you leave the milk please put coal on t'fire, let t'dog out and put t'newspaper inside t'door. P.S. Don't leave any milk.
George Orwell, a softie from the south but one who fundamentally took the side of the north during its darkest days, could get a bit tetchy with them:
A Yorkshireman in the south will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the north that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the north is the only 'real' work, that the north is inhabited by 'real' people, the south merely by rentiers and their parasites. The northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and lazy – that at any rate is the theory. 'North and South', England Your England, 1937
Well, it seems as sensible as superstrings and black holes, to be honest, George. Yorkshire's capacity for contrived curmudgeonly bluff has even been caricatured by Yorkshiremen themselves. In the book Billy Liar, Keith Waterhouse pokes fun at the cult of Yorkshireness. Billy mocks the writings of a Stradhoughton Echo writer who styles himself 'Man O' The Dales' who praises 'honest native buildings' and 'gleaming cobbled streets'. Billy instead sees 'rugged Yorkshire towns with rugged neon signs and rugged plastic shop fronts. . . Have you ever realised that your blunt Yorkshire individuals are in fact interchangeable like spare wheels on a mass-produced car?' Similarly, in John Braine's Room at the Top, he writes of the hero's hometown thus: 'Bluntness was the fashion. . . Everyone behaved as if they were under contract to live up to the tradition of the outspoken Yorkshireman with the heart of gold underneath the rough exterior.' The worst of it was, he'd add, that underneath the rough exterior their hearts were as base and vicious as anyone's from the suave and treacherous south.
Perhaps the most famous piece of Yorkshire mockery ever was delivered in part, though not written, by one Michael Palin of Sheffield.
First Yorkshireman: Ahh. Very passable, this. Very passable bit of risotto.
Second Yorkshireman: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
Third Yorkshireman: Eh, you're right there, Obediah.
The Four Yorkshiremen sketch is often wrongly assumed to originate from Monty Python when in fact it was first heard on At Last It's The 1948 Show and was written by John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman. It's come to sum up the county and its culture for a generation, to put the tin lid on it, as they say in Bradford. As they sit in luxurious surroundings enjoying fine wines, the four Yorkshiremen attempt to outdo each other in ludicrous one-upmanship about their childhood deprivations.
Boastful, needlessly competitive, prone to exaggeration and revelling in their own poverty, mental and physical, this is the caricature of Yorkshire that even Yorkshiremen have come to cherish.
They come across like Texans, or at least the caricature of Texans once beloved of British wits: smug, fulsome, well-fed individuals saying 'call that a waterfall/desert/tunnel' and telling you that back home they have faucets/golf bunkers/cat flaps that size. Tykes will indeed often tell you that Yorkshire is the Texas of Britain. The comparison extends beyond the character of the natives. Yorkshire is huge, easily Britain's biggest county. Six thousand square miles of it, from vast undulating moors to sprawling conurbations. Lancashire is only a quarter as big, something which Yorkshire folk love to tell us Lancastrians in a kind of 'pitying smirk at the urinal' kind of way. It's seven times bigger than Nottinghamshire and thirty-six times bigger than Rutland. That reflects its origins as a territory of the Vikings, who were so expansionist in outlook they made Tesco look positively bashful. It's got three chunks to it too: the famous Ridings.
It was even bigger before 1974, when a notorious shake-up of regional government saw it significantly and savagely pruned. In the north-east, around Barnard Castle and Bowes, it lost a chunk to County Durham and Cleveland and gave up Dent and Sedbergh to Cumbria, resulting in the bizarre anomaly that the Howgill Fells are in the county of Cumbria but part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. In the south-east, the upstart region of Humberside pinched the bits around Hull. But most galling of all to true tykes is the loss of most of its territory west of the Pennines to us Lancastrians. Yorkshiremen will talk of the day that they ceded Saddleworth to the old enemy with the same shame and sadness that a Serbian talks of Kosovo.
Saddleworth and the moors lie nor'-nor'-east from Oldham. You'll do it in half an hour, even on our ravaged public transport system (thanks again, Margaret) and quicker still if, like me today, you're travelling by car. It's becoming more and more popular with walkers and tourists, as evidenced by a new Brownhill Countryside Centre located on the long climb out of Oldham. Initially, it appears that the opening times on the door suggest otherwise. I try the door but it won't budge. Just as I'm going back to the car, an elderly lady appears shouting, 'Ey, we're open. I were just on t'toilet, love,' in a voice that sounds like old sandpaper marinated in caustic soda. 'I thought I'd better lock it, you know, in case. . .' In case of what? I want to ask. In case one of those infamous masked gangs of armed fudge and cycle-trail leaflet robbers come down from Huddersfield and ransack the place? But she seems a nice old soul so instead I admire the displays of children's art, wander upstairs and look at some embroidery and leave with an armful of maps and brochures and fudge.
But though Saddleworth isn't far from Oldham in the grand scheme of things and gets its gas and electricity and mail from the resolutely Mancunian Denton and Stalybridge, it is a world away from the mills and bhuna of the new Lancashire. For a while they spun wool here, traditionally the preserve of Yorkshire folk, but when that failed, they diversified, leaving the old industry to fade and the bleak moors to reclaim the landscape to the joy of locals and ramblers. Don't be put off by the approach along the main A road where the moors look pitted and grimy and you are suddenly confronted with the gutted and derelict remains of the Horse and Jockey pub. Dotted across this landscape are a succession of lovely, sooty-faced villages clinging to the hills, with buildings the colour of toffee and full of nooks and crannies. Delph, Dobcross, Diggle; gorgeous places, each sounding more lik
e one of Trumpton's firemen than the last.
Isolated by their height and relative remoteness, Saddleworth folk have always had a reputation for making their own fun. There are a plethora of youth clubs and amateur dramatic societies, cricket clubs and male voice choirs. There are a clutch of decent pubs. Locals will tell you that this self-sufficiency in entertainment stems directly from rotten weather and isolation. Though the coming of the 4X4 and the dreaded Chelsea tractor has liberated Pennine folk to a degree, a few days of snow can make it feel like Siberia. So there's no point looking to the fleshpots of Rochdale and Oldham for your kicks.
Pies and Prejudice Page 19