Chief in the area's social calendar is Whit Friday, 'band day' as my friend John Leonard, who lives in Dobcross, calls it. For him, it's one of the highlights of the social calendar, involving a barbecue, guests galore and concerted consumption of beer. On Whit Friday morning, contingents from all the Saddleworth villages parade into Uppermill for a church service, after which comes the serious business of brass band playing and beer drinking. The contests proper start around six in the evening by which time the less dedicated bands might find their technique stymied by the potent produce of Messrs Marston, Theakston and Boddington.
John is keen to point out, though, that 'it's not quite like that scene in Brassed Off where they have the babies in haversacks and everyone's too pissed to play. That's funny but it's not strictly accurate. These are serious musicians for one thing and there's a lot of money at stake in the various competitions through the day. Someone like the Black Dyke Mills band can earn more on that one day than selling out the Royal Albert Hall.' In 2006, there was almost thirty grand in prize money at stake.
When the south looks north, when its documentary makers and film directors frame their shot of the mill chimneys and the slate roofs and the mint ball factory, they can already hear the soundtrack and always it is the sound of a brass band. That warm roseate glow of sound is the north in a handful of notes. As a kid I hated brass bands. They belonged to the same order of things as 'parlours' and 'antimacassars' and 'larders', a chilly, pre-central heating world that was in effect an endless Sunday. They conjured up sickly children in tin baths by the fire and women in shawls waiting at the pithead for the inevitable bad news about the roof fall.
Now I love them. Clearly it's me who's changed, not them, because brass bands don't change. By long-standing tradition, they comprise twenty-seven players playing three basic types of instrument – valved metal stuff like cornets and euphoniums, trombones and percussion. The movement has its roots in the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century and the comings of organised industry and, with it, organised leisure. While the big cities had picture palaces and theatres, the smaller towns and villages, like Saddleworth, had to make their own fun and 'banding' was part of that fun.
Soon, the factory and mill owners realised that brass bands were a great way of keeping the workforce out of the pub for a couple of hours. The employers began to sponsor and support the bands; supplying instruments, music, conductors, trainers and funds. The employers did well out of the arrangement – a leisured, sober workforce and something to boast about to old Sourbutts, whose band didn't know their Hoist from their elbow - and the workers had something they could take pride in. Instrumental prowess became a matter of family honour; some babies had a cornet in their mouths before they had a dummy. Top cornetist Harry Mortimer once said, 'I don't think I was even asked if I wanted to learn – it was as much a matter of course as cleaning my teeth or polishing my boots.' Brass bands are still a vibrant part of working-class culture in the north but their origins lie in a more paternalistic world; one of jobs for life, stable communities, living in one village all your life and towns built by wealthy, portly men with mutton-chop whiskers.
On the Saturday after Band Day, the Saddleworth Beer Walk is held. This is a huge fundraising event where participants walk around Saddleworth in fancy dress, stopping off at many of its pubs along the way for half a pint of beer or lager while spectators chuck money at them. Saddleworth also hosts what has become the largest Festival of Morris Dancing in the whole of the United Kingdom, at which point we should pause for giggling.
Now I like morris dancing a lot. I suppose I'd classify it as a guilty pleasure. I've never tried it, adhering to Sir Arnold Bax's principle that one should try everything once except incest and morris dancing. I like it in the way I like folk music and proper beer and all that kind of stuff, however geography teacher-ish it makes me sound, because it has its roots in real communities and the English landscape and the people involved in it are generally adorable. But mainly I like it in the perverse way that I like seventies progressive rock and Pot Noodles; precisely because they are all Aunt Sallies for those snickering southern studenty comedians. In their vernacular, it's 'sad'. It's for 'losers'. (This usually from someone whose wardrobe runs to three T-shirts, can't cook and hasn't had a proper girlfriend since 1997.) My idea of heaven would be watching a group of beefy tanked-up morris dancers lay waste to the Soho House club, sending TV commissioning editors fleeing, possibly on micro-scooters.
But back up here on the hills between Oldham and Huddersfield, where are we? Yorkshire? Lancashire? A Pennine no-man's-land? Writing in 1968, local journalist and TV presenter Graham Turner found locals who claimed the Wars of the Roses weren't dead and one man in particular who pointed to the moors and said, 'That hill, it's like the Berlin Wall.' And you know what they say: the only good thing that ever came out of Yorkshire is Standedge, the local name for the road out of Yorkshire. Saddleworth politics has been equally contentious down the years, with a strong Tory and Liberal tradition in sharp contrast to most of Lancashire. But when I ask my friend John if we are now in Yorkshire he says yes, unequivocally and without hesitation. 'They have a Real Yorkshire Society in Saddleworth. They tour the pubs and walk the old boundary and a lot of those pubs still have a white rose emblem behind the bar. Quite a few people put West Riding of Yorkshire as their address. They won't admit to coming under Oldham. They don't talk like Yorkshire people though. They still say "abowt" and "rowndabowt". When you get over the hill into Marsden it's all different.'
So I go over the hill into Marsden through a drifting sheet of fog and rain. Occasionally, a sodden sheep or embattled pub looms out of the murk. Everyone's headlights are on at three on an April afternoon. Living here must have been wild and precarious once. John Wesley came here in 1757 and said, 'A wilder people I never saw in all England.' So maybe that wasn't a sheep I just saw huddled on the hillside by the trough. You can understand why there's little allegiance with the valley dwellers of Oldham, safe and snug way down there.
Marsden is a big beefy village or a small town depending on your perspective and it's a paradise on earth for transport history spods. If your future husband gets sweaty-palmed at the idea of tunnels and turnpikes, you might find yourself honeymooning here rather than Rome or Paris. Blind Jack Metcalfe of Knaresborough (I'm not making this up) built three turnpike roads up here in the late 1700s. I would have thought blindness was a pretty formidable obstacle for a career in surveying and road-building but what do I know, since the third of Jack's turnpikes is still in service as the modern A62. We'll be lucky if the Virgin Pendolinos are still running next year.
Best of all, though, is the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, opened in 1811, which runs from Marsden to Huddersfield. The Standedge Tunnel, the longest, highest and deepest canal tunnel in Britain, is seven feet wide and three miles long and it used to take 'leggers' four hours to push a narrowboat through, lying on their backs and using their legs only. John Noakes used to recreate this every other week, it seemed, on Blue Peter. As you drive across the moor, you can see enigmatic, striking monuments dotted across the landscape, the ventilation shafts for the tunnel. At the prosaically named Tunnel End, there's a visitors centre – more fudge and leaflets – and a chance to board the Marsden shuttle, a narrowboat that you can take on the short trip through the tunnel. You can even hire it for parties if you like.
It was launched, literally and metaphorically, in 1991. A brief, largely forgotten TV incarnation as a riverboat captain aside; why on earth David Essex? It's not as if his name even sounds like Fred Dibnah so it can't have been a bad line to the agent. His name in fact is Essex, not a good start for your Yorkshire boat-launching celebrity candidate. Never mind. I hope he sang 'Rock On' as he manned the tiller. That's my favourite.
You won't go hungry or thirsty in Marsden. The Luddites used to drink here, planning their next act of mass sabotage, and it's still a fine place to booze away an afternoon when you should be w
orking, even if you don't actually smash up a lathe or anything. There's a great little micro-brewery at the Riverhead Brewery Tap (seven beers, go nuts, sample them all, then you'll be singing 'Rock On' on the Marsden shuttle). Then if you can get in, you can have a good feed at the justly famous Olive Branch, a 'restaurant with rooms'. I like the idea of a restaurant with rooms. It makes me think of stunned diners, unable to walk after the bread and butter pudding, being carried up to bed like babies.
Marsden is the hometown of one of our best contemporary poets, Simon Armitage, whom I first met when we used to work together on Mark Radcliffe's late-night Radio 1 show. The show ended at midnight and Simon, like Ian McMillan, another terrific Yorkshire poet and regular guest, would head back home by BBC minicab over the Pennines from the Manchester studios. Neither of them minded the winter snows and getting home in the small hours. But after one occasion when Simon realised his driver had fallen asleep at the traffic lights in Saddleworth, they drove themselves. Or better still, we'd all stay in the Britannia Hotel and get drunk.
Simon has written evocatively about these parts, their isolation, their debatable status, that sense of being a fragment of the rough urban north cast carelessly skywards into the province of sheep at the top of the world. His website bears the cheery injunction: 'Welcome, from the long lifeless mud of the Colne valley.' His poem 'Snow Joke' tells the story of a motorist, 'wife at home, lover in Hyde, mistress in Newton-le-Willows and two pretty girls in the top grade at Werneth Prep', who becomes benighted and snowbound while in a reverie on the moors and is eventually found by local drinkers who 'heard the horn moaning like an alarm clock under the duvet'. In his poem 'It Ain't What You Do, But What It Does To You', a touching lyric about finding the magical in the everyday, he writes of 'skimming flat stones across Black Moss', a local reservoir, 'on a day so still I could hear each ripple as they crossed'. His book All Points North is definitely the second book about the north that everyone should read.
But one quietly eerie poem about this landscape addresses that shadow, that distant echo of horror that will always hang around these uplands now. It's in Zoom, his debut collection, and is called 'On Miles Platting Station'. Armitage describes the view from an early-evening train traversing these moors:
high enough to see how Ancoats meshes with Beswick
how Gorton gives onto Hattersley and Hyde to where
Saddleworth declines the angle of the moor. . .
the police are there again boxhauling the traffic
adjusting the arc lights. They have new evidence tonight
and they lift it from behind the wind break, cradle it along
their human chain and lower it carefully down
into Manchester
The poem describes with a delicate horror the reopened investigations into Britain's most notorious murders. Saddleworth Moor is where Ian Brady and Myra Hindley disposed of four of their young victims during their sadistic killing spree of the mid-sixties, dumped them in ravines or nameless places, buried them in shallow graves. In the late eighties, acting on information from Hindley herself, police began to look for two more suspected victims, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. They found the little girl. Keith Bennett's remains are still unrecovered.
I did some work with a camera crew from near the area recently and when Saddleworth was mentioned the cameraman said, 'Saddleworth? Lovely place but the kids get under your feet.' There wasn't a groan, no embarrassed clearing of the throat. Just a sudden appalled and utter silence. Media people are generally fairly unshockable; it's almost a badge of honour in these days of 'dark' comedy. But no one makes jokes about the Moors Murders. Alongside the Yorkshire Ripper but more reviled, they are the north's darkest, nastiest secrets, the source of an enduring miasma of evil that swirls around Saddleworth and Chapeltown. The passage of a hundred years and the fact that they are illuminated by hissing gaslight to the clop of a hansom cab has meant that Jack the Ripper's crimes have become safely packaged into just another exhibit on London's tourist itinerary, even though the murders were savage and chilling. There will never be Moors Murder tourism. They have a special, inviolate place in the national psyche. That place lies in the north. Nineteen sixty-six was not just the year of Moore, Charlton, Hurst and triumph in north London. It was also the year of Brady and Hindley and wickedness beyond belief in Manchester.
Everyone in the north of my generation grew up in the shadow of the Moors Murders. When we were told not to speak to strangers, to run home from school on dark winter nights, to avoid nice-looking ladies wanting our help looking for lost dogs or gloves, we knew it was not just idle parental blather or daft talk from Nan. We knew that horror and evil had come out of the dark, sounding and looking just as northern as our own kind, looking for kids like us and finding us, in Ancoats, Gorton, Ashton, the places where we lived and played and went to school. For kids like me from towns like mine, the bogeyman was not a nameless fear or a vague shape under the bed. The bogeyman had a name, two names, normal names, and the bogeyman's two faces stared at you out of the newspapers, hair full of peroxide and brilliantine, eyes full of pure and pitiless evil.
Poor, lost Keith Bennett aside, the story is maybe beginning to recede into memory. Hindley is dead, unmourned, Brady a caged, sacred monster who'd rather be dead. If you want to know the whole grisly story, find a copy of Emlyn Williams' brilliant and sober study Beyond Belief. In it, he describes how in the end it was Myra Hindley's sister and impressionable teenage partner David, whom Brady tried to lure into his world of fascistic fantasy, who alerted the police when they realised just what kind of a world it was. That couple were The Smiths. Williams describes them as this several times and I've always thought that maybe that's how the greatest of Manchester's bands came by their name. Certainly their song 'Suffer Little Children', tender and ghostly at once with its famous 'Oh Manchester, so much to answer for' refrain stands alongside Williams' book as a sombre and seemly remembrance of hideous events.
Slaithwaite is a lot more heart-warming. It's a town which, if you're a devotee of heart-warming Sunday night drama, you may already know. A glut of these shows have given many Yorkshire towns and villages a little added USP on the marketing front. The daddy of them all is Holmfirth, the village where old men behave like little lads and baths are forever being turned into rudimentary flying machines with hilarious consequences as the home of Last of the Summer Wine. LOTSW - as I'm sure someone must call it – has been running for twelve hundred years and predates the coming of the enclosure system. I haven't checked this; I'm just going off a gut feeling. I'm not going to tell you what it's about as it is utterly unthinkable that you have not seen it. I will just say that it has become fashionable to mock Last of the Summer Wine for its recycled plots and sickly 'aren't we all daft oop north' humour and this is one occasion where I am happy to go along with metropolitan fashion. It's rubbish. My mum and dad love it, though. If you do too, make a pilgrimage to Holmfirth and you can have tea at Nora Batty's old cafe. I actually did this once with Billy Bragg, the ratlike pop group Bros and Radio 1 DJ Mike Read, for reasons far too complex to go into now. Similarly, Goathland in North Yorkshire has a cute little steam railway system, a big village green, a couple of pubs, and is known to millions as Aidensfield in Heartbeat. Heartbeat, like its successor in the schedules Where the Heart Is, is twee and toasty and melted buttery and must save the NHS a fortune in Mogadon. Don't go there on a Bank Holiday Monday unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the massed nice ladies of the Nick Berry Fan Club looking for things 'he' might have touched.
And Slaithwaite, a tykeish, likeable little country town which straddles a tributary of the Colne Valley, is transformed by the magic of television into Skelthwaite in the aforementioned Where the Heart Is. Locals watch it with the sound off just to spot each other's allotments and houses. Half the buildings cling to the steep sides of the valley like lichen, half – like the huge old Titanic Mill, now chic apartments, of course – sit brooding in the hollow like
a troll. I'd provide more evocative detail but by now lacerating sheets of hail (just like those old plastic strip curtains your auntie used to have) have completely obscured the town. It stung your face like ice-cold buckshot and filled your pockets with freezing water. This then is the Colne Valley. In May.
A few sodden pieces of paper have been left blowing about in the bus shelter. These turn out to be several copies of a leaflet entitled 'Walking Round Slaithwaite', presumably abandoned by a drenched rambling party who are even now warming up with a Jameson's in the snug of the Silent Woman or the Shoulder of Mutton. But this leaflet does tell me that Slaithwaite is the only town in Britain to have a canal running along the main street. Lean out the cabin door and you can probably grab a Greggs pasty.
Pies and Prejudice Page 20