A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

by Tony Fletcher

  By 1914, Manchester’s commercial dominance appeared uncontested: the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal twenty years earlier had created a direct route to the Irish Sea that bypassed Liverpool entirely, helping Manchester claim processing rights to an astonishing two-thirds of the world’s cotton. But a decline in manufacturing subsequently took hold during World War I, as Britain’s access to its foreign markets became greatly restricted; it accelerated again when the war ended, though other nations soon began producing equivalent goods at a cheaper price (often, ironically, on machinery made in Manchester). The Great Depression hit Manchester especially hard, with mills falling like dominoes, forcing a permanent decline in its population from its 1931 peak of 766,000, and although World War II saw much of the workforce gainfully employed in the manufacture of munitions, it was the United States, not Great Britain, that emerged from global battle as the prevalent economic empire. The balance of power that had shifted over the nineteenth century from Liverpool to Manchester had now emigrated entirely.

  But no city of any merit takes defeat lying down, and Manchester in the immediate aftermath of World War II had reason to still believe in itself. It had been spared the excessive bombing runs of the Nazi Luftwaffe that had flattened entire sections of Liverpool, and thanks to the Manchester Ship Canal, its port was still the country’s third largest. The city had two of England’s finest and best-supported football teams (Manchester United and Manchester City), a reputation for music and nightlife, and a pronounced love of jazz and blues. And the Labour Party, born of a TUC conference held in 1900, had come to power at the end of the war and embarked on an immediate and exhausting plan of action of welfare programs and nationalization of industries that promised a fairer distribution of industrial wealth. Not only had Engels’s vision of a workers’ revolution come about in precisely the manner he had considered impossible—in small steps, without armed insurrection—but his fears of Irish savages corrupting English mores had been proven hopelessly ill informed: the “civilization” of the Irish in Manchester in fact helped improve conditions for everyone.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  I was very aware of being Irish and we were told that we were quite separate from the scruffy kids around us—we were different to them. In many ways, though, I think I had the best of both places and the best of both countries. I’m “one of us” on both sides.

  —Morrissey, Irish Times, November 1999

  One of my first ever memories is of seeing two young Irish women who were not long over here from a tiny Irish village, skint but better off than they were back home, entirely liberated by this new life. Needing to live within feet of each other as a support system.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  The new wave of Irish immigrants were not fleeing famine, and neither were they living under British rule anymore. Ireland had gained independence in 1922 and officially became a Republic—Éire—in 1948, even though the decision by the six counties of the mostly Protestant north to stay part of the United Kingdom meant that the issue of full Irish unity and independence would remain frustratingly unresolved. But for the time being, there was peace. Indeed, under the leadership of President Éamon de Valera, Ireland had successfully sat out World War II entirely—referring to it instead as “The Emergency.” And in a reversal of mid-nineteenth-century (mis)fortunes, a protectionist policy had ensured that the Irish had plenty of meat on their plates throughout and beyond the war years, while the British endured continual rationing. But isolation had come at a price: Éire was denied membership in the United Nations until 1955 as a result of its neutrality, and the economy barely limped along as a result, its agricultural base no match for the (re)building boom that was taking place across war-ravaged Europe. Great Britain, embarking on an ambitious plan to construct a million new homes, had even taken to advertising for immigrant workers in its colonies. It was all too tempting for the youth of Éire to travel across the Irish Sea and pick up some of these jobs in the big British cities. Through the first half of the 1950s, some 200,000 left Ireland, and once again, a significant percentage settled in Manchester.

  Among them were a majority of seven Morrissey siblings who had been raised in a central Dublin tenement until they were moved into the new housing estates of Crumlin, south of the city, in a process of enforced “slum clearance” that would become a constant refrain in the life of the second youngest, Peter Aloysius Morrissey, but a week old at the time of the family’s relocation in November 1935. The Irish nation under de Valera was to be applauded for addressing the housing needs of its urban poor, but it skimped on the social amenities necessary to establish true community bonds: with a lack of good schools, playing fields, and jobs, Crumlin could not contain the postwar ambitions of this new generation.

  Mary Bridget Morrissey emigrated first, opening up a pet shop in the solidly Irish part of South Manchester’s Moss Side neighborhood with her husband, Leo Corrigan. Cathryn Patricia followed, marrying in London in 1952 and relocating with her husband, Richard Corrigan—Leo’s brother—to Moss Side’s Stockton Street, one of several roads laid out on a north-south pattern leading from Moss Lane down toward Alexandra Park. The two- and three-story terraced houses of this enclosed residential area opened onto the street as was typical in working-class England, but several of the larger ones had cellars, gabled windows, and tiny front yards; they were not by any means the slums of the nineteenth-century Irish immigrants. Distinct from the new West Indian community of Moss Side that lay to the east of the Princess Street jazz clubs, the neighborhood provided a base for the ever-growing number of Manchester Morrisseys. Around the same time that another sister, Ellen, married there in 1955, Peter Morrissey, still a teenager, was enticed to join them, staying with Richard and Patricia Corrigan on Stockton Street while he found a job and made plans for his girlfriend to follow suit.

  That girl, Elizabeth Ann Dwyer, known to all as Betty, was the second oldest in a family that, like the Morrisseys, consisted of five girls and two boys and had likewise lived in the very heart of Dublin, on Pearse Street, until being moved out to the corporation houses in Crumlin. Further back on the Dwyer family line there was reputedly some serious wealth—considerable land ownership around the tourist village of Cashel—but that was hardly evident when Betty Dwyer left school at fourteen to take a job at one of the Crumlin factories, sewing buttons. It was there she had met Peter Morrissey, himself employed making ashtrays and lampshades; they started courting, and by the time they made their respective moves to Manchester, where Betty settled into digs around the corner from Stockton Street with an elderly couple who looked after her like she was their own, they were a firm couple.

  And a fine-looking one at that. Betty was nothing less than beautiful in her youth, whether photographed standing next to Peter’s mother outside the Stockton Street house in an everyday cardigan, her evident Irish features accentuated by her broad smile, or dressed to the nines, likewise beaming for the camera, during a day out in Alexandra Park. Peter had broad shoulders, a comparatively stout build, and typically met the camera with an air of quiet determination and resilience; he became quickly known in Manchester for his positive attitude, his reliability as a friend and worker, his cheerful demeanor, and especially his love of football, a sport that was officially frowned on in Éire, which promoted the Gaelic version of the game instead. Peter had been among many of his hometown’s youth to have taken a pledge of temperance during the time of their confirmation into the Church and reached adulthood without developing a taste for alcohol. When he arrived in Manchester, he was more interested in the freedom to play Association Football than the opportunity to knock back the booze; over subsequent years, he developed a parallel reputation as a devoted, exceptionally talented amateur player and a reluctant, equally amateur drinker.

  Peter Morrissey quickly got a job as a forklift truck driver in the Trafford Park warehouse of the venerable Manchester company Richard Johnson, Clapham and Morris (JCM); Betty gained emp
loyment as a packer for a firm of blanket makers. On the surface, neither job appeared much more attractive than those they had left behind in Crumlin, and to be sure, the new Irish immigrants still experienced their share of discrimination. But by this point they were too well established in Manchester, and conditions sufficiently improved for the working class as a whole, to accept themselves as scapegoats or to be manipulated as scabs. There were jobs for all, on building sites and roads, in hospitals and factories, at shops and schools, with a fair day’s pay for any who could commit to a hard day’s work. And when work was done, there were Irish pubs and social clubs to gather at, Catholic churches to attend on Sundays, and Catholic schools for the children when they came along. There was a life, and all things considered, it was a good one. On March 16, 1957, Peter Morrissey and Betty Dwyer, twenty-one and nineteen years old respectively, wed at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in Moss Side. The service was followed by a party back on Stockton Street that raged all night and all the way through the subsequent St. Patrick’s Day, with several of Betty’s siblings, visiting from Dublin—and her parents, too—enjoying themselves so much that they immediately hatched their own plans to move to Manchester.

  Less than six months later, Betty gave birth to a girl, Jacqueline Mary. The daughter arrived in the midst of a transition for the British so vivid that many who lived through it saw it as if the world switched in front of them from black-and-white to color. The arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America, and the simultaneous explosion of its simplistic British sibling, skiffle, came at a point when food rationing had finally ended and the abolition of national service loomed enticingly on the horizon, inviting the nation’s youth to rediscover themselves as something brand-new: teenagers. They did so in a growing economy, with a disposable income on which to buy the 45 rpm singles of the newly hip hit parade, as well as to indulge in fresh fashions that experienced a tabloid-enhanced heyday with the drape jackets of the “teddy boys,” but were more generally enjoyed for the novel freedom to express oneself as something other than merely a working person. For the musically minded, the concept of hire purchase—payment on installment plans—presented the opportunity to own guitars and drums, to form rock ’n’ roll or skiffle bands, to explore career opportunities beyond the familiar office apprenticeship and factory line. Hastening this dream process down in London, a thoroughly British entrepreneur by the name of Larry Parnes set up a personal assembly line by which he transformed teenage boys of faultless physicality and dubious talent into singing sensations with vaguely risqué stage names: Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, and the like. None was to be confused with Elvis Presley, Little Richard, or even Buddy Holly, but given that by the end of the 1950s, those three had, respectively, gone into the Army, found religion, and been killed in a plane crash, the Brits took what Parnes and his ilk could produce—and with gratitude.

  Peter and Betty Morrissey were just on the wrong side of the newly delineated teenage line to enjoy all of this; it would be not them but their children who would benefit from the changed society. Shortly after the arrival of Jacqueline, the family moved from temporary rented digs on Moss Side’s Henrietta Street to a more permanent home at 17 Harper Street, part of the same neighborhood but, crucially, just to the west of the City of Manchester lines and inside the Municipal Borough of Stretford. Peter Morrissey took an improved job at the JCM factory and continued to play football religiously. There were, it was suggested, opportunities to swap the one profession for the other, especially after February 1958, when eight of the Manchester United first team, which had just won the English league two years in a row, died as their charter plane crashed on takeoff following a European Cup quarter-final in Munich. As the star striker both of a league-topping pub team and works team, Peter Morrissey was routinely urged by his fellow amateurs to take trials for United, whose Old Trafford ground was close by the JCM warehouse; the thought was that he might at least make a now-depleted reserves team. But Morrissey had been through the process before, passing a trial at neighboring Bury then turning down further invitations due to a clash with his overtime schedules. Morrissey was a risk taker on the football field only; when it came to work and family, he erred on the side of caution. The arrival of a son, in spring 1959, put to rest any last hopes—more on the part of his friends by now than his own—to meet a professional calling outside of the factory.

  The boy was born at the Park Hospital in Davyhulme, on May 22, Whit Friday—which made the Morrisseys among the few Mancunian Irish not to spend the day alongside 50,000 of their fellow Roman Catholics, some of whom marched through the city streets to the sound of pipes, fife, drums, and brass bands, others of whom broke through barriers to rush the American-born Archbishop Gerald Patrick O’Hara. It was the kind of religious hysteria that would later befall the newborn Morrissey on a nightly basis—not, of course, that anyone had great expectations of such worship as he lay on the hospital bed.

  When it came to naming the boy, Peter and Betty looked to tradition. As was not uncommon for inner-city Dublin of the 1930s, Peter Morrissey had seen two younger siblings die in infancy, one of them named Patrick Steven; with the slightly different spelling of Patrick Stephen, this had also been the name of Betty’s father. Patrick, however, was too Irish a name to go up front; it was bad enough knowing their son might be called a Paddy for his Irish roots without, literally, calling him Paddy. For his part, the child would later claim he had been named for the American actor Steve Cochran, a former on-screen tough guy and ongoing off-screen Romeo who, at the time of the Morrissey boy’s birth, was about to hit his nadir as the lead in a schlock movie that promised to lift the lid off “the wild, weird world of the Beatniks!” That movie, The Beat Generation, opened in July 1959, the same month Peter and Betty got around to officially registering their son’s name—as Steven Patrick Morrissey.

  If The Beat Generation represented some scraping of the Hollywood barrel, British cinema was going through a far more fertile period the year of Steven Morrissey’s birth. January saw the release of the movie Room at the Top, based on a recent John Braine novel in which the narrator moves to a prosperous West Yorkshire market town from his desperate Lancashire mill town outside Manchester; in September followed an adaptation of the highly acclaimed John Osborne play Look Back in Anger, set largely in an attic apartment in a smoky Midlands city. Between them, the two films announced a “new wave” of British cinema: powerfully earnest movies that depicted, in stark black-and-white film and equally plain, even vulgar language, the stymied, hampered, claustrophobic lives of the contemporary working class and their often frustrated attempts at upward mobility.

  The literary and theatrical movement that led to these films had initially been heralded as one of “Angry Young Men,” as in the Osborne play, but that title had been rendered almost instantly obsolete when, in 1958, A Taste of Honey introduced a new and unsettling version of femininity onto the London stage. A savagely hilarious and brutally amoral tale of a northern teenage working-class girl, Jo; her pregnancy by a black sailor who promptly vanishes from her life; her subsequent friendship with a protective gay student; and, throughout, her troubled relationship with a semi-whoring mother, Helen, and Helen’s latest alcoholic playboy partner, A Taste of Honey managed to break almost every taboo that existed across British social mores. (Homosexuality being illegal, that character’s sexual orientation was never actually stated, though it was certainly implied by the familiar, flowery insults hurled his way by Helen’s lover.) The breakthrough was rendered all the more astonishing by the fact that A Taste of Honey’s author, Shelagh Delaney, was just seventeen years old when she wrote it and not part of any perceived theatrical “set”; a working class girl determined that the theater should be a place “where the audience has contact with real people, who are alive,” she had set the play in her native Salford.

  In a BBC profile on Delaney broadcast in 1960, at which point her second play, The Lion in Love, had just been launched
and a superb cinematic rendition of A Taste of Honey was in production, Salford was described, in the clipped tones of the Queen’s English, as a “gray industrial town near Manchester.” This was typical patronizing southern ignorance, for Salford was a city in its own right. Divided from Manchester to the east (and Stretford to the south) only by the meandering flow of the River Irwell, Salford had played its own pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution. It was home to the quays and warehouses of the Manchester Ship Canal, and the base for numerous factories and mills—including those of Ermen & Engels. The cooperative movement had been born here in the 1830s, when Salford’s population had already reached 50,000; the Salford Working Men’s College had been founded as far back as 1858; the Salford Lads Club had been opened to provide additional opportunities to the city’s working boys in 1903. L. S. Lowry, though born and raised in Stretford, one road over from Stockton Street, had studied at the Salford School of Art for ten years and located many of his most famous paintings there. Salford was home to Britain’s first unconditionally free public library and to its first gaslit street; the gas works themselves were immortalized by Salford’s native songwriter Ewan MacColl in his 1949 song “Dirty Old Town.”1