It had not always been that way. Until 1963, when the girls were farmed off to the newly built Cardinal Vaughan, St. Mary’s had enjoyed a coed intake, which served to self-regulate some of the excesses of juvenile misbehavior. The school had its share of success stories too, especially in sports. Come Morrissey’s time, though, many of the pupils were, like him, recently displaced and relocated, Old Trafford having gone through its own slum clearance program in the 1960s. The rootless boys of modern Stretford had no hunger for the school’s demand for spirit, be it pride in St. Mary’s as a whole or in one of the four assigned “houses” within the school intended to instill good-natured competition and team camaraderie. Their working-class parents, many of them immigrants from Ireland or other Catholic countries (Italy and Poland, for example), remained generally disconnected from the process, and St. Mary’s pointedly did nothing to encourage them, sending home only twice-yearly reports and hosting but annual parents’ evenings that were sparsely attended.
Like all British secondary schools, St. Mary’s insisted its pupils wear uniforms, which included a blue blazer for the first three years, along with the nominal requirement of short trousers and a cap for the first years too. But in working-class areas like Stretford, this long-standing tradition had come up against the reality of the kids’ own uniforms in the shape of their stylized youth culture; by the time Morrissey attended St. Mary’s, the enduring mod look of the mid-’60s had given way to the tougher, more pronounced imagery of the suedehead and skinhead, meaning that there were multiple dress codes competing with one another. In addition, the social upheavals and scientific discoveries of the 1960s had caused many to question, if not their religious background—one could no more deny being Catholic at St. Mary’s than deny one’s skin color—then certainly their religious faith, as per the Morrissey family. And yet St. Mary’s remained unapologetically strict in its Catholic doctrine. There was a monthly Friday Mass conducted by the local priest, regular prayers and religious lessons, frequent visual demonstrations on the sin of abortion, and what Morrissey recalled as a Monday-morning inquisition regarding one’s attendance at church the previous day.
Rather than acknowledge the depth of these problems and seek an innovative way to solve them, the school’s headmaster, Vince “Jet” Morgan, a former Army officer whose educational qualifications were held in low esteem by his teachers, opted for a program of strict discipline designed to instill fear and respect. The routine started every morning with assembly, where, alongside the singing of hymns, Morgan would deliver a religious sermon, as likely as not about the saint of the day or one of the Catholic martyrs after which the four school houses had been named. Morrissey was assigned to Clitherow House, after Margaret Clitherow of York, a sixteenth-century convert to Catholicism who was executed for her religious beliefs by being crushed to death.2 In October 1970, just after Morrissey started at St. Mary’s, Margaret Clitherow was canonized by the pope, but her sainthood had little effect on the students, who typically recoiled in horror from the gruesome details of the morning sermon, taking away from it only the (intended) sense of Catholic persecution, a chip on their shoulder they could use and abuse when they ran into pupils from the local nondenominational secondary modern, Great Stone.
Assembly ended with the headmaster ritual, that which inspired the Smiths song of the same name, surely the most damning musical indictment of British public education ever composed by someone who failed their 11-plus. Each morning, Morgan selected a different item of the pupils’ dress or cleanliness for inspection. It could be the shoes; were they of the formal kind and were they suitably polished? It might be the tie; was it properly knotted at the top button? But it could easily have been the fingernails; had they been duly clipped and cleaned? Those who failed to meet Morgan’s exacting standards were sent down to his office to await his personal delivery of the “strap” (which the pupils referred to as the “whip”) on their outstretched hand. And so the school day began.
Not that corporal punishment ceased there. While a focus on term grades and exam results might have seemed a loftier aspirational goal, St. Mary’s promoted a system of “merits” and “conduct marks.” The idea was that the four houses would compete for merits and seek to rein in those receiving conduct marks; the reality was that nobody cared much about their individual house to begin with and only marginally more about school in general. Conduct marks were therefore allocated disproportionately, noted with what the teacher considered the number of applicable “straps,” and the pupil sent down to receive them from the staff member on punishment duty.
All this was merely the official process by which the pupils were physically disciplined. Unofficially, the metalwork teacher had a two-foot-long piece of tapered wood that he nicknamed Charlie and administered freely on the boys’ backsides; he was also given to pulling post-pubescent kids up by their fashionable sideburns, which many considered to be more harmful in the long run. A female teacher who struggled to control her pupils was given her own piece of wood by another teacher (assumed to be her lover), which she rapped viciously against the boys’ calves. Another used the slipper; another still threw the blackboard duster directly at the boys’ heads. The swimming teacher used a long bamboo pole to whack kids on the head to prevent them from hanging on to the edges of the pool over at Stretford Baths. In contrast, one of the physical education teachers kept kids hanging from the bars in the school gym until their fingers turned blue.
No wonder, then, that many of his fellow former pupils shared, and even applauded, Morrissey’s subsequent condemnation of the place as “a very sadistic school, very barbaric.” One of the boys in his year compared the routine of daily beatings and whippings to “martial law”; another used the term “scandalous.” A third, Steven Adshead, who went on to become a Labour councilor and mayor of modern Trafford, observed, in words not dissimilar to Morrissey’s own, “It is a shameful reflection of our society at that time that children could be beaten in this way. I really think society should apologize for it.” Arguably the greatest sadist on the staff was the main PE teacher, a Mr. Sweeney, who took delight in having his class run around the gym while he took potshots at them with a medicine ball. Midweek on the playing fields, as Morrissey later referenced in “The Headmaster Ritual,” Sweeney had the boys run from school, over the iron bridge (the pupils called it the “Monkey Bridge”) to Kings Road, from where they turned away from Morrissey’s home (no doubt to his relief), down a side street, and after a mile, onto the fields alongside Stretford Grammar School. The boy who came last was forced to bend over and get a ball kicked at his backside. (In summer, he would be whacked on the rear with a cricket bat.) Those who weren’t then among the twenty-two selected to play team sports had to run instead all afternoon around the fields, frequently rendered a mud pit by the wet Manchester weather.
The likes of Sweeney were hardly unique to St. Mary’s. In fact, by 1969, his type was so familiar that it was caricatured in the movie Kes, in which the actor Brian Glover played a sports teacher whose (Manchester United and England center forward) Bobby Charlton complex leads him to chop, push, punish and otherwise cheat his way through a football match that he shouldn’t even be participating in other than as referee. By all accounts, Sweeney reveled in identical action. Morrissey himself later recalled how he once—and only once—had the temerity to “take the ball” off Sweeney. “His response to this was to ignore the game, ignore the ball, ignore the pupils—and just kick me.”
To the extent that it had one, St. Mary’s academic focus was evidenced by the fact that it offered metalwork, woodwork, technical drawing, and engineering drawing, but not music, drama, or even foreign languages; that there was no school magazine, no orchestra, no instruments, no annual productions of plays or of music. For sure, there were some boys who benefited from this approach and who look back fondly on their time at St. Mary’s, even the beatings. Typically, they’re the ones who excelled at competitive sports, respected the firm arm of author
ity, and were good with their hands. Steven Morrissey was not among them.
He hardly helped his case by showing up on the first day accompanied by his mother, and wearing, as he would throughout his first year, the optional shorts rather than the long trousers favored by almost all the other new boys. Along with his decision to take the short journey home across the bridge for lunch every day, he was immediately marked as a “mummy’s boy,” and even as “posh.” And yet he was not victimized for it. Though bullying was certainly perpetrated by some of the boys (who were only copying the teachers, after all), it was nonetheless considered a sign of weakness by most of them. After all, if you wanted to fight, there was always another tough lad happy to oblige; you didn’t need to pick on the effeminate kid or the token Pakistani to prove your mettle.
Morrissey inadvertently secured his safety by befriending one of the tougher kids in his year, Mike Foley, the pair discovering that they were more interested in fashion and music than were other kids and that they each excelled at athletics. Morrissey described this as his “saving grace at school,” noting that he got “streams and streams of medals for running.” These sporting talents were inherited from his footballing father, no doubt, who would surely have loved the son to follow (further) in his footsteps, but Steven had learned the hard way, via Sweeney’s boot, what became of people who dared to play team sports with any degree of passion. So while being “a model athlete,” as he described it, afforded him important status with teachers and pupils alike, he chafed at the commitment it required, complaining later of being carted off to “places very far away” under the threat of “being beaten to death” if he failed to show.
Uninterested, then, in the camaraderie of sports, uninspired by the rote teaching, unconverted by the Catholic indoctrination, unimpressed with the relative unintelligence of many fellow pupils, at the same time he was unwilling to rebel and risk a daily thrashing. “He wasn’t being educated,” his classmate Mike Moore told Johnny Rogan. “He was being manipulated by a system that was streamlining him to work in industry. The whole principle of the system was that you didn’t buck it, but accepted. If you showed any individuality, they tried to wipe it out. They preferred to ignore him at school, and he ignored them because if you started to argue about the conditions, you were whipped.”
“He was too clever for us,” said Paul Whiting, who started off in Morrissey’s class. (There were three classes in each year, totaling approximately 100 pupils, streamed according to each year’s exam results into classes A, B, and C.) “We were all fucking dur-durs from the council estate fighting each other and robbing each other, and Steve Morrissey was above that. He shouldn’t have been in that school.” Future head boy Barry Finnegan, whose younger brother Terry became a good friend and frequently visited the Morrissey household on Kings Road, was forever catching him in the hallways during breaks, avoiding the machismo of the playground by “walking round, looking at things, intently.” Morrissey, he quickly concluded, “was either painfully shy or he purposefully blocked other people and didn’t want other people in his life. It seemed like he had a shield around him.”
As befitted an insular and intelligent personality, Morrissey’s personal passions were for the most part firmly askew of his classmates’. While comics were all the rage among adolescents of the time (many musicians and groups naming themselves for superheroes), Morrissey preferred monster magazines full of Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. As his classmates tried their best to bunk into “AA” (over fourteen) or “X” (over eighteen) movies, Morrissey celebrated the camp theatrics of Britain’s sexually titillating but cheerfully unrevealing Carry On series instead, developing a particular fascination with Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams. In particular, whereas the fictional James Bond was viewed as the archetypal film hero, Morrissey preferred the deceased American actor James Dean, whom he had discovered back at primary school after watching Rebel Without a Cause “quite by accident”; he became obsessed not so much with Dean’s acting ability but with his life story, the way that the public image of the handsome young rebel masked a “constant uneasiness with life.” That Dean was ambivalent about his sexuality certainly did not escape the attention of a bookish young boy who claimed, “I did research about him and it was like unearthing Tutankhamen’s tomb.”
In a culture that measured a family’s success by the amount of meat on its Sunday dinner table, Morrissey became a vegetarian at the age of eleven after watching a TV documentary about farm animals: he found the image of “pigs and cows still thrashing about after they’d been supposedly stunned” to be “so violent, so horrendous,” that he gave up eating them there and then, never to return. Unusually for boys of his age, most of whom viewed it (if at all) as their parents’ soap opera, he was so devoted to Coronation Street that at the age of twelve, he took to writing scripts for the show, sending them off to Granada Television and, by his own claims, entering into correspondence with the writer Leslie Duxbury during the process of having them routinely rejected.
All of this, clearly, helped formulate the adult Morrissey, along with the words, music, and imagery of the Smiths, but arguably nothing proved as influential toward his future persona as when his mother, determined to cultivate her son’s literary instincts, followed up an introduction to Thomas Hardy’s novels by giving him the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde with the assurance that, as Steven quoted her, “It’s everything you need to know about life.” The gift was rendered, according to its recipient, before Morrissey started at St. Mary’s; he has cited the shortest of Wilde’s fairy tales, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” as making a particularly strong first impression. In that story, a songbird sacrifices itself against a thorn to produce a red rose for a love-struck student; after the object of the student’s desire returns the rose as hopelessly insufficient compared to another suitor’s gift of jewels, the student casually throws the flower in the road (where it is crushed under oncoming wheels) before concluding, “What a silly thing Love is! … It is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true.” During his first round of media scrutiny, in late 1983, attempting to explain his lack of a love life, Morrissey noted, “In your formative years you’re led to believe that lots of magical things will happen with other people—which doesn’t actually happen.” “The Nightingale and the Rose” was, then, in essence, his introduction to the “Miserable Lie” of love.
From Wilde’s fairy tales, it was a short step up to his plays, set in a world equally far removed from 1960s and ’70s Stretford, that of the landed gentry of late Victorian England, where the lords and ladies of the manors sat or strolled around one another’s drawing rooms and gardens, flinging devastatingly witty and occasionally barbed one-liners at one another, inevitably drawing themselves into complex personal and financial relationships until a dastardly clever denouement brought a happy ending for those who deserved it (and occasionally, those who did not). As was true for Morrissey in later life with the Smiths albums, Wilde’s four “society plays” were written in the space of four years—and represented the author’s commercial peak, bringing Wilde both the popular acclaim that he desperately desired and the financial rewards he direly needed to maintain his flamboyant lifestyle. Despite the fact that the cream of British society flocked to Wilde’s every new theatrical presentation in the early 1890s and craved his company at their dinner tables, they were always acutely aware that his comedies of errors barely disguised a contempt for their conceits, arrogance, hypocrisy, and other defects; this would invite a powerful denouement of its own.
Certainly, Wilde the writer shied from neither provocation nor controversy. His first published work, a collected book of poems, was returned to the author by his former university debating society amidst claims that it was mired in plagiarism. His novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was castigated upon publication in serialized magazine form for its sexual, moral, and violent decadence; in a rare sign of defensiveness, Wilde r
emoved some of the more homoerotic passages for the subsequent book. And his play Salome, written in French just after Dorian Gray and just before his run of mainstream hits, was refused a license for the London stage because it depicted biblical characters in salacious scenes.
As all this makes evident, it is impossible to read much of Oscar Wilde without reading an awful lot about Oscar Wilde, which is how the writer wanted it. After all, it was Wilde himself who stated, “I put all my genius into my life, I put only my talent into my work.” As Morrissey read up on the amazing life story of Oscar Wilde, he could hardly have contemplated that they would ever be written of in the same sentence, for, other than their Irish heritage, their difference in backgrounds was almost impossibly pronounced. Wilde was born into a prestigious, intellectual family, his father a noted—indeed, knighted—surgeon, author, naturalist (and womanizer); his mother a poet, acclaimed translator, and rabble-rouser (a Protestant one, at that) in the cause of Irish nationalism. (Morrissey would later take Lady Wilde’s call to arms for a Smiths song title.) Wilde grew up in one of Dublin’s most fashionable houses, furnished with six servants, a governess, and a maid, where dinner guests often numbered a dozen and afternoon parties sometimes a hundred. And he started his education at a renowned Irish private school (proclaimed “the Eton of Ireland”), after which he attended Dublin’s premier school of higher learning, Trinity College, then went on to Oxford, where he graduated with a “double first” (the equivalent of summa cum laude honors in two subjects in the United States). The council houses and secondary moderns of Stretford this was not.
A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths Page 8