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

by Tony Fletcher

  The breakdown in law and order, in mutual respect and honor, merely mirrored British society at large. With inflation riding high, a series of successful worker strikes for matching wage increases led to ever-greater inflation and ever more strikes in turn as the trade unions, largely established in the factories and mills of nineteenth-century Manchester, were seen by many to be taking control of the country. In an attempt to establish its authority, the Conservative government declared a state of emergency and a three-day workweek, with the result that preannounced power cuts became a regular part of the evening “entertainment” and lining up for gasoline a national pastime. The government collapsed all the same, although it took two general elections in 1974 before Labour could secure a sufficient parliamentary majority of its own—at which the left-wing party duly assumed the role of adversary to the recalcitrant unions.

  The situation in Northern Ireland, in the meantime, which had remained under British rule (and neglect) for the past half century, turned ugly as the Catholic minority, demanding civil rights, came under attack first from the Protestant-controlled police force and then from a British Army that had been sent in ostensibly to protect them. The unrest awoke the sectarian paramilitaries, and in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday of January 1972, wherein thirteen unarmed protestors were shot dead by the British Army, the Provisional IRA brought a bombing campaign to the British mainland. In February 1974, an IRA bomb exploded at the magistrates’ court in Manchester, injuring a dozen people and leading to a new round of soul-searching among, and allegations about, the local immigrant Irish.

  The football terraces were also turning into battlegrounds, with Manchester United fans—specifically those at Old Trafford’s “Stretford Road” end—garnering one of the fiercest reputations in the country, not unrelated to the fact that they also drew the biggest crowds: more than 50,000 a week routinely crammed onto crumbling terraces. And all the while, the factories and mills continued to retrench or shut down completely, forcing unemployment to levels not seen since the Depression; as a city built on manufacturing, Manchester suffered as severely from the nation’s economic decline as anywhere in Britain. In such a climate, the small handful of teachers who attempted to cut through the mutual animosity and overriding apathy at St. Mary’s and deliver something approximating a valuable education were faced with an almost Herculean struggle. English teacher Graham Pink acknowledged that for all his attempts to bring in a wider range of relevant literature (for example, Kes and Billy Liar) he spent more time “sitting on the loudmouths” than attending to the likes of Morrissey, whom he saw, to the extent he paid attention to him at all, as being “very retiring.” For his efforts Pink endured disdain from his school’s more strident disciplinarians, and later went into nursing.1

  One of the few who succeeded in getting through to the Stretford kids was a Mr. Hopkins, who wore a Crombie coat fashionable with the skinheads, and conversed with the tougher boys on their level. In Morrissey’s final year, Hopkins somehow circumvented Headmaster Morgan’s aversion to drama and directed a production of the play The Long and the Short and the Tall, which had first come to the British stage in 1959, directed by Lindsay Anderson in the wake of Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey. Hopkins secured the support of the troublemakers like Foley and Whiting by giving them leads (it helped that the parts were of embittered, working-class conscripts in World War II); secured a role for everyone who wanted to be involved, even if just as a stagehand or extra; and even let the boys smoke real cigarettes onstage instead of fakes. For those who had fought, stolen, and truanted their way through school, it was a rare moment of consideration and collaboration.

  For Morrissey, though, such efforts proved too little, too late. Taking as much time out from his latter years as he could get away with (rather than shoplift at the Stretford Shopping Precinct, he would generally just go on a walkabout), he left in the spring of 1975, right around his sixteenth birthday, with the barest of CSEs to his name. (He subsequently embarked on an additional year of schooling, at Stretford Tech, on a crash course to secure the handful of O-Levels that would gain him worthy employment.) Morrissey remained forever unforgiving about his treatment at St. Mary’s, to the point of celebrating Morgan’s passing from the stage at the Old Trafford cricket ground during a homecoming solo show in 2004. In interviews, he was no less restrained. Talking to Manchester’s own Paul Morley in 1988, a year after the Smiths split, it was evident that his time at St. Mary’s had left a deep scar of bitterness. “The horror of it cannot be overemphasized,” he said. “Every single day was a human nightmare. In every single way that you could possibly want to imagine. Worse … the total hatred. The fear and anguish of waking up, of having to get dressed, having to walk down the road, having to walk into assembly, having to do those lessons …” And more than a decade later, speaking to Brian Boyd of the Irish Times, he even floated the idea of formal retribution.

  “It was so abysmal—and you may snigger, you may not, I’ll chance it—that I’ve considered actually suing the Manchester Education Committee because the education I received was so basically evil and brutal. All I learnt was to have no self-esteem and to feel ashamed without knowing why. It’s part of being working-class, this pathetic belief that somebody else, somewhere, knows better than you do and knows what’s best for you.”

  Due to dwindling class sizes, itself not unrelated to such an appalling reputation for corporal punishment that even the Department of Education and Science took note, St. Mary’s was closed in the early 1990s and demolished. A housing estate was built over its grounds. The iron bridge across the railway tracks to Kings Road remains as it was—except for extensive graffiti, added since the 1980s, almost every last word of which lovingly quotes a lyric by the most famous St. Mary’s “old boy” of all.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  It’s something that’s in me spiritually. And psychically. Just as a being, this sort of absorption in music. Popular culture is more of an intellectual thing, but that connection with the sound is just something that is in my DNA.

  —Johnny Marr, March 2011

  When it was the Maher family’s turn to be moved out of their terraced street in the name of slum clearance, they were relocated, as were so many from Ardwick, Hulme, and Moss Side alike, to a growing—indeed, overflowing—community eight miles south. The “garden city” of Wythenshawe, to give what would later be damned as “Europe’s largest council estate” its true title, had first been envisioned back in the 1920s. A product both of necessity (the imperative to create new housing for an overpopulated Manchester), and idealism (the desire to do so in a positive manner), its planners took their lead from the original garden cities in the south of England: Letchworth, completed in 1904, and Welwyn, finished just after World War I. They set their sights on open lands around the ancient Cheshire villages of Northenden and Baguley, each referenced in the Domesday Book of 1086, and Wythenshawe (“Willow Wood”) itself, a relative newcomer of a mere seven hundred years’ existence. The River Mersey and its surrounding floodplains had long provided a psychological and physical barrier to such urban encroachment, allowing the lords of the Cheshire manor houses to enjoy their fiefdoms in relative peace and quiet—although the decision by the Tattons of Wythenshawe Hall to stand with the Loyalists in the English Civil War had resulted in cannons being shipped from parliamentarian Manchester to encourage a rethink. Wythenshawe Hall survived that four-month siege almost intact, but was not able to halt the march of history. In 1926, the Tattons sold 2,600 acres to the City of Manchester, while locally born businessman Ernest Simon bought Wythenshawe Hall and its surrounding 250-acre estate to create Wythenshawe Park, which he then gifted “as some return for all that we owe to Manchester.” More than a mere philanthropist, Simon pushed relentlessly for the garden city project; at various times a Manchester city councilor, chairman of the housing committee, Lord Mayor, and Liberal MP, he was in Parliament to vote on the 1930 bill that forcibly transferred the
surrounding lands of the Cheshire villages to the City of Manchester for development. In addition, Simon was the author of The Smokeless City, How to Abolish Slums, and The Rebuilding of Manchester, among other books, and therefore considered primarily responsible for Wythenshawe becoming one of Britain’s first smoke-controlled areas.1

  Despite these best laid plans, the vision for a garden city that would preserve local woods and ponds, include ample amenities, and allow for a number of “self-conscious” smaller communities of approximately 10,000 apiece, was hampered by fiscal and physical realities. The onset of the Depression, the interruption of World War II, and the rush to build substandard housing in the wake of that war, meant that by 1964 Wythenshawe’s population had already reached its goal of nearly 100,000, but that shops, cinemas, performance spaces, and the like languished desperately far behind. The local papers filled up with headlines about “vandalism,” and Mancunians who had never been there came to view Wythenshawe as a “rough, rundown huge council estate where the kids were savages,” according to one of its inhabitants who came of age in the 1970s. But when the Mahers were moved, alongside a number of other Mancunian families—Irish, English, Indian, and Caribbean among them—into the new Shady Lane estate, just off Altrincham Road, their elder boy, Johnny, took one look at his new surroundings and figured it for exactly what the garden-city planners had intended: utopia.

  Marr’s excitement was understandable. Shady Lane was a cul-de-sac, which allowed kids the freedom to play without constant traffic, and though the houses on the Mahers’ own terrace, Churchstoke Walk, lacked the space and comfort of the Morrissey family’s semidetached in Stretford, the mere existence of indoor toilets and phone lines seemed positively luxurious after Victorian Ardwick. The Mahers had arrived just as Wythenshawe was turning a corner; a long-overdue civic center (with sports facilities) and accompanying forum (with concert capabilities) had been opened in 1971; a new hospital arrived in 1973. Wythenshawe had its trouble spots, for sure, but the worst of them—Benchill, Woodhouse Park, and Peel Hall—were far off to the south and the east, over the new M56 motorway that extended from the city center out to Manchester Airport. The Mahers were in Baguley, on the northern periphery, bordering Sale and Altrincham, which had original 1930s-era council houses of considerable high quality. On the other side of Altrincham Road from Shady Lane stood Brookway High School, which took in most of the local non-Catholic residents, girls included, not only from Baguley but from the estates of Brooklands, Northern Moor, and Royal Oak, which were almost middle-class—or at the very least, what Johnny Marr would come to consider “bohemian.” Just off to the east of the school was Wythenshawe Park itself, its ancient hall of less interest to the local youths than its multiple football pitches, or the prospect of the fair that set up every Easter weekend, where Johnny and his sister, Claire, soon learned to spend every waking hour soaking up the music that blared from the speakers day and night.

  In Ardwick, by his own admission, Johnny had been “a very quiet, introspective little fella,” overwhelmed by the wild behavior of the young Irish immigrant community; at his primary school there, “everyone was very uptight and aggressive and I was very intimidated.” But on his first day at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Primary School, adjoined to the church of the same name, he recalled looking around and thinking, “Everyone’s really nice.” The kids didn’t have to wear uniforms, and Johnny could flaunt his fondness for high-street/football fashion, in the form of Oxford “bags” (baggy trousers), V-neck “star” jumpers, Budgie jackets (as worn by Adam Faith on the TV show of the same name), and black Brutus jeans. Wearing such clothes to primary school, said Johnny, “I became aware that I was considered almost exotic.” He found that people were interested in him, perhaps even impressed by him. “I saw at the age of eleven that I’d got out of an intimidating place and into this world, and a certain image was reflected back at me who I was, and it gave me confidence that I absolutely didn’t have.”

  It was, in short, precisely the opposite experience from that of Steven Morrissey in his new environment, and there remains the interesting hypothetical question of what would have become of Morrissey (and subsequently any band like the Smiths) had his own family followed the more common forced relocation path from Hulme and Moss Side into Wythenshawe. Some things, however, appeared consistent regardless of location. Though Johnny Marr passed his 11-plus, leaving Sacred Heart Primary in the early summer of 1975 (the same time Morrissey said good-bye to St. Mary’s Secondary), when he started the following school year at St. Augustine’s Grammar School, a Roman Catholic establishment three miles east along Altrincham Road toward Gatley, it proved a major disappointment. The headmaster at St. Augustine’s, Monsignor McGuiness, was an alcoholic, with the stink of gin noticeable on his breath; the teachers all wore mortar boards and gowns; uniforms were again compulsory, the striped school blazer making him a natural target of ridicule for the boys at Brookway High School; Latin was mandatory for the first two years; discipline was harsh, the strap used constantly by any number of openly vicious teachers; music was restricted to its Catholic associations of choirs and orchestras; and there was constant religious indoctrination, down to morning sermons on the saint of the day. It was, as a grammar school, still a better seat of learning than Stretford’s St. Mary’s, but the philosophy remained almost identical: drill the kids religiously in Catholicism and beat them fearlessly if they step out of line. (As at St. Mary’s, the beatings were not restricted to officially recorded punishment. One former pupil recalled a math teacher “meting out brutality which, I’m sure, would not have seemed out of place in a street brawl.”)

  Quickly frustrated by his school’s rigidity, Marr preferred spending his evenings not on homework but at West Wythenshawe Youth Club, located in the college of the same name. Here he could mingle not only with friends from St. Augustine’s, but with lads from Brookway—and lasses, too. The youth club was all-embracing, offering chess and other activities, roller-skating and rock-climbing excursions, and helping keep the kids further out of trouble with Wednesday-night discos, where the DJ played dance music a step beyond the chart-topping sounds of ABBA or Tina Charles, introducing Marr to the Fatback Band and Hamilton Bohannon, which would prove to be key influences on a boy who had otherwise followed his love of T. Rex onto a conventional path through prepubescent glitter: David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Sparks. Other, more physical, introductions were also made at “West Wythy”: through his fellow Ardwick emigrants Marc Johnson and Chris Milne, older boys who attended Brookway, Marr fell quickly under the spell of a group of lads from that school, scattered in the (comparatively) upscale estates on the north side of Altrincham Road. More than mere fellow music obsessives, most of them were accomplished guitar players too. The likes of Dave Clough, Robin Allman, Billy Duffy, and Barry Spencer would all, and to varying degrees, exert an enormous influence over Marr’s teenage years.

  Marr was by now no slouch on the guitar himself. The potential had always been there, fostered by the perpetual sound of music back in Ardwick, by his mother’s habit of leaving him not only alone in front of the radio as she went about her cleaning, but in front of the amplifiers at the guitar stores in central Manchester while doing her shopping. At a very young age, he’d been given a harmonica and had occasionally pitched in on drunken living-room jams with his extended family and neighbors. Over the course of multiple Christmases and birthdays, he had then asked for, and received, a steadily improving run of guitars, until “the one I took with me from Ardwick I was able to restring and get chords out of.” In his new bedroom on Churchstoke Walk, he had learned to play along to many of the hits of his childhood: specifically, with a classic such as “All the Young Dudes,” he would incorporate the melodies into the chord structures. At Sacred Heart, he had gained immediate kudos for this—“I think what I brought from Ardwick with me was my identity as a guitar player”—but now, at secondary school, at an impressionable age, and with glam receding from the charts, he fel
t the need to emulate the musical tastes of the older guitar players from Brookway.

  It wasn’t that easy. He couldn’t relate to Deep Purple “because it was so organ-based,” couldn’t identify with Led Zeppelin “because it was groove-based,” and couldn’t get down with Jimi Hendrix because “I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate it.” What he could relate to was the Rolling Stones. His mother had always been a fan—she used to sing “Get Off of My Cloud” at him when he got too pushy with her—and when Marr was sat down with a more extensive collection of the band’s 45s by local guitar player Dave Clough, it proved something of a revelation. This was partly about the music, the fact that more than a decade into their career, the Stones continued to turn out hit singles as diverse as “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” and “Fool to Cry.” But it was also about the style, especially that of Keith Richards, whom Marr thought “just seemed to be the coolest man on two feet.” For some, that coolness was manifested in the reputation Richards had for staying up days and nights on end and taking the kind of drugs that weren’t readily available in Wythenshawe. For Marr, it was about the way he played guitar—Keith could take the most simple riff and embellish it with inflections that made it distinctly, inimitably his own—and how he led the band without making a big statement about it. The general public might have thought that the Stones were run by their famous singer, Mick Jagger, but guitarists knew better; they saw Keith as what Marr called “the engine.”