Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  As for Prince Philip’s mailbox, which had been at the centre of the maelstrom, the contents amounted to little more than messages from Prestel users sending good wishes to Princess Diana on her birthday. Those were more innocent times.

  Music & Literature

  In an ideal world, musicians and (particularly) authors would be the most revered members of our society. Their output has shaped the culture we live in and given us countless hours of enjoyment, making life itself worth living. However, some of the most influential and best-loved works of music and literature might never have come into being had it not been for a serendipitous episode, while other little-known events have had repercussions far beyond their import at the time.

  A mender of kettles refuses to leave prison

  ‘Necessity,’ we’re told, ‘is the mother of invention.’ ‘Brevity,’ Shakespeare claimed, ‘is the soul of wit.’ If these thoughts were two wise monkeys, one might say that the third could be, ‘Adversity is the wellspring of creativeness.’

  In the case of a certain 17th-century pot-mender-turned-itinerant-preacher, the fact that he rather brought the adversity upon himself doesn’t seem to have in any way dimmed the fire of artistic expression. He was initially imprisoned for six months for preaching without a licence. However, it was only his repeated stubborn refusals to give his word that he would not continue preaching once he was free again that meant this relatively brief sentence eventually turned into a 12-year stretch.

  Had he not been subjected to this lengthy prison term the world would have been deprived of one of its most enduring works of literature. The book the recalcitrant preacher wrote in his cell has never been out of print since its publication over 300 years ago and has become the best-selling work of fiction ever written.

  If one had been at his mother’s bedside as she gave birth to little John Bunyan, it would have been difficult to imagine that much would come of the new life brought forth. The little mite was born into poverty in a Bedfordshire village called Elstow in 1628. His living conditions as a child were far from ideal: ‘My father’s house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,’ as he was later to recall. However, his mother had come from a family of marginally higher social standing than her husband’s, which probably explains how she somehow managed to send little John to school. If nothing else, this meant at least that her son learnt to read.

  The English Civil War (or the War of the Three Kingdoms, as historians prefer to call it nowadays, since it spread beyond England’s borders) broke out when Bunyan was a teenager, and at 16 he signed up for military service, spending the next three years in the army. Somewhat farcically, until relatively recently no one was at all sure whether he’d fought for the king or for Parliament. Bunyan himself didn’t see fit to record with which side he had fought, not even deigning to point it out in his autobiography. It wasn’t until some Civil War muster rolls were discovered at Newport Pagnell, where he was stationed, that it was determined that Bunyan had been a Roundhead, serving under the command of Sir Samuel Luke. Almost nothing is known about the actions Bunyan took part in, though he may have been involved in the siege of Leicester.

  Soon after leaving the army Bunyan married. We know next to nothing about his wife – not even her name – aside from the fact that she was as poverty-stricken as her husband, ‘not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both’ as Bunyan noted. However, she did own two books, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety. Bunyan the kettle-mender had, by this point, more or less forgotten how to read, so his wife had to rekindle his literacy skills using these two books. It was on account of them that he underwent a spiritual civil war of his own, doubting the Christian message but still ineluctably drawn to it. It was a struggle that went on for several years.

  It was when he came under the wing of the minister of a Puritan group in Bedford, one John Gifford, that Bunyan was at last drawn into the Church. He moved his family to Bedford from Elstow (which was only a mile away) and after a couple of years became a deacon at the church. He began preaching at nearby villages and towns, a course of action that would eventually be both his undoing and his making.

  Bunyan did not possess the requisite licence to preach. He was first charged in 1658 but the case doesn’t appear to have made it to court. Bunyan continued preaching and began writing pamphlets, initially attacking Quakers, whom he regarded as folk who did not take the Bible seriously enough. His last work before the storm really broke over him was the eye-catchingly titled A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul; by that poor and contemptible servant of Jesus Christ, John Bunyan.

  It was one of those tragic ‘Ah, if only they hadn’t done that’ events in British history that was to curtail Bunyan’s freedom. In 1660 the monarchy was restored. Despite assurances given by the perfidious Charles II prior to his coronation, laws aimed against members of non-conformist churches were re-enacted.

  It was unfortunate for Bunyan that the magistrates at the quarter sessions in Bedford were particularly zealous in cracking down on those who dared stray outside the Church of England. One of them, Sir Francis Wingate, heard that Bunyan was to undertake a preaching engagement near the village of Lower Samsall, and made haste to have him arrested. Bunyan got wind of this and could have fled, but reckoned that it was his moral duty to preach until he was stopped: an attitude that has afflicted many a preacher since.

  Wingate didn’t really have anything substantial with which to charge the preacher, but he sent him to Bedford Jail anyway in order to give himself time to dig up some dusty forgotten law he could use against him at the next quarter sessions. Sure enough, two months later, in January 1661, Bunyan was charged under the obscure Conventicle Act of 1593, which parliamentarians had forgotten to repeal. The pot-mender from Elstow was found guilty of ‘perniciously abstaining from coming to church to hear divine service, and for being a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom’.

  He was given a three-month sentence. However, there was a catch: if after that he did not agree to go back to church (by which was meant a Church of England church, of course) and stop preaching, he faced being exiled. If that occurred and he dared to come back into Britain, he would be hanged. Despite these rather draconian measures, when Bunyan’s three months were up he simply refused to give the undertakings his accusers sought. Rather than deporting him, they kept him in prison. And all the while Bunyan refused to stop preaching, he remained there. He believed it was the will of God that he should give sermons and so he told magistrates that he would rather stay in prison until moss grew on his eyelids than be free and not preach. Although he was actually let out for brief periods – to spend a night at home or, on one occasion, make a trip to London – his three-month sentence would end up lasting 12 years.

  The upside to this enforced hiatus in his life was that it allowed him to devote much more time to his writing. There is disagreement among historians as to whether his greatest work was penned at this time or during a later imprisonment that he suffered, but the available evidence favours this former period of incarceration. Indeed, some Bunyan scholars have posited that the final six years of this confinement were dedicated to the writing of the book – The Pilgrim’s Progress – that would make his name.

  Bunyan’s religious allegory follows the journey of a man named Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. On the way he passes through such places as the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, and the River of Death. Christian carries a great burden on his back (representing sin) and meets with a cavalcade of contrasting characters: Obstinate, Mr Worldly Wiseman, Goodwill, Hypocrisy, Faithful, Ignorance, Mr Ready-to-Halt, Mr Great-Heart and a host of others. As their names suggest, some are helpful to him while others are a distraction or a danger.

  The s
tory is also noteworthy for its inclusion of a giant called Pope who lives in a cave (with fellow giant Pagan) in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and is portrayed as a doddery old man ‘grinning at Pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails, because he cannot come at them’.

  The book was a huge hit from the moment of publication in 1678. By 1692 it had sold over 100,000 copies – a colossal number for the period. It was said that every English household had its Bible and its Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s allegory went on to become the second highest selling book in publishing history, surpassed only by the Bible. Its virulently anti-Papist message helped normalise ill-feeling towards Catholics in Britain, an attitude that saw its culmination in the Glorious Revolution, in which the Catholic James II was replaced by the Protestant William and Mary.

  The Pilgrim’s Progress also proved highly influential abroad: Christian missionaries sailing out from Britain carried copies of it with them to use as a simple evangelistic tool. It has now been translated into more than 200 languages.

  The book has left its mark in others ways, too – its influence can be seen very explicitly in many of the great works of English literature such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, among many others. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote an opera based on the story for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and several film directors have had a stab at recreating it on the big screen, with the first attempt reaching cinemas as early as 1912.

  Bunyan was released in 1672 – when all laws targeting nonconformists were suspended – only to be imprisoned again three years later when the political winds changed. On that occasion, though, he was only held for six months, probably in a one-cell jail on a bridge crossing the River Ouse. He spent his last years in relative prosperity, thanks largely to the sales of his bestselling book. He died in 1688, having caught a chill as he rode from Reading to London where he planned to act as peacemaker between a father and son.

  If there is any doubt as to the influence over his writing of Bunyan’s prison experience, one need only look to his sequel to The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he wrote while free. It was called The Life and Death of Mr Badman, and flopped horribly.

  Two Liverpool teenagers are introduced after a church fête

  It’s not an overly bold statement to claim that some first encounters between Britons have been of rather more significance than others. There was the meeting in Manchester’s Midland Hotel in May 1904 of Charles Rolls and Frederick Royce. Dr Samuel Johnson marched into 6 Russell Street, Covent Garden to find one James Boswell within, apparently sipping a cup of tea. Henry Morton Stanley’s encounter with Dr Livingstone even fashioned its own catchphrase. However, there can have been few meetings that have had such an impact on modern British culture than that which occurred on Saturday 6 July 1957.

  The historic event happened in Woolton, a middle-class suburb of Liverpool. John Lennon’s band, The Quarrymen – or ‘The Quarry Men Skiffle Group’ as the posters for the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fête dubbed them – were performing three times that day. First they played in the procession that opened the fête, although ‘played’ may be something of an exaggeration in this case. The lorry on the back of which they were standing was being driven very slowly through the streets of Woolton behind the float of the Rose Queen and her attendants, but the band members still found it difficult to keep from falling over, while at the same time doing something meaningful with their instruments.

  John’s half-sister Julia Baird, in her book Imagine This, remembers running alongside the lorry with her younger sister trying to make their big brother laugh. ‘John gave up battling with balance,’ she recalls, ‘and sat with his legs hanging over the edge, playing his guitar and singing.’

  The Quarrymen were awarded bottom billing on the poster for the fête, beneath such enticements as the Liverpool Police Dogs Display, Fancy Dress Parade, Sideshows, Refreshments, and the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. The entrance fee to this extravaganza was a modest 6d for adults and 3d for children. Undaunted by the apparent slight, the Quarrymen gave their second performance of the day, on a stage in a field by St Peter’s, the parish church where John had once been a choir boy.

  The line-up that day was John on vocals and guitar, Eric Griffiths on guitar, Rod Davis on banjo, with a rhythm section of Len Garry on tea-chest bass, Pete Shotton on washboard, and Colin Hanton on drums. In an interview with Record Collector, Paul McCartney recalls ‘coming into the fête and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little tannoy system. It was John and the band. I remember I was amazed and thought, “Oh great,” because I was obviously into the music.’

  It’s often cited that the two met at the fête. However, to be strictly accurate, although Paul heard John perform there, he was only introduced to him later, as the band was setting up for a gig across the road at the church hall. The Quarrymen (billed last again on the poster, of course) were to share duties with the George Edwards’ Band at the Grand Dance that was scheduled to take place at 8P.M., after the garden fête – admission two shillings.

  The unsung hero who brought John and Paul together was Ivan Vaughan. He knew both boys because he occasionally played the tea-chest bass with John’s band and was in the same class at the Liverpool Institute as Paul. The two boys’ interest in rock ’n’ roll and their obvious talent at performing it was Vaughan’s reason for making the introduction, though in another sense it was not a meeting of equals: Lennon would be 17 in October while Paul had only just turned 15.

  The two talked a little – John may or may not have had a beer or two (Paul recalled smelling something beery on his breath) – before Paul famously showed John how to tune his guitar conventionally. Up until that time Lennon had been using a banjo tuning, in G (his banjo-playing mother Julia had taught him how to play guitar and had only ever shown him the banjo tuning). Paul had heard John play and sing earlier in the day but of course John had not heard what Paul could do. Cue an impromptu performance by the 15-year-old of a Little Richard medley, Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’. Swapping the guitar for a handy piano that was lurking backstage, he also gave John his version of Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.

  The Quarrymen performed their third gig of the day at the Grand Dance and the story goes that afterwards the band went to the pub, with McCartney and Vaughan in tow, though Quarrymen Len Garry and Pete Shotton have since claimed that that never happened (and, for that matter, that John had not been drinking earlier either). We do know what Paul and John were wearing when they met, though. Paul was rather dapper in a pair of black drainpipes and a white jacket with silvery streaks on it. Black-and-white photographs taken of the Quarrymen that day show John in an open-necked checked shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and dark trousers.

  Lennon was impressed by McCartney’s singing and musicianship but he agonised over whether he should invite him to join the Quarrymen, fearing that Paul, despite his comparative youth, might prove a rival to his leadership of the band. After talking it over with washboard-player Pete Shotton, it was agreed to ask Paul to come on board. A fortnight or so later Pete bumped into Paul in Woolton and formally invited him to become a Quarryman. Paul recognised that John was talented but was somewhat less in awe of the other members of the band, so took his time deliberating before saying yes. Lennon and McCartney were in partnership. Paul’s friend George Harrison joined the band the following year. In 1960, after several line-up and name changes (‘Los Paranoias’ perhaps being the best, with ‘Japage 3’ a low point), they became The Beatles. Ringo Starr joined two years later.

  The effect that The Beatles had on music and culture in the 1960s was immense, not just in Britain but around the world. Although they split up somewhat acrimoniously in 1970, their output has remained incredibly popular, resulting in album sales of well over
two billion. Their sound and style of songwriting has influenced musicians from Elton John to Florence and the Machine.

  The band was such a force of nature that it seems highly unlikely that either Lennon or McCartney would have had as much of an influence as individual musicians had they never met. Post-Beatles, McCartney has produced some material that is more than passable, such as the Band on the Run album he made with Wings, and the occasional decent single. However, he has also seen fit to inflict on the world ‘The Frog Chorus’ and the interminable festive-season dirge ‘Wonderful Christmastime’. Likewise, although there are plenty of fans of the solo work John produced before his life was tragically cut short in 1980, only a few tracks can make a serious claim to comparison with the best of The Beatles’ canon.

  Yoko Ono attempted to put her finger on the collaboration when commenting on an interview that she and John had given to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 1970:

  Paul possessed elements that John would have wanted to have as well. In other words, Paul was extremely charming to the world and, because of his diplomacy and charm I think that the band flourished in a way. Whereas John’s rôle was to really bring that spiritually nourishing energy to the band, and that really helped the band to survive and to expand and to be successful… They were complementing each other.

  There would not be another meeting that had an impact on British pop music that was in any way comparable for another 25 years, when an 18-year-old Johnny Marr turned up on the doorstep of Mrs Morrissey to see if her son was in.