The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  In Casino Royale, Bond ends up I recall being tied to a wicker chair and having his testicles thrashed by a surly Eastern European man. Ordsall has a reputation for being a little rough but at no point did this seem likely on my visit to the bingo. In fact, the people at the Gala Bingo hall were supremely helpful, sensing I think that I didn’t go to bingo every night. Actually, I’d never been before, unless watching my mum slide the little plastic shutters across on the ones at the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool counts. I had somewhat naively expected to hand over a small amount of cash and then go in and play bingo. I had forgotten of course that nothing is like this in the modern world. The modern world requires passwords, registration, mothers’ maiden names and first pets, the writing down of reference numbers, the skilful copying down of weirdly drawn numbers that look like you’re having an LSD trip, and nonsensical words in little boxes. Not even the Ordsall Gala Bingo, a bastion you would think of the Old Britain of postal orders and Chestnut Mild and whooping cough, not even they are immune to this. Eventually, after a rigmarole that would seem involved for gaining security clearance for the Pentagon, I am given a blue plastic wallet with my Gala Bingo card inside it. But it’s not over yet. Now I have to choose which of the many playing options I want.

  ‘Would you like the Salford Special?’ asks a kindly lady behind a counter. Having no idea what this might entail and more than a little nervous, I plead to be given the simplest option possible. ‘Ah, OK love,’ she smiles sympathetically. She reaches beneath the counter where I assume she keeps the books of tickets, before handing me an electronic tablet. I gaze at it mutely for a moment, rather like the chimps looked at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and then go inside the hall.

  Eric Morley, the oleaginous fellow familiar to my generation from his appearance at the end of every Miss World contest, once claimed to have invented bingo. He’s a fibber, though his outfit Mecca did make it a mass commercial venture after the Gaming Act of 1960 which extended the legality of wagers and gambling for money beyond the confines of the race track. But evidence of something like a set of ancient bingo balls was unearthed in Mexico in the 1830s, and bingo’s recorded history dates back to 1530 to an Italian lottery called Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia. Lotto is still bingo’s fancy name and what they probably call it at the Palace. In Britain, bingo-like lotteries were held from the time of Queen Anne onwards, usually as a means of raising revenue for foreign wars. Appropriately, bingo has always been popular with the British military. The Germans played a version of the game in the 1800s, but, with characteristic flippancy and sense of fun, they used it primarily as a maths aid. It was the Americans who gave us the modern version, originally played at travelling fairs and called beano.

  Bingo became a craze in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Newspaper headlines of the early 1960s suggest there was even a mild moral panic about it. The Times fretted over ‘Bingo’s hold on womenfolk’ while the Daily Mirror told of ‘Woman’s Bingo Bonanza’ and how ‘Wife’s bingo led to divorce’. During the sixties, bingo or lotto or housey-housey was regularly played by hundreds of thousands of people, a far cry from this large and largely deserted hall on a weeknight in Salford.

  Times are tough in the bingo industry, and the decline has been sharp. Bingo peaked later than you’d think, in 2003 when it made £122 million, but it’s been downhill ever since. In the last decade, the number of clubs has dropped from 600 to fewer than 400. (Think, where’s your local bingo hall?) There have been 6,500 jobs lost in the past decade. Visits are down from 80 million in 2005 to 43 million today. The 2007 smoking ban and the advent of online gambling have made a night at the bingo a less attractive option than it was back in the day when my grandma and aunties would go at least a couple of times a week.

  But it is trying to fight back. In 2014, the chancellor George Osborne halved the taxes on bingo taking a swipe at Labour as he did. (‘Labour decimated the bingo industry,’ he said, possibly fighting back tears.) Brian Binley, Conservative MP for Northampton South and chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Bingo has said: ‘Of all forms of gambling, bingo is the most socially welcomed … I say that because I go once a year to my own local bingo centre and I see many people, many of them elderly, who find comfort and friendship – a hot meal at a low price in a warm and happy environment. And if that isn’t social services, I don’t know what is.’ Stirring words, though my immediate reaction was, ‘There’s an all party parliamentary bingo group?’

  To be brutally honest, the ambience here tonight is more last chance saloon than drop-in centre, though in mitigation it is the hottest night of the year and every beer garden in Lancashire will be full. There are a few people in though, dotted at tables across the cavernous hall. The staff are lovely, ushering me to my table and talking me through my iPad thing with the same patience and pain as you would perhaps show a bushman of the Serengeti how to use a washing machine. A pitcher of lager is six quid and several tables are adorned with one, as well as the books and dabber pens that the hardcore players use.

  On each table, there’s another bit of kit, a kind of plastic kids’ toy involving numbers and sliding panels that turns out to be used for the first couple of games, a kind of warm-up. Except that even this entry level loosener leaves me gawping and flipping the little windows randomly while a neutral almost robotic voice, apparently on tape, intones, ‘Gold 43, Blue 5, White 17, White 39.’ The effect is disorientating and stressful, like listening to those number station espionage broadcasts that used to come out of East Germany through a blizzard of shortwave static. On an adjoining table, a man with an enormous neck goitre chuckles dementedly as his fingers fly, all blurs and lines like one of those Futurist paintings that are meant to convey speed.

  Eventually, it’s over. Damp and wrung out, I drain half of my pitcher in one go and slump. Within seconds, Gavin, the personable and flamboyantly camp general manager leaps to his feet and takes the stage.

  ‘Evening everyone!! What a lovely day it’s been and it’s going to get even better because …’ – what fresh hell is this I think – ‘… now it’s time for the Diamond Deal!’ There’s a peal of thunder and a sudden explosion of that insanely, nightmarishly cheery music you get on afternoon game shows, a kind of ersatz Vegas mania that trembles on the verge of a nervous breakdown. This is probably ‘an innovation’. Bingo is keen on innovation. You use tablets that mean you don’t even have to mark your own card. You can have your hen party here. You can enjoy a ‘multi-zone gaming experience’.

  But beneath all this is the game itself, largely unchanged this half millennia and strangely restful. In fact a realisation begins to dawn on me. Underneath the cheesy glamour and the razzmatazz of the prizes, the appeal of bingo may be that it’s actually quite restful. The steady rhythmic intonation of the numbers has the same soothing regularity as the shipping forecast. The numbers and repetition have the same contemplative calm as the music of Philip Glass or Morton Feldman. Next to me, someone is reading a book while playing. The gameplay itself is thoughtful and unhurried. It’s a bit like playing collective sudoku.

  The bingo caller is nothing like the manic and tortured titular character of The Fall’s ‘Bingo Master’s Break Out’. He is actually rather suave, in a daytime TV show host way. He is well spoken, in that strange, over-modulated melisma that some people have – Richard Hammond, Paul McKenna or those Sky Sports presenters with unplaceable accents. But the real disappointment is that the traditional lingo has gone. There’s no fat ladies or little ducks, no Kelly’s eye or clickety-click. There’s a bit of desultory whistling from the players for ‘legs eleven’ but that’s it. Maybe it was only ever there to buy time so that people could cross off the numbers with unwieldy, massive pens. In the age of the tablet, there’s no need for it all, and a little gaiety has gone out of the world.

  It’s still baffling, though. Various games with various odd names come and go. Every now and again, the suave voice will say, ‘The top left square is now free,’ and
all the people who know what they’re doing – which is largely everyone except me – busies themselves with their tablets and dabbers. I just sit and randomly mark things off. The lady who’s selling the pitchers of lager takes pity at one point and comes over and gives me a sort of tutorial. But I’m still floundering. It doesn’t help that my tablet keeps randomly flashing up adverts for Mini Cheddars.

  The next game is another weird perplexing variant on the simple, honest bingo I learned at my mother’s knee. It probably had a name like the ‘Super Electric Topaz Flyer’ but I don’t seem to have written it down. Gavin bounds back onto the stage to explain, ‘Now for this next game, a full house in less than 50 numbers wins a hundred pounds …’ There’s some faint ‘ooh-ing’ at this, some of it from me, ‘… and if you do it in less than 40, it’s £20,000.’

  BLOODY HELL! I nearly drop my iPad. TWENTY THOUSAND QUID? No one else seems bothered. They clearly know how rare this eventuality is. A screen behind Gavin’s coiffured head tells us that 211 people are playing this game. We play for a few minutes and then comes the news that someone in a Gala Bingo in Chorley has won. I’m surprised we didn’t hear them shout from here.

  It was still light when I left and strolled along the Manchester Ship Canal in the last of the throbbing summer heat. Though it was no fault of anyone at Gala Bingo, I don’t think I’ll be back. Unlike the bowls or the dogs or the horses, there was no drama or spectacle to distract you from the fact that this was simply about trying to win money. It felt grim and mercantile and more than a little melancholy. But I guess it would have been different if I’d won the 20 grand. In that case, I’d be using my nice new Gala Bingo member’s card a great deal. As it is, I put it in my wallet behind my library cards and set my mind on higher things.

  CHAPTER 4

  GETTING A BIT OF CULTURE

  To Hull and Berwick with Larkin and Lowry, and getting arty in Wakefield with Hitler

  Anyone who writes about the north, its people and their culture, will find a small but imposing cluster of giants standing at their shoulders, company that is both inspiring and daunting. Priestley, Orwell, Alan Bennett and, first among equals some would say, Richard Hoggart. In 1957, Hoggart wrote a book called The Uses of Literacy which was the first serious study of working-class cultural life and the mass media’s effect on it. Whole university departments were built upon it, and the entire discipline of cultural studies. Its influence has been profound, sometimes in the quirkiest ways. Persuaded by lawyers not to use the real titles of pulp crime novels in the book for fear of libel, Hoggart invented some he thought were typical, like the brilliant Death Cab for Cutie. A decade later, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band took that name for a song, and several decades after that, a dour American indie rock band named themselves after it.

  I love The Uses of Literacy for many, sound reasons, not least for the fact that, while it is rooted in Northern working-class life, it neither sentimentalises nor sneers at it. It is generally and penetratingly on the money, as you’d expect from a man of Hoggart’s intellect and sensitivity who grew up on the terraced streets of Hunslet. He reserved some of his sternest words of rebuke for those metropolitan critics and newspapermen who claimed to speak for the working classes, particularly those who used a supposed identification with ‘common folk’ as an excuse for philistinism and crassness, for an attack on:

  … the debased world of Bohemia. Modern art will only be mentioned if someone has given an excuse for trouncing the odd. The Arts Council is a ‘fiddle’ by a lot of ‘sissies’ who despise the pursuits of the plain Englishman; and the BBC is little better. Any University Extension lecturer is a stodgy ‘do-gooder’ and his students spotty and thin-blooded …

  Hence the aggressive ‘plain man’, the embattled lowbrow tone of many columnists and leader writers.

  Hoggart wrote that in 1957 but that same tone of belligerently bullying ‘common sense’ is still heard from the Clarksons and Kelvin Mackenzies of this world.

  In fact, as Hoggart pointed out ‘“Highbrow-hating” … is not strong among working-class people’. The opposite may well be true. Though it might not seem like it if you watch the nastier end of daytime TV, working-class people have always been voracious in their appetite for high culture as well as low. ‘Improving oneself’ smacks of Hyacinth Bucket and crocheted toilet-roll covers. But self-improvement in a different sense has always been the goal of ‘ordinary’ people. Not just in the sense of acquiring a bigger house or flashier car, but in getting an education and by seeking out the best in art, music, literature and culture generally.

  If you do a cursory trawl for ‘improving oneself’, through magazines, books or the web these days, you will by and large unearth fad diets of varying weirdness and clickbait lists of self-help mumbo jumbo. It was not ever thus. Self-improvement in the Victorian era was a matter of moral and intellectual growth, and was often handed down from on high to working people.

  One winter evening I wandered Manchester following a walk you can find in a leaflet put out by the Royal Geographical Society called ‘Slums, squalor and salvation; Discover how religious organisations helped the poor in Victorian Manchester’. In 2015, it is deeply unfashionable among the chatterati to give religion and religious people (or at least Christians) an even break. The dominant tenor of our age is ‘scepticism’, brandished as a torch of honour by ‘satirical’ comedians and the like, normally in the thrall of the self-aggrandising Richard Dawkins. I am a confirmed agnostic. I find fundamentalists of all kinds, atheist or apostle, boring and small-minded. If Einstein wasn’t sure whether there was a God or not (and he wasn’t), I’m pretty sure it’s an issue that’s too large and complex for someone who wisecracks on panel shows.

  But more to the point, the new breed of high volume atheist get on my nerves because they’re not much use to anyone. It is a very teenage kind of stance; self-regarding and full of haughty opinion but feeble. The humour website The Onion made this point beautifully with a spoof article entitled ‘Local Church Full Of Brainwashed Idiots Feeds Town’s Poor Every Week’ and containing lines like ‘As of press time, the brainless, unthinking lemmings had donated winter clothing they no longer wore to several needy families and still hadn’t opened their eyes to reality.’

  I thought about this as I followed the walk from Victoria Station down to the Charter Street Ragged School and Working Girls Home. It’s a fine Victorian building built by those well-meaning lemmings back in the day as ‘a place of meeting by any temperance society or societies and for any other purpose or purposes of a religious, moral, scientific, literary or educational nature.’ From the moral high ground of our self-assured time, it’s easy to mock such efforts as paternalistic or patronising. The benefactors of the day though were in no mood for moral relativism. They didn’t worry about not respecting the ‘distinctive culture’ of the girls. They just thought they should be fed, protected and educated.

  The Methodist Men’s Hostel on Hood Street didn’t let its residents go out in the evening. They provided pastimes for the men instead. Intolerably prescriptive by our delicate standards, perhaps, but it was meant well and much appreciated. The walk ends at the Methodist Hall on Oldham Street, in the heart of that hipster enclave, Manchester’s Northern Quarter. A century-and-a-half ago, it was built thanks to fundraising by suburban Wesleyans and depended for its day-to-day running on the efforts of 2,000 volunteers. Inside there was a large main hall for worship and entertainment and the alcohol-free Saturday night concert provided popular family entertainment intended to compete with the local music halls and pubs. The basement café, offering cheap sustenance to the poor, is still there. As I walk past in a murky winter drizzle, two young lads are emerging after their meal, both with the cheap leisurewear and pimply pallor of the gluehead or junkie. They shake hands with a smartly dressed young African man of about their age who sends them on their way with a smile; brainwashed idiot that he is of course.

  God helps those who help themselves, though, and the gr
owing industrial working class of the Victorian era was also busy improving its own lot without charity, however well meant. Alongside the bastion of the Methodist Hall in the towns of northern England and Wales was the miners’ institute or ’Stute, as it was often known. Miners would contribute a percentage of their wage towards their building and upkeep, places of education and relaxation with a library, reading and meeting rooms, a bar and a billiard table, so that all manner of healthy appetites could be provided for. Nye Bevan said that his intellectual development was all down to time spent among the volumes of the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute. The night I watched the Manic Street Preachers play a homecoming show in their hometown miners’ institute in Blackwood near Cardiff was an unforgettable occasion, full of pride and passion and community and other such outdated notions.

  As a concept, the miners’ or mechanics’ institute was never entirely disinterested and airy in motive. They were also there to fill the gaps in technical and science education needed by the modern skilled workforce. Those gaps were often substantial. Until 1870, there was no legal compulsion to send children to school, and even the most basic of those schools charged fees (‘school pence’) which meant that most working-class kids got a sketchy education at best, further constrained by the need to go to work as soon as possible to earn a wage. Well-meant and undeniably a force for good as they were, mechanics’ institutes were normally managed and run by churchmen, landowners or local middle-class entrepreneurs, who made no secret of what they were there for.