by Paul Morley
Praise for The North:
‘Impressive . . . Packed with raw emotions and ambivalent passions . . . Morley writes with care and precision, though, and his rhythm is such that his book is a lively, breezy read’ Sunday Times
‘Morley’s writing skipped and span, whirled out from specifics to ghosts, those hard-to-capture feelings around the north . . . The ideas are insightful and the execution inspired’ Miranda Sawyer, Observer
‘He soars above the landscape with daring and verve and ambition and brings it to life with his usual heady and mesmerising prose gymnastics . . . It is rich and dense, and its sprawling nature encourages one to luxuriate, exploring it at your leisure and finding the odd tracks that link say, Ken Dodd to LS Lowry . . . This is a book to lose oneself in, as long as you’re not too worried about where you emerge or when you might get there’ New Statesman
‘This great, whirling, baggy compendium of a book is a travelogue, a geographical study, a potted history and a rich encyclopedia . . . The North is both a star turn and a labour of love. Its weight meant I could barely pick it up; but once lifted, I could hardly put it down.****’ Daily Telegraph
‘Varied and illuminating . . . A wildly multi-stylistic book that sets memoir alongside socio-geographical history alongside postmodern pranksterism . . . This long and winding road leaves you much more inspired than tired. The closing valedictory sections are memorably poetic.****’ Mojo
‘There’s a certain bravery in calling a book The North (And Almost Everything In It). But then Paul Morley has never been afraid to stick his neck out . . . Everything from the Romans to Bernard Manning, Jodrell Bank to Julie Goodyear is covered in an engrossing read’ Yorkshire Post
‘I love the little asides; they are more than digressions or tributaries to the abandoned slip road in the sky just off the Mancunian Way. The North is a major achievement that has kept Morley at the coal-face of the keyboard for so many years. But it’s been time well-spent: the result is as bold, broad and sweeping as the north itself, and just as quirky and contradictory.*****’ Mail on Sunday
‘Morley’s account of the ways in which he’s defined by his Manchester roots is both a confessional memoir and a cultural history covering everything from music to poetry to the Blackpool Tower’ GQ
‘Fascinating . . . This affectionate tribute is more a nostalgic bow to a largely lost working class community than an objective account of a region, but is no less endearing for that’ Independent on Sunday
‘A loving portrait of England’s other half’ London Review of Books
‘There is an enjoyably subtle mordancy about much of the book’ Financial Times
‘Rambling and vast compendium’ The Times
‘A great baggy monster of a love letter to its author’s provincial origins’ Terry Eagleton, Guardian
‘Essentially a treasure trove almanac wedded to a wistful coming-of-age memoir. Some passages soar’ Metro
‘A typically sprawling, deliberately disjointed book – part memoir, part history’ Guardian
‘A fascinating exploration of northern-ness’ Grazia
‘With this mournful, gentle memoir of his childhood and family . . . Morley, only half-Northern himself, does his adopted region proud’ Lady
‘This is endless fun for fact fans and it’s hard for any Northerner not to feel stirred by Morley’s pride in the area’ Yorkshire Post
‘An idiosyncratic rumination on what it means to be northern . . . It’s bound to deposit a certain amount of iron in the soul’ David Hepworth, Guardian
To Elizabeth
And the Morleys
And the Youngs
And the Hydes of Hyde
Contents
Part One: ‘A something in the air’
Part Two: Through no fault of my own
Part Three: 13 June 1963
Part Four: Making it all happen
Part Five: The five colours
Part Six: A leap forward through the past
Part Seven: The rest of the world rubbing off
Part Eight: For all the boys of Stockport
Part Nine: A special world apart
Part Ten: There must be change
Acknowledgements
Permissions Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Part One
‘A something in the air’
In the middle of these cogitations, apprehensions and reflections, it came into my thought one day that all this might be a chimera of my own, and that this foot might be a print of my own foot.
Robinson Crusoe in the novel of the same name by Daniel Defoe, 1719
1
This is the first step, the first brick, the first drop of rain. There is the mountain to climb, the breathtaking viaduct to cross, the enterprise to explain. Look at the vast nineteenth-century mill, still standing, scrubbed nude, exposed to a time and economy it wasn’t built for, free of smoke and noise and cloggy clattering gothic commotion, remade, remaindered, dolled up as a museum, a titanic souvenir, a loft dwelling, its soul long gone. It stands a few postered knocked-about miles from the shiny money-mad modern mall, which never really had a soul, and there is much to marvel at in how one structure led to the other.
Here is the north, up here, where all things start – stories, fights and journeys, crimes, games, plans and ventures, proposals and accidents, public lives and private schemes, mysteries, changes of heart and false starts, rivers and obsessions, apologies and murders, words and spells – the north, at the top of the page, black marks on a white void, distant and remote, not quite sure what will happen next.
Here is the north, this is where it lies, where it belongs, full of itself, high up above everything else, surrounded by everything that isn’t the north – which is off the page, somewhere else. This is the story of how I found the north, as a young boy, born in 1957 – the same year that L. S. Lowry painted Man Lying On a Wall, that the riotous comedian Frank Randle died, that the 250-foot radio telescope was finished at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, that Richard Hoggart’s The Use of Literacy was published, that Harold Pinter mentioned an Eccles cake in The Dumb Waiter, that Lennon met McCartney, one hundred years after Prince Albert disembarked at Cheadle Hulme station and travelled via Stockport Road (now Albert Road) to Cheadle and Abney Hall to visit the Great Exhibition in Manchester. And then, as a man, over forty years later, remembering when I was a young boy who spent a lot of time walking around, from one centre of attention to another, because the streets were irresistible. This is where I find what I am looking for: the north, and where it begins.
This is the next step, and the rain starts to fall like it means it.
2
1976
A jumped-up seventeen-year-old pop music fan writes a letter to the New Musical Express in June, 1976:
I pen this epistle after witnessing the infamous Sex Pistols in concert at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. The bumptious Pistols in jumble sale attire had those few that attended dancing in the aisles despite their discordant music and barely audible lyrics. The Pistols boast having no inspiration from the New York/Manhattan rock scene, yet their set includes ‘I’m Not Your Stepping Stone’, a number believed to be done almost to perfection by the Heartbreakers on any sleazy New York night, and the Pistols’ vocalist/exhibitionist Johnny Rotten’s attitude and self-asserted ‘love us or leave us’ approach can be compared to both Iggy Pop and David Johansen in their heyday. The Sex Pistols are very New York and it’s nice to see that the British have produced a band capable of producing atmosphere created by the New York Dolls and their many imitators, even though it may be too late. I’d love to see the Pistols make it. Maybe they will be able to afford some clothes which don’t look as though they’
ve been slept in.
Steven Morrissey, Kings Road, Stretford.
One day Morrissey, as he becomes known, will say in an interview, ‘You’re southern – you wouldn’t understand. When you’re northern, you’re northern for ever, and you’re instilled with a certain feel for life that you can’t get rid of. You just can’t.’ And he will write a song called ‘Cemetery Gates’ about meeting the artist Linder Sterling in 1976:
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
all those people all those lives
where are they now?
with the loves and hates
and passions just like mine
L. S. Lowry died of pneumonia and a stroke on 23 February 1976, aged eighty-eight, at Woods Hospital, Glossop. The vast majority of Lowry’s paintings share themes relating to scenes in the industrial north of England. Almost always outdoors, they often feature a backdrop of chimneys and dark rectangular buildings with some sort of event or incident going on in the foreground. Lowry used only five basic paints, mixing these together to form other colours as necessary. ‘When I was young I did not see the beauty of the Manchester streets. I used to go into the country painting landscapes and the like. Then one day I saw it . . . suddenly I saw the beauty of the streets and the crowds.’
Eight years before he died, the Crane Kalman Gallery, which championed Lowry from the late 1940s until his death in 1976, mounted an exhibition called the Loneliness of L. S. Lowry, with the idea of countering the stereotypes that had become attached to him through being known almost exclusively for his smoky, simplified, romantic northern factory views, around which pipe-cleaner people scurried like worker ants. The intention was to promote Lowry as the most distinctive and comprehensive artist recording pre- and post-Second World War northern industrial towns. The effort was not entirely successful, and the myths have lingered around Lowry – that he was a naive eccentric, a talented but limited weekend painter of tea-towel art.
3
The north of England, with England being north-west of Europe, and Europe being in the northern hemisphere, and north being a word that says so much and leaves plenty to the imagination. A certain territory, this English north, this island of islands, coldly exotic, mysteriously ordinary, this gathering of fields and brick, trees and chimneys, lakes and clouds, mud and memory, boundaries and boroughs, washing lines and shop signs, lies and byways, rust and revolution, stadiums and stones, kids and schools, puddles and puddings, public houses and corner shops, pets and churches, men and women – with their ways, which are something else altogether, surrounded on two sides by land, on two by sea, existing below Scotland, which is another north altogether, and above the rest of England, above where the south has become the amorphous midlands, which itself, in fits and starts, over rivers, in buildings, in the mind, across fences, becomes the north. This north geographically, bluntly speaking, is where England itself is at its narrowest, at times a mere tens of miles across, the shortest distance between sea and churning sea, between the sea that there is between England and Ireland, which meets up with the northern Atlantic Ocean, which meets up with the rest of the world, and the sea there is between England and Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Germany, between England and a vast east, which eventually turns back on itself and ends where it starts.
All that it once was leading to all that it now is, representing everyone that ever lived there, everyone that now does, and everything that ever happened, accidentally, deliberately, gradually, suddenly, historically, geographically, politically, tragically, comically, to produce this north, which is still on the way to becoming the north, as if the final decision about what the north is, this English north, will not be taken until a few thousand years of preparation has been resolved, which may yet take a few thousand more years. The north is what it now is after a few grinding, transformative centuries that were a mix of excitement, decline, patience, persistence, pain, pleasure, acceptance, defiance, invention, obedience, nothing much, an awful lot, a mix of those that came from elsewhere, invading or visiting, passing through or sticking around, those that were born there and left, and those that stayed rooted to the spot.
No other north but this north, inside and outside England, which consists of this fluid, static piece of land, this tangle of internal borders, these lengths of coast, this number of hills, this collection of voices, these boundless acres of heath and forest, this cluttered, stratified arrangement of cities, towns and villages, with names that are definitely, irrefutably northern, this list of events, records and discoveries, this collection of minds, attitudes and certainties, this change in circumstances, this passing-on of attitude and atmosphere, this sharing of a place and of places next door to each other across time, these multiple ghost images. A north however built up, closed in and fiercely urban, however paved and derelict, smoked and stained, charged and noisy, always close to sea, river, meadow, dale, scrub, cliff or moorland, to more natural noise, and lavish, ageless calm. A north packed with intrepid people handing on the north, as they see it, all that history, and nature, and difference. A north, all on its own.
4
1976
On 16 March 1976 Harold Wilson announced his sudden resignation as prime minister and his intention to retire from politics altogether. Although he claimed at the time he had always intended to retire at sixty, it may well be that he was aware of the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
1974
Oldham has lost much of its industrial prowess and former civic glory. During the 1960s and 70s it was pitilessly redeveloped and lost not only much poor-quality housing, but many good, substantial, public and commercial buildings. The final indignity might have come in 1974, when there was a proposal to give the newly created metropolitan borough a different name. Newham, Milltown or even New Oldham were suggested. The idea was rejected.
1973
Last of the Summer Wine, an amiable sitcom featuring an eccentric trio of rural west Yorkshire pensioners at home, or not, airs for the first time on BBC 1 as a pilot entitled Of Funerals and Fish in a Comedy Playhouse series of one-off comedies. Based on a slightly darker novel by Roy Clarke, it was set in the eternally pretty surroundings of a small isolated market town to the north of the Peak District, a few miles south of Huddersfield. Clarke wasn’t sure about making it into a series until he decided to write about the elderly characters as though they were small children. It would eventually become the world’s longest-running situation comedy. Peter Sallis, an actor born in Middlesex, faked a Yorkshire accent for his character which was so convincing that Preston-born Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, when calling him to ask him to voice Wallace, refused to believe that Sallis’s natural accent was his own.
5
Where does the north begin? This is often the first question asked when the idea of the north of England comes up – as the subject of a book, as the place you come from, or visit, or move to, or live in. The north, a definite territory, a certain reality, an assorted spread of times and spaces pulled together, charged with feeling, a famous base for outsiders and strivers, beggars and visionaries, zealots and loafers, jokers and poets, somewhere solid, authentic, which you can think about, and feel you understand. The north begins over the border where one thing, specified by a collection of statistics, truisms, anecdotes, landmarks, accents, addictions, events, buildings, beliefs, occupations, boasts, gates, resolutions, timetables and signposts, becomes another thing.
The north begins over half a million years ago. Some enterprising explorers were there in 500,000 BC: a large Lower Palaeolithic stone axe was found in Knutsford, Cheshire, a rare find in northern England as the area has been covered with ice several times and the mountains and hills profoundly eroded. This book of the north can begin with this crude, magnificent roughly chipped axe, found in a place that first appeared in the 1086 Domesday Book as Knut’s Ford, nothing to do with King Canute no matter how much romantics would like it to be. This axe will be used to clear the path ahead, cle
ar the way through the north, from the beginning of time to the end of this book.
The north begins 18,000 years ago, when much of Britain was covered in a thick blanket of snow and ice and the north-east of England, as we know it now, was an uninhabitable freezing wasteland. The north begins with the ice nonchalantly sculpting the geological mass of what is now known as the Lake District into the distinctive, imposing mountains and valleys that we take for granted and/or marvel at today. It begins in this nowhere, this not yet somewhere, rocky cold land stark under dismal moiling skies, this desolate zone that would surely never become anything or be occupied by such pushy, determined life and language. How did that implacably frozen void heat up so much that eventually it would contain all that wild, nutty, self-reliant human character and variety? Is it the result of centuries of endeavour based on an ancient tenacious need to escape the cold, to outwit the circumstances, to find a home, but without moving away, because where else would you go, and how would you get there? How could you be sure that there was anything else to find? Where you found yourself was all there was, and you stayed, despite it all.
The north begins about 10,000 bc, as the Ice Age was finally coming to an end. The islands of Britain appeared slowly from under the receding ice, mysterious landscapes, small and large, taking shape as the melting glaciers caused the seas to rise, covering some areas, leaving others alone. Ireland was cut off. The land bridge between Britain and mainland Europe disappeared. By about 6000 bc Britain was an island, and naturally there was a northern part, closer to the North Pole, and a southern part, closer to the now separated European land mass. As the climate warmed and forests developed, people began to migrate into the area that would eventually become the British Isles.
The north begins with the glaciers melting away around 5000 BC, with early hunter-gatherers edging into what is now Cheshire and finding dense, damp oak forests nursed on rich clays and loams. These new inhabitants lived in caves and holes dug into the ground and prospered by hunting down and eating red deer, wild boar and the wildfowl hugging the meres. Mammoth, wild ox and packs of wolves and hyenas roamed Cheshire in those days. The rivers cutting and shaping the landscape into hills and hollows, producing bogs, mosses and peat, were teeming with trout, and fishing was a quick way to satisfy hunger. Oak trees dominated the land, supported by alders, willows and birch, with ash and elm on the higher slopes. Few English counties owe more of their history to their geographical position and surroundings, and to the character of their natural features, than Cheshire.
