by Paul Morley
‘There is no doubt in my mind that the astounding Merseybeat boom had a big effect on the outcome of the general election. The groups were young, vibrant and new. They were in tune with the desires of the people. They asserted working-class values, they looked to the future. I believe the Beatles made a powerful contribution to Labour’s victory without recognising it.’ Liverpool MP Eric Heffer writing in his autobiography of the 1963 election.
In December 1963 Morecambe and Wise recorded a show with the Beatles. They treated the most famous pop group of all time with typical irreverence. In a parody of Eric’s description of Ernie being the one with the ‘short fat hairy legs’, George Harrison described the foursome as the ‘ones with the big fat hairy heads’. Eric mistook the lads for the Kaye Sisters and kept referring to Ringo as Bongo.
Morecambe: Hey! Hey-hey! What’s it like being famous?
John: Well, it’s not like in your day, you know.
Morecambe: What do you mean ‘not like in my day’?
John: Well, me dad used to tell me about you, you know.
John Peel found himself in Dallas on 22 November 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Peel felt the compulsion to visit the scene of his namesake’s assassination and raced across to Dealey Plaza. When faced with the police barrier, he simply claimed that he was a reporter from the Liverpool Echo and somehow gained admittance. He later used the same trick to gain access to the press conference that paraded the recently arrested Lee Harvey Oswald.
While appearing as nightly anchor on regional news magazine Scene at 6.30, presenter Michael Scott was the messenger in an historic Granada coup. On 22 November 1963 the programme had been on the air five minutes when the telephone rang in the newsroom adjacent to the studio. It was CBS in New York with the news that President John Kennedy had been shot. There was a rule that ITV programme companies should never pre-empt ITN on big stories. Denis Forman, the senior Granada executive present, called ITN and was told they were not going to break into the schedules with the story until they had it from their own reporter in America. Forman decided to go ahead, and Scott broke the news to northern viewers half an hour before it reached the rest of the country.
The swinging sixties saw great changes in the physical appearance of the towns of Tameside. At Hattersley farms and scattered cottages gave way to a vast estate to house Manchester’s overspill. Hyde’s boundaries were extended to include the area, although all costs were met by Manchester. Building began early in the 1960s and the first families moved on to the estate in May 1963. They were welcomed by the mayor of Hyde and received free milk and sausages from Wall’s factory at Godley. By August 1964 there were 4,000 people in Hattersley, served by just one doctor. There were few shops or community facilities and problems increased as the estate grew in size.
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The north begins with names and naming. In the late ninth century, four centuries after the decadent, exhausted Romans retreated, the fierce Picts filled the vacuum by running riot, and the Saxons, Jutes and Angles established their settlements and kingdoms. The Danes and other northmen were the next set of curious, predatory interlopers sailing from the bays and fjords of north-west Europe. Known as Vikings – creek men – ‘the great north wind’ brought them to the east coast of what would become Yorkshire, from where they expanded inland and across the Pennines.
Much of what was later known as Lancashire escaped colonisation, although the Danes did settle much of the area around what is now Manchester. Oldham was named Aldenhulme around 865, and places like Urmston, Davyhulme, Cheadle Hulme and Hulme are all of Danish origin – the Old Danish hulm or the Old Norse holmr meaning a piece of flat land surrounded by streams, or a water meadow. Flixton, close to Urmston, is perhaps a hybrid name from a Danish invader called Flix, and tun, the word for village or farmstead. The Lake District in what would become Cumbria was mainly attacked from the Irish Sea by Norse Vikings, around ad 930, and then settled. The area is thick with becks (brooks), fells (hills), garths (enclosures, yards), gills (ravines, gorges) and tarns (lakes). The word acre itself derives from the Viking mjor-aker, meaning a small piece of land.
There is a distinct Norse influence on numerous northern place names. Your surroundings need names to create the sort of familiarity that means you are home, and it is all yours. Names stamp territory with claiming authority. Place names ending with ‘scale’ and ‘side’ (grazing land) reveal their association with the soil as the Danish colonisers settled down to what, when they weren’t sailing the seas and carving open new territories, they liked the most – farming. In north Lancashire any name ending with ‘thwaite’ (a clearing in a wood, a settlement), like Rosthwaite or Seathwaite, shows Viking presence. In Yorkshire Micklethwaite is the great clearing, Skipton is a sheep farm, Aysgarth is a gap in the hills where oak trees grow.
Place names ending with ‘by’ – Selby, Whitby – or ‘dale’ (valley) or ‘ness’ (headland, important navigation markers for the seafaring Vikings) are Viking in origin. A ‘thorpe’ – Scunthorpe – was a secondary settlement in an area considered second rate and marginalised. Grim, a Viking prince, founded Grimsby. Many street names in Leeds and York end with ‘gate’ – from gata meaning way, street or road. Many surnames with a decidedly northern tint have Viking roots – Airey, Appleby, Asquith (Askwith), Beckwith, Brandreth, Chippendale, Fotherby, Fothergill, Grimshaw, Hague, Heseltine, Heslop, Hislop, Hogarth, Holmes, Kendal(l), Lofthouse, Pickersgill, Rowntree, Scargill, Schofield, Stockdale, Sykes, Thackeray, Thorpe, Threllfall, Thwaite(s), Willoughby, Wolstenholme and York. From the name of the god Thor we get such forms as Thorburn, Thurkettle, Thurstans, Thurston, Turpin and Turtle. The consequences of Norse immigrants converting to Christianity can be seen in names that end or begin with ‘kirk’, from the Old Norse word for church – Ormskirk, Kirkby, Kirkham.
By 880 the Vikings controlled most of England, with Jorvik – York – as their capital. In what was not yet named Yorkshire the thorough, highly regimented and bureaucratically minded Viking rulers divided the area into three separate units for ease of administration. The Old Norse word for a third of something (thrithjungr) became modified to ‘riding’, giving rise to the East Riding, North Riding and West Riding of Yorkshire. Pushing south and west, the Vikings had attacked the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex in 871. This was resisted by Alfred, who thus became ‘the Great’. He became king that same year and was the first Anglo-Saxon ruler to be recognised as a national leader, if only because of his effective use of self-promoting propaganda. Alfred retook London in 886 but realised that he could not force the Vikings out of the rest of England and so came to an agreement with the Danish leader Guthrum. This gave the Vikings their own independent territory in England, the Danelaw – an area of the country subject to Danish law – north-east of a line stretching from London to the River Mersey north of Chester. On the Mersey frontier with the Danelaw were burhs – a word which denoted a fortified town, a Saxon stronghold or a neighbourhood, which in time became ‘borough’ – at places to be one day known as Chester, Runcorn, Thelwall and Manchester.
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1963
For young people in York the sixties truly began in 1963. That was the year the Beatles played the Rialto on Fishergate no fewer than four times. Their first appearance was on 27 February, supporting Helen Shapiro, who was ill and didn’t perform. The group are said to have written the follow-up to 1962’s ‘Love Me Do’ – ‘From Me to You,’ their first number 1 in the NME charts – on the tour bus journey from York to the next gig in Shrewsbury. They wrote ‘She Loves You’, their first number 1 in the BBC charts, in the Imperial Hotel, Jesmond, Newcastle. They had played the modest Majestic Ballroom in Westgate Road on 26 June 1963 and had a spare day before performing in Leeds on the 28th. Paul encouraged John to start composing the song in their hotel room.
‘Already an old square, I propose in 1964 to be even squarer. I have no desire to bully teenagers into trying to like what I like, and so long as th
ey are out of my hearing, they can scream their heads off; but on the other hand the mass media must stop trying to Beatle me. At the point where teenage-herding, adolescent hysteria and high-pressure salesmanship all meet, there will probably be just as much sound and fury in 1964 as there has been in 1963; but nobody will do nicely out of explaining their social significance to me. Or, for that matter, the social significance of anything else. Any of that stuff needed here will be produced in and for the home market and will not be imported.’ J. B. Priestley, New Statesman, 27 December 1963.
A few years earlier Priestley had responded to the rise of the Angry Young Men in theatre, literature and film by saying, ‘Angry? I’ll show you bloody angry. I was angry before you were all born.’
An editorial in International Socialism commented in 1963, ‘In the portly lineaments and plummy accents of the late Gaitskell the world could detect more than a mite of that amateur gentlemanly public-school tradition which Labour is so dedicated to combating.’ Harold Wilson, his successor, looked and sounded quite different. While Macmillan and Home posed as Edwardian gentlemen on their grouse moors in plus fours, Wilson was a pipe-smoking northerner, a self-proclaimed supporter of Huddersfield Town with traces of a Yorkshire accent. Far from being a landed gentleman, he was the son of an industrial chemist. Wilson shrewdly exploited these assets. His Huddersfield accent faded away during the forties and fities, but now made a telling come back.
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The north begins with the Normans, who had Viking ancestors, coming from the south, from across the narrow Channel, and pulling the constitution of the country to the south. The Norman influence on Englishness led to new layers of aristocracy and intermarriage which tended to be in the south, nearer to the centre of the new regime in Normandy. A few centuries before the metaphorical centre of the islands had been in the north-east, collected around the curious patient minds and manners of the learned monks in the abbeys on the Northumbrian coast.
Previously invasions and foreign influences had arrived in the north as much as the south – from the north Germanic tribes which absorbed and amended particular British qualities more than they wiped them out, producing a new hybrid of social and cultural dynamism that seethed and simmered in all areas of the country. With the Normans the energy shifted to the south, new forms of social division and class systems started to operate and the idea developed that people in certain parts of the country were more advanced and more important, involved and sophisticated, than in other parts of the country – which, by the very nature of them being not near the ruling centre, meant they were not part of where the action actually was. They were judged to be ecclesiastically, socially and culturally backward. This would hold for those parts of the British Isles that were not English and for regions of England more distant from what was now the direct link to the royal home – the Channel.
These latest conquerors of the British Isles were not quite as flexible as previous invaders and outsiders in absorbing and realigning the existent indigenous characteristics. French took over as the language of the court, administration and culture – and remained so for 300 years. Meanwhile, English was demoted to everyday unimportant uses.
The most significant change in terms of the psychology of the region that was becoming England was that previous historical currents, especially through the Saxon and Viking eras, had tended to run from east to west – the Danelaw itself split the nation predominantly vertically between east and west. Under the Normans the currents shifted to run from south to north, as if England had shifted position, revolving so that it was clearly, in the mind and on the map, split between up and down. There was now an area distant from where power materialised, a little shapeless at the edges but with a strong beating heart: there was the north.
The north begins in the markets that started in squares around churches to sell produce from the countryside. Market towns in Lancashire were the county’s first towns of any real importance, and most would become over time large towns or cities. Market charters were granted to Lancaster in 1200, Bolton in 1251, Manchester in 1282, Preston in 1292 and Burnley in 1294. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Yorkshire thrived and many new towns emerged. These included Barnsley, Doncaster, Hull, Leeds, Pontefract, Richmond, Scarborough and Sheffield.
The north begins with new influences from other countries, because of certain domestic arrangements, and perhaps a little bit of snooty or well-intentioned wifely nagging. In 1330 Edward III was encouraged by his wife, Philippa of Hainault, to invite highly skilled Flemish weavers to settle in England. The intention was to help the expansion of the weaving trade and raise the standard of woollen fabrics. Many of the immigrants headed to Norfolk, but some arrived in and around Yorkshire and also in the Manchester area up towards Bolton. Bolton has had many names throughout the centuries, including Bodeltun, Botheltun, Bodeltown, Bothel-tun-le-Moors, Bowelton, Boulton, Bolton-super-Moras, Bol-ton-in-ye-Moors, and Bolton-le-Moors (to distinguish it from others such as Bolton-le-Sands, and describing its situation among the west Pennine moorlands – formerly wild, almost uninhabited, and infested with wolves and wild boars). Bolton is Old English for ‘settlement with a special building’. It is possible that Flemish weavers introduced clogs to the northern English, who redesigned the uncomfortable wooden sabots lined with lambskin. Over time they proved warm and efficient against wet conditions and were economical and durable.
The north begins with the weather, the water, the landscape, the distance from bossy supercilious central authority; the colliding and subdividing of surly, superior and demanding invading interests; the legacy and emotional residue, the conclusions, the prejudices of those who came and went; the resultant stubbornness, resilience, toughness, wryness, independence, scepticism, defiance, acceptance; the need to build, to create, to invent, to speculate, but also, less romantically, the need to accept, to put up with, to reason and withdraw, and then to fight back, to resist, to argue and struggle.
And then there is the combination of the geology of the north and the emphatic earthiness of the people to produce voices that make sounds that seem to follow and be followed by the shape of the earth around them. In the south your voice leaves the ground, your accent fights away from the earth, as if you are using how you speak to avoid the dirt under your feet, which represents the planet itself.
People with voices that resembled the landscape around them built on this northern earth stretching between one sea and another, between one part of the country and another, a place to dwell, dream and determine their destiny. All of this dreaming and determination poured into and out of the mouths of people who spoke – whether on the east or west coast, on top of hills, by lakes, by rivers, down slopes, in valleys, under shadows, in forests, across shiny cobbles the shape of petrified kidneys, in unforgiving isolated open spaces, in misty scalding coldness, in villages becoming towns and cities, even small empires – in ways that clashed with those who came with hostile intent or friendly reasons from outside, or by those who slammed the door on outside influences, even rejected the slur, sting and snap of near neighbours, preferring their very own slap, twist and thud, in ways that dug into and twisted around their rolling, turbulent surroundings and circumstances the richly developing English language, so that it all fed back into and bent into shape what was always becoming north.
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The Park Hill Flats, located on thirty-two acres of land behind Sheffield station and overlooking Sheffield city centre, were built 1957–61, inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. The flats were the result of the first complete post-war slum clearance scheme in Britain, relocating thousands of people. The project meant clearing a violent slum nicknamed Little Chicago. Rather than rehousing the area’s residents in then-fashionable isolated towers, the architects attempted to replicate in the air the traditional tightly packed and communal street life of the area. Consisting of 995 dwellings, and housing over two thousand people, the huge snake-like blocks were built on a slope. Sheff
ield Council hoped that Park Hill, the ‘streets in the sky,’ would signal the rejuvenation of the town and provide attractive enduring homes in a deprived area.
1962
One of the reasons the Decca record label rejected the Beatles in 1962 was that it preferred the safety and convenience of signing the London-based Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
Ringway Airport Terminal One was officially opened in 1962 by Prince Philip, and was the first in Europe to incorporate the pier system, in which passengers remain under cover until ready to board their flight. This state-of-the-art construction cost £2.7 million. Four specially commissioned Murano glass chandeliers were ceremoniously unveiled at the same time, their meticulously hand-blown multicoloured teardrops symbolically flooding the city with light, pointing the way to whole new worlds beyond Britain’s austerity-period shores. Each weighed two tonnes and was made up of 1,300 individually blown pieces of lead-grey and amethyst glass up to ten feet long. They were the centrepiece of a grand tribute to the glamour and romance of air travel in the style of the splendour of the great old railway stations but reinterpreted with modernist flourishes – including black rubber floor tiles and an Elizabeth Frink sculptural piece celebrating Manchester’s Alcock and Brown, the first aviators to fly the Atlantic non-stop.
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If you are coming to the north, it, the north itself, perhaps doesn’t really begin – it isn’t what you were expecting, however vaguely – until you arrive at the pinched scrappy edges of a major industrial city, one of the greats, one of those with a name that chimes with achievement even if only because of sport, or music, or perhaps comedy and entertainment, but certainly history, filled with people who know their own minds because they’ve learned in the face of all manner of questioning and condemnation to speak for themselves in a way that is often very different from people living a few short miles away. As you head towards the north, destined to arrive in the north-west, as opposed to the north-east, which would bring you into the north through Yorkshire, there are warnings about what is to come. You will have spotted them perhaps as far south as Birmingham, or Nottingham, or Derby, or Stoke. They will have taken the form of the land, or the buildings, or simply the clouds gathering in a sky that itself seems to be changing, as if the north actually begins high above the ground, in the atmosphere that borders outer space.
