by Paul Morley
26
1949
On 16 September government permission is granted to burn the fuel required to bring back the Blackpool lights. A spectacular display on the cliffs portrays a deep-sea diver’s world of tropical vegetation. At over 200 feet long and 22 feet high, it is an amazing sight. Actress Anna Neagle is the celebrity chosen to switch on the lights; other celebrities – sportsmen, singers, politicians, comedians and television personalities – follow her.
1950 Wilfred Pickles
1951 Stanley Matthews
1952 Valerie Hobson
1953 George Formby
1954 Gilbert Harding
1955 Jacob Malik (Russian ambassador)
1956 Reginald Dixon
1957 John H. Witney (US ambassador)
1958 ‘Matty’ Matthews
1959 Jayne Mansfield
1960 Janet Munro
1961 Violet Carson
1962 Shirley Ann Field
1963 Cliff Michelmore
1964 Gracie Fields
1965 David Tomlinson
1966 Ken Dodd
1967 Dr Horace King (speaker of the House of Commons)
1968 Sir Matt Busby
1969 A Canberra bomber
1970 Tony Blackburn
1971 The cast of Dad’s Army
1972 Danny La Rue
1973 Gordon Banks
1974 Wendy Craig
1975 Tom Baker
1976 Carol Ann Grant (Miss UK)
Wilfred Pickles said in 1949, ‘May it be forbidden that we should ever speak like BBC announcers, for our rich contrast of voices is a local tapestry of great beauty and incalculable value, handed down to us by our forefathers.’
By the late 1940s Granada’s attention was turning away from theatrical entertainment towards the fledgling television industry. As a theatre chain, it had taken the name Granada in 1930, chosen by its well-travelled chairman, Sidney Bernstein. He felt that the name’s exotic connotations suited the image he wanted for the theatres. After requesting a licence to operate an independent television station in 1948, the company finally received a contract in 1954 to broadcast five days a week in all of northern England, becoming one of the four founders of Britain’s Independent Television Network. Granada made its first black-and-white transmission on 3 May 1956, with a programme called Meet the People.
John Robert Clynes and Mary Elizabeth Harper, a textile worker, married in 1893. He died on 23 October 1949 and she soon afterwards.
‘Our fourth leader, John Robert Clynes, he once said something very, very important. He said we come into Parliament not to practise the class war, but to end it. To end the abuse of power in the workplace, to end the inequalities of health and education, to end the waste of worklessness and the cruelty of crime. He said he came into Parliament to put into practice what it says on our membership cards: power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many and not the few. Those are inspiring words. Those are words that, if put into practice, would transform this country.’ David Miliband, Labour Party Conference speech, 2010.
Increasing prosperity meant that more and more families could take a fortnight’s holiday on the coast, and the seaside towns were in competition for a growing market. Many resorts believed that beauty contests were important in gaining publicity: in Morecambe beauty contests were seen as second only to the illuminations as its major tourist attraction. The Morecambe contest began in the summer of 1945 as the Bathing Beauty Queen. It was organised by the local council in partnership with the Sunday Dispatch. The first final was watched by 4,300 people in a continuous downpour and the winner was a civil service typist. According to the local paper, she received a cup, a ‘paltry prize’ of seven guineas and a swimsuit.
27
There were a few cars parked on Westbourne Grove, but this was in the days before the dominance of the car, and it was possible to play a scrappy game of football in battered Tuf school shoes – the only shoes I owned – on the street without having to stop more than once or twice an hour to let a car pass. Each house had a yard or two of garden in front of a deadpan door painted in one of a few neutral, unshowy colours and windows blocked with dainty lace and hints of curtain. The houses on our side of the street each had a basic back garden about twenty feet by ten, which ended with an uneven charred-brick wall roughly eight feet high tipped with scraggly barbed wire. On the other side was a creepy scrapyard filled with rusting corrugated iron, piles of rubble, old cars, tyres and broken bottles. The houses the other side of the road had smaller back gardens which each led through a gate to a narrow cobbled back alleyway. These houses more traditionally fitted the image of the classic affordable northern terraced house, with its distinctive style arising from the need for economy: small size, red brick (cheap and quick to build with), a shared chimney stack and scullery wall, small panes in the sash windows, slate roofs pitched low to save on materials, and a minimum of decoration.
There was only one tree in our garden, which never produced any leaves and therefore seemed made of the same dull grey-brown earth it grew out of. I don’t think it did much growing. Thinking about it now, it seems more like a sculpture, a shape, a smudged mark in space and time that illustrated where nature itself had run out of inspiration. This was where I began to think, I suppose, about what it was to be someone else, somewhere else, as if the tree’s stunted branches were the beginning of a bridge that I could cross over and emerge somewhere glorious.
I could climb up its scarred spindly trunk to a height of about six feet, and for this period of my life, at least until 1966, this was about the closest I got to feeling on top of the world, as if I knew everything there was to know. There was a branch that stuck out at a melancholy angle which was strong enough to support a cheap child’s swing. I would sit on this swing and absent-mindedly rock back and forth, more reflections leading to the filling of the spaces in my mind.
In our back garden we also had a home-made-looking air-raid shelter. Square and dominant, you could not miss it, craggy copper-red bricks jammed together with coarse grey cement, a crude miniature version of a satanic mill minus a proud purposeful chimney, ten feet tall, probably that across, featureless, windowless and pointless, set dead centre between the house and the back wall. It was dark and damp inside, with suggestions of slimy emptiness and shapeless decay, and I have very little recollection of ever entering it, just in case. A certain timidity kept me from imagining it as a cave, a tunnel, any sort of adventure. I climbed on top of it now and then, reaching a brave new height even above the crooked tree, and sat there, surveying the whole world as far as I could see, mostly the placid backs of houses, which suggested to me that without brick there would be nothing in the world, and nowhere for people to go. Because bricks were Lowry’s bread and butter, because for him they were the pillars of beauty, the beginning and end of decency, he was in the right place at the right time to paint that part of the universe that was so bricked up and bricked in it was a kind of primeval, time-worn cul-de-sac.
I never imagined the shelter being used, packed with neighbours knee to knee, as the determined, merciless German planes flew above them, a younger Mrs Wilson with husband away fighting, nervously chatting with Mrs Brown, husband closer to home, drinking mugs of tea and waiting for the all-clear siren and the relief, as the impassive droning and danger passed overhead. I didn’t play war games much. I had boxes of cheap grey, green and navy Airfix plastic soldiers that you could line up in rows, and a box of more colourful even camp cowboys and Indians, but I never really knew what to do with them once they were lined up, except knock a few of them over. I did not have a fighting mentality, tended to be bullied rather than the bullier, and so never developed any strutting, threatening northern hard-man qualities and the sense that surviving in the world could be done through demonstrating toughness in the way you walked, talked, smoked, drank and, if necessary, hit someone. I was not cut out to be any sort of warrior or even any sort of niggly, annoying local hooligan, let alone an
off-colour unblushing pub poet who did all his gruff rhyming, considering and slagging-off over a hard-earned pint.
I never heard any stories of bombs dropping nearby, or I didn’t pay attention to whatever stories there were. Eventually our unlovely back-garden shelter was knocked down. My dad demolished it in a sudden rush of something that might have been anger, tearing into this big block of the past with a monstrous hammer, dropping a bomb on it in the madly focused form of his temper, which could be war-like, successfully hitting the target, and brick by broken brick it was removed, leaving behind the stark slab of scarred immovable concrete that had been its base. I would then use this as a penalty area for games of football using a rusty metal single-bed frame on its side as the goal. The bed’s wilted springs made a wonderful substitute for a goal net, and sometimes the tennis ball I used would get stuck between two springs, giving me the sense of actually scoring and hitting the back of the net. Turf was laid by my dad between the concrete base and the house, turf that never really became a Cheshire-style lawn, more a patchy collection of warped muddy grass squares.
These games were separate from playing in the street with neighbours about my age. I enjoyed myself more in these solitary games, creating tournaments in my mind, imagining matches, playing in them, creating rules that suited the garden’s layout. When I was about eleven, I played more and more on my own, in my own world, having not made an impact as part of my school football team, not enjoying the rough competitive element of playing with others, which involved rules of engagement that I was not in control of.
I had a brief alliance with Westbourne United, a football team run by a stocky bow-legged twinkly local chimney sweep. He was called Frank Aspinall, although at the time I knew him only as Frank but maybe never even called him anything, not to his face. He lived at the bottom of Westbourne Grove and always seemed covered in the soot he swept out of the numberless chimneys in the neighbourhood. To my young eyes he was so gently ancient, uncomplaining and wrinkled, he could easily have lived in the nineteenth century, and his spindly black wire brushes and charred face seem now to have made him something I only vaguely sensed at the time, a blemished character in the background of a Lowry who had carelessly fallen from the canvas into the burdened modern world. No doubt my memory is playing tricks to suit this sort of book, but he seemed to be constantly coughing up phlegm, caused by a Woodbine habit that shook the smoke that gave him, just about, a living, deep into his ruined chest.
I was never happy in his team, possibly because this required a certain amount of discipline, morning training sessions and teamwork alongside tough ruddy-faced boys always aiming elbows at my ribs. It all felt a little dodgy, and the matches arranged did not seem very real, but I think this was the young me making assumptions based on my own reading of the situation, which was simplistic and prejudiced. I didn’t like playing for Westbourne United, and I stopped going to the training and playing in the matches.
In fact, Frank Aspinall was a part-time scout for Stockport County, at the time mostly near the bottom of the Fourth Division of the Football League. But they were one of the League’s ninety-two teams, up and above the Northern Premier League, which was non-league and therefore irrelevant. Frank had actually discovered and nurtured some local youngsters who went on to play professional football, including Bobby Noble, who played for Manchester United, and Keith Newton, who played for Blackburn, Burnley and Everton. I either did not know this information, which would have excited me, or did not believe it, as there seemed no way to my biased young mind that this always filthy, slightly uncommunicative, rather crumpled chimney sweep could possibly have any connections with professional football. Locally, I learned later, he was seen as something of a hero, donating all his time and energy to encouraging and training young boys in Reddish and giving them the opportunity to play trials for local teams.
I kept myself to myself and didn’t turn up for training, not realising that adults talk to each other. Frank told my dad I was not attending training; I must have told my dad that I was. He was furious with me, and grabbed the ball one day as I was playing my solitary game in the garden, dreaming of greatness in a match against imaginary superstars, scoring astonishing goals in a setting entirely of my creation that transformed our small scruffy garden into a magnificent stadium. He shouted at me, his attitude based on information I did not have, about letting poor, generous Frank down, and told me what an embarrassment I was, why I was stupid for playing on my own and not joining in with others and, possibly, going on to play for Stockport County. I think I had a suspicion – which I now wonder is me now wondering, and which I did not actually have at the time – that he was so angry with me because he recognised something of himself in my behaviour – his inability to make friends, or if he did, keep them.
After this shock, an education into how other people had feelings and that there were consequences if you didn’t turn up to do something you said you would, I soon reverted to my solitary football world, where I was everything I wanted to be. I did not return to Frank’s team, now too embarrassed to show my face. I reverted to kicking a ball around the garden on my own, which must have looked odd to anyone watching me, but as far as I was concerned it was a game of great skill, built around rules that made complete sense. In a world where it was hard to get the sort of attention I was seeking, which might have made me feel more confident about myself, I set myself at the centre of my own attention, where, in all the fantasies I created, I was tremendously talented.
If my ball went over the wall at the back of the garden, I faced up to the terrors on the other side and climbed over. I needed to get it back because it was the only ball I had to play football with, and losing it would mean, for a while, losing everything, even if it was no more than a tennis ball so battered and faded most of its fibres were missing, revealing bare patches of rubber. The ball was an essential part of my meagre set of toys at the time, which included two Subbuteo balls, the big brown one for football, preposterously almost as big as the little Subbuteo players themselves, the tiny red one for cricket, a flimsy blow-football ball, a floaty table-tennis ball, a full-sized red plastic cricket ball with moulded seam, a faded rare hard cricket ball that wasn’t authentically leather but still stung the hand, and chipped glass marbles, never many at the same time, most of them lost within weeks. My first feeling of loss, of real, desolate grief, was not because of a dead relative, friend or neighbour, but when a red plastic ball modelled to resemble a real leather football, proudly bought earlier in the day for a few pennies, burst on the end of a rusty nail in the garden. It instantly turned from something that enabled me to dream and lose myself into a few miserable scraps of useless plastic, and I was consumed with a sadness that made me want to brick myself up in a corner of the world where no one would ever find me.
The wall was greasy, the bashed moss-streaked bricks always seemed soaked with rain even on sunny days, and once on top I would look down what seemed an awful long way on an area filled with chunks of barbed wire, weeds, shards of glass, brick dust, smeared sweet wrappers, grimy pop bottles filled with a liquid the colour of something someone had decided was waste, although it was hard to believe that all the rubbish at the bottom of the wall, which had gobbled up my poor tattered ball, had ever had anything to do with being human. This was a discarded north outside the perversely glorifying frame of Lowry, and the other side of the immediate northern border to my existing personal territory.
Jack Bond, captain of Lancashire Cricket Club in the late 1960s
I slid down the rough wall, scraping skin off my hands and knees, into the other side, which was as soft and greasy on landing as rotting flesh, with jagged shapes and scraps of metal sticking up in the direction of my bony white legs, and strange sudden possibly animal movements at the edge of my vision. I squeezed between the wall and the back of some sort of derelict shed, with no sign of my valuable ball, and felt in no doubt I might be trapped there for ever. If I didn’t find the ball, history an
d time would stop. If I found it, then everything kept going, and everything was as it should be.
28
1948
It was a significant event for the University of Manchester when shy, funny, free-spirited, nail-biting genius, thirty-six-year-old Alan Turing joined the mathematics department. Turing, whose thinking ranged across philosophy and psychology to physics, chemistry and biology, joined the department as a reader, with the nominal title of Deputy Director of the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory. He had been a full-time member of the team of mathematicians at the wartime Bletchley Park code-breaking centre and was awarded the OBE in 1944 for his vital contribution to the war effort.
In work that remained secret until long after the war, Turing is credited with helping to break the code used to encrypt communications with the German U-boats operating in the North Atlantic, which were sinking merchant ships bringing much-needed supplies to Britain. Some historians have suggested that without this breakthrough a war claiming millions of lives every year might have continued another year or two. Turing had long imagined a machine that could think in the way a human brain did, and in 1949 an astonishing machine connected to the urgent requirement for a British atom bomb was built at Manchester by the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory. It was the very first practical application of Turing’s computer principle based on his 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. The Manchester Mark I was nicknamed The Baby or Small Scale Experimental Machine, and was one of the earliest electronic computers. Occupying a large part of the top floor of the engineering building, its vast size was due to the fact that an enormous number of electronic valves were used for its construction (transistors were not yet available). Turing envisaged a computer able to switch at will from numerical work to algebra, code-breaking, file handling or chess playing. He was a pioneer of computers for personal use and one of the first to use a computer for mathematical research. There are those who therefore argue he both defeated Hitler and gave us computers.
