by Paul Morley
In Stockport the trams that had glided around town since the very un-orangey first decade of the twentieth century had stopped running in 1949 – the last tram ran through Stockport on the Manchester–Hazel Grove route – and it had taken nineteen years for these would-be-trendy orange and white buses to arrive, turning the town away from the stuffy remnants of the nineteenth century and on course for a surely sleeker, lighter future. In this future even conductors adding life and characterful motion to the buses’ seating areas were extinct, and you paid your fare as you got on, with glass doors folding behind you with a modish swoosh, a seductively synthetic noise closely related to the noise of Dr Who’s materialising – or dematerialising – Tardis.
The orange was, on the one hand, not romantic or super enough, and on the other, not murky and preoccupied enough. This was not a colour scheme of interest to regular solitary bus user Lowry, for whom a bus was dark, more dour and practical, a muddy hard green or a jaded red, the top deck coated with the degraded smell and memory of the green smoke and coughed-up phlegm and spit of pensive, faded others, and not part of a world where appearance and frivolous brand image were decided by the sort of indiscriminately past-hating committees and consultations that felt flared-trouser orange was appropriate in Bury, Hyde and Ramsbottom.
The scuffed orange slapped around Stockport as if it was part of some system of commercial and administrative encouragement to the town to ‘get with it’. Buses must be up-to-date, as the main way of broadcasting how efficient and up-to-date the local council was, and buses that once looked like they drank flat-out bitter now looked more likely to smoke a joint, if they smoked at all. Buses that once looked like they were matter-of-factly losing their hair now seemed to be wearing undignified fake wigs and speeding through traffic lights with an iffy aura of self-conscious cool.
In 1974 towns and villages and populations were shunted between counties and administrative areas, crossing borders at the whim of the authorities in a way that governmentally meant little, but psychologically and practically could be very disorientating. Reddish was not only split between being both of Lancashire and of Cheshire, it was now in neither. It was officially in Greater Manchester, which, following the SELNEC boundaries, exploded into the middle of an accepted natural-seeming set of borders that had been settled for centuries.
It had taken some time for the shape of Cheshire to settle down. As with the nations that eventually solidified as England, Scotland and Wales, county boundaries ebbed and flowed over centuries as tribes (Cornovii, Ordovices, Brigantes), civilisations (Celts, Romans, Vikings) and kingdoms (Mercia, Gwynedd, Northumbria, Wessex) jostled for position, fought, conquered, and were conquered. The border with Wales was particularly volatile if not as violent as that between England and Scotland. It was finally fixed in 1284, with Cheshire bordered by counties, a country and the sea, connecting the midlands with the north, and England with Wales, and Wales with Liverpool and Manchester.
Francis Lee of Manchester City celebrating a goal as City beat Newcastle 4–3 to win the 1967–8 First Division Championship
Most of the borders between Cheshire and whatever was next to it were natural geographical features. These features were if nothing else clearly where something should come to an end and something else begin. There was the far north-west limit, where the Wirral Peninsula was surrounded by the Irish Sea as the Mersey and the Dee became estuaries. To the north, Cheshire was separated from Lancashire by the Mersey, and along the north-east, not far from Reddish, there was a short stretch where it was separated from Yorkshire by the Pennines. There was a border to the east with Derbyshire, which used rivers, and to the south-east with Staffordshire along the tightly twisting River Dane. To the south, the boundary with Shropshire followed (a little erratically) the watershed between the Mersey and the Trent. The border to the south-west with Flintshire used various brooks that fed into the Dee. The border with Wales and Denbighshire to the west clung to the Dee. The boundaries of Lancashire in the north were Cumberland and Westmorland, in the east Yorkshire, and in the south Cheshire and Derbyshire. To the west was the Irish Sea, with all that was beyond – can you imagine?
By 1835 the changes to society caused by the Industrial Revolution had exposed cracks in the county system, especially where borders between counties were along rivers that bisected rapidly expanding towns. The Mersey, separating Lancashire and Cheshire, flowed through the middle of Stockport, and so someone living only a few yards north of the river was not able to use the local facilities south of the Mersey. They would have to travel further north into Lancashire. Heaton Norris, a small Lancashire district tucked in north of the Mersey, was handed to Stockport, but remained in Lancashire, so that part of Stockport was now Lancastrian. Further minor adjustments during the nineteenth century, including small gains from Lancashire, small losses to Lancashire, Derbyshire and Shropshire, led to a substantial expansion in the size of Stockport when, needing more land, it incorporated Reddish in 1901. In 1931, as Manchester expanded to the south, Northenden, Baguley and Wythenshawe moved from Cheshire into the city.
Lancashire produced the great cities of Liverpool and Manchester, which then to some extent broke free of their parent, and became the equivalents of counties, great conurbations sprawling at the eastern and south-western limits of the county that had nurtured them. There was much about the cities that was straight Lancastrian, but as one of the elements inherited from Lancashire and deposited into Liverpool and Manchester is a sense of independence, they existed entirely separately from the county. They were once part of Mercia – spiritually, sort of geographically, possibly merely historically they still were part of Lancashire – but by 1974 they were legally and officially on their own.
There is, if discreetly, much about Liverpool and Manchester that is Cheshire, as much as the two cities were in, and what they were because of, Lancashire. This mixing of Lancashire and Cheshire – with all the other mixing that took place, from all over the world in Liverpool, and from all over the nation in Manchester – meant that there was a great difference between these cities and the inland Lancashire cities, the character of which was formed by less cosmic and not so cosmopolitan external pressures.
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1944
The German V-1 flying bomb, or doodlebug, was the first guided missile used in war. The characteristic buzzing sound of its engine caused considerable fear, but then relief if it then faded into the distance. If the engine cut out, it was time to take cover, as the missile was on its terminal dive and about to hit. In the early hours of Christmas Eve 1944 German bombers flying over the North Sea launched V-1 flying bombs at Manchester. Most missed the city, but one landed at 5.50 a.m. on a terrace of houses in nearby Oldham. It killed thirty-seven people, including some evacuees from London, seriously injured sixty-seven and damaged hundreds of homes.
Hull was the most severely bombed British city or town apart from London during the Second World War. Of a population of approximately 320,000 at the beginning of the war, approximately 192,000 were made homeless as a result of bomb destruction. Much of the city centre was completely destroyed and heavy damage inflicted on residential areas, industry, the railways and the docks. Little was known about this by the rest of the country at the time since most radio and newspaper reports did not reveal Hull by name but referred to it as a ‘north-east’ or ‘northern coastal’ town to avoid giving information of value to the enemy. Consequently, it is only in more recent years that the damage to Hull has been acknowledged. The city was an obvious target because of its port and industrial activity, and an easy one because of its location on the east coast at the junction of two rivers, but Hull often took hits meant for more inland places, or from German aircraft fleeing down the Humber to the open sea after failing to find Sheffield, Leeds or other northern towns, the victim of pilots who needed to dump their bombs. Remarkably, the port continued to function throughout the war.
In 1944 a poll showed George Formby to be the most popu
lar figure in Russia after Stalin. In his films (over twenty blockbusters) he always played the underdog who succeeds in the end; rich toffs are portrayed as bad-tempered, idiotic, bullying and small-minded.
1943
Born in Liverpool in 1943, George Harrison grew up with the music of Lancashire comedian George Formby, as did all the Beatles. Formby’s huge popularity meant that the sound of the ukulele banjo, particularly his own rhythmic style, was a familiar part of life.
The Second World War put a temporary brake on Blackpool, although Leonard Thompson said, ‘Entertainment is about the only commodity that isn’t rationed.’ During the war years Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach remained open all year round, enabling thousands of evacuees and service personnel to escape the reality of war for a short while.
The BBC’s glorification of ‘ordinary people’ as heroes of the national struggle did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere, but was the result of a thorough remapping of the symbolic representations of nationhood that had taken place earlier, a complex process in which individuals and institutions from film makers like John Grierson, via popular magazines like Picture Post, novelists and social critics like George Orwell, J. B. Priestley and Walter Greenwood, organisations such as Mass Observation and the Pilgrim Trust, social investigators like Seebohm Rowntree – born to Joseph Rowntree in York in 1871, ‘the Einstein of the Welfare State’, committed to helping the poor and the disadvantaged, arguing after the First World War for the introduction of a family allowance and a minimum wage – to artists like L.S. Lowry, whose visual remapping of the north became central to shared perceptions of the meaning of the nation and national identity.
1941
Eric and Ernie first performed together on 28 August 1941 at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool, as Bartholomew and Wise, but soon made the change, having rejected the idea of using both their birthplaces, given that Morecambe and Leeds sounded like the name of a building society. Eric recalled, ‘My mother was talking to Adelaide Hall, the coloured American singer on the bill, and explaining to her how nobody liked the name Bartholomew and Wise. Adelaide’s husband, Bert Hicks, overheard and said that he had a friend who called himself Rochester because he came from Rochester, Minnesota.’ Bert asked Sadie where she came from.
‘Morecambe,’ she replied.
‘That’s a good name. Call him Morecambe.’
Julie Goodyear was born Julie Kemp in Heywood on 29 March 1942, daughter of Alice and George. He walked out soon after, and her parents divorced. She was brought up by her mother and stepfather Bill Goodyear. While at school she wanted to be a singer but eventually decided to take up modelling. In order to fund this she trained as a shorthand-typist, worked in an aircraft factory, sold washing machines and worked as a waitress. She also served behind the bar in her stepfather’s pub in Heywood, the Bay Horse.
Wilfred Pickles became the first national newsreader with a pronounced northern accent in December 1941, signing off each night with a hearty ‘Goodneet.’ His appointment was a ploy by Minister of Information Brendan Bracken to foil Nazi propagandists, who had become skilled at imitating BBC ‘Oxford English’. His unconventional style created a furore and he was caricatured mercilessly by London cartoonists, who depicted him with his shirtsleeves rolled up and wearing a muffler and cloth cap.
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As part of the county reorganisation of 1974 – the culmination of changes begun over a century before when modern local government was established – Liverpool and Manchester, while remaining part of the historical counties of Lancashire, and of Cheshire, and in Manchester’s case a slice of West Yorkshire, became the centres of the administrative and ceremonial counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester.
The name Greater Manchester had more of a sense of locality than the invented Merseyside, although the latter expanded Liverpool sensibilities throughout the new area more coherently and instantly than Manchester distributed any Mancunian spirit through the areas of Lancashire and Cheshire that it absorbed. Liverpool was always more inside itself than Manchester, more set apart from the history and geography of Lancashire, creating a singular cultural personality from within that tended to confound political and social systems vainly imposed upon it. Its accent was outside Lancashire, expressively other, ahead of the time, post-1974, when the Manchester area accent would move away from the soft, broader, chummier Lancashire, with an edgeless Yorkshire bruise, and closer to the demonstrative and unparalleled Liverpool hybrid of interruptive, argumentative foreign outsider and edgy, insular insider. Liverpool was more of a detached sovereign territory, almost an island following its own rules, its own standards and internal strengths and weaknesses.
Cheshire lost much of the northern Wirral to the new Merseyside, keeping Ellesmere Port, and gained Warrington and Widnes from Lancashire. Those who had happily lived in Lancashire since they were born were handed a Cheshire address, which for many was an outrage. A whole chunk of Cheshire (Longdendale, Stalybridge, Dukinfield, Hyde, Bredbury and Romiley, Marple, Hazel Grove and Bramhall, Cheadle and Gatley, Stockport, Ringway, Bowdon, Hale, Altrincham, Dunham Massey, Carrington, Warburton, Partington and Sale), the most removed from its traditional Chester centre near the Welsh border in the west, became part of the new Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester, both administratively and geographically (though not for postal purposes).
People in Sale – one of the world’s first commuter towns, emerging along the new railway routes of southern Manchester in the 1840s – were still likely to write their address as Sale, Cheshire, though, if only from habit, ancient allegiance or because, for any number of reasons, Cheshire seemed a better, less artificial place to be than Greater Manchester. The new metropolitan county comprised ten administrative districts: Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, the invented Tameside and Trafford, and Wigan. Those in Wigan would still mostly say Wigan, Lancashire, because Wigan, Greater Manchester seemed either too new and awkward, or a bit contrived, and local roots went deep into the idea of Lancashire. Allegiance to the name of a place and the name of where it was showed how place names represented history and identity as much as anything, and an arbitrary adjustment to any part of the name of the place where you lived could be considerably disconcerting.
Manchester Airport, once very much of Cheshire, when it was known as Ringway, was placed entirely inside Greater Manchester, although appropriately for a place where the world came and went, later expansion of the airport would see it extend back into Cheshire. Parts of Yorkshire were administratively passed to Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Humberside, Cleveland and County Durham, causing considerable grief among those who had invented steady, inspiring identities as Yorkshire folk. However, even with boundaries moved and land removed, the county was still the largest, taking up about 10 per cent of the nation.
Those who lived in Ulverston – birthplace of comedian Stan Laurel, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac, and Maude Green, mother of Bill Haley – north Lancashire, north of Morecambe Bay, and ‘north of the sands’, now found themselves in another county, Cumbria, itself a new invention. They were suddenly called Cumbrians, as though their history could be abruptly rewritten, the geography changed and their identity altered. The Tan Hill Inn in the North Yorkshire Dales, reputedly the highest pub in Britain at 1,732 feet above sea level, mere inches above the Cat and Fiddle on the Cheshire–Derbyshire border, has been moved back and forth between the Yorkshire and County Durham sides of the Tees – switched from the North Riding in the 1974 county reorganisation when Teesdale was shunted into County Durham, and later moved back into North Yorkshire.
The historical counties still existed, but there were many who resented this technical fiddling with these existing regions which were far too psychologically and culturally set into the mental and physical landscape of the nation for them to simply disappear. People having over centuries been made to accept borders, regions, local authorities, were now shifted into a new place where the map itself was being
redrawn, no doubt to be redrawn again, as if to undermine the very certainties that this new infrastructure intended to define. Those on or near the borders slipped through gaps and often switched counties without moving home.
When the slicing up and renaming of counties happened in 1974, I was ignorant of the details, as much as I was of what had happened to the counties in the nineteenth century, but felt the changes, which came not long after the decimalisation of the pound, which gave money, so fixed in solemn shape for so long, a sense of unreliability if not downright quirkiness. Twelve pennies to a shilling and Stockport being in Cheshire were now, it seemed, outdated. A world made up of long-established patterns of common ground was being taken apart, and although I had no loyalty to much of the old, most of which I was racing away from with the natural forward-looking appetites of a teenager annoyed, irritated and impatient with traditions and elders and their superior, commanding and guarded ways, the new world seemed a little flimsier and unformed. This made the need to find things that were personally certain and existentially firm even more urgent.
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1940
For three nights leading up to Christmas the Luftwaffe bombed Manchester. The city was ablaze, with many of the fine historic warehouses of Portland Street set alight or razed to the ground. This was the Christmas Blitz of Sunday 22 December to Tuesday 24 December 1940. On the first night 270 aircraft released 272 tons of high explosive and 1,032 incendiary bombs. On the next night 171 aircraft dropped another 195 tons of high explosive and 893 incendiaries on central Manchester and Salford. More than 650 people were killed, more than 2,300 injured. Within a mile of Albert Square and the town hall, 165 warehouses, 150 offices, 5 banks and over 200 business premises were destroyed or so severely damaged that they subsequently had to be demolished. Many major buildings were wrecked or destroyed: the Free Trade Hall, Cross Street Chapel, the Corn Exchange and Smithfield Market. Within days the medieval pubs of the Shambles, apart from the (still surviving) Wellington Inn and Sinclair’s, had been wiped out. Only one English cathedral – Coventry – took more bombs than Manchester’s. The city would never look the same again.
