The North

by Paul Morley

  ’When I’m cleaning windows’, undoubtedly George Formby’s most popular song, featured in his 1937 film Keep Your Seats, Please and was banned by the BBC because of its content. Such was its popularity that Formby or his collaborators wrote a sequel the following year. Of the twelve verses in the two versions, nine contain sexual references as follows: the sexual activities of newly-weds (three verses); women undressing (two); naked women (two); frustrated ‘old maid’ (one); his large penis (one).

  David Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire on 9 July, the son of Kenneth and Laura Hockney and the fourth of five children (Paul, Philip, Margaret, David and John). His father worked as a clerk in a city centre dry-salters, grocers and wholesalers, although he later became an accountant. The family lived in a typical large Bradford terraced house at 61 Steadman Terrace, Leeds Road.

  ‘At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it were, are the ‘pot banks’ – conical brick chimneys like gigantic Burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke almost in your face. You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with their picks.’ George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Chapter 7.

  Returning from Hollywood, Gracie Fields said, ‘I still say by gum and gee whiz; I haven’t gone all glamour.’ In 1937 she was given the freedom of Rochdale. Her identification with Rochdale needed to be maintained in the midst of her fame, so that to the outside world she still possessed some sort of immediate difference, even if that difference bore little relation to what it really was to be working class and living in Rochdale. Fields used an idea of northernness to achieve a perverse form of glamour, shrewdly exploiting her underclass roots in order to convey alluring novelty. ‘My work . . . has meant travelling the world over, to great places and small, but home to me always means Rochdale and its gradely folk.’

  37

  Reddish does not appear in the Domesday book – typical of places in the south-east of Lancashire and other northern areas such as County Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. There is a brief mention of Manchester – as Mamecastre – in the book, noting that it had a parish church, but of its 1,700 pages Lancashire and Manchester occupy a bare one and a half, as an appendix to Cheshire, which then included parts of what would later be Wales.

  The 1086 survey was ordered by William the Conqueror as a record of the land he had conquered twenty years before, and is regarded as the first great work of a bureaucratic state, a way of discovering who owned what land in order to calculate tax. The document, allegedly written by a single monk, was nicknamed domesday because like the Last Judgement there was no appeal against its findings.

  For centuries, until the period of history that framed and was framed by what was later branded the Industrial Revolution, Reddish was all but on the verge of not even being a place, simply somewhere possibly nameless connecting other places, somewhere as much on the edge of the countryside as on the edge of Manchester, or Stockport, or its own insignificant shapelessness.

  I find out how distant and removed it was by searching for Reddish on Google. There are a few, slight traces, explaining how the area came into being, enough traces of memory and archive to form a basic history of the place where I lived. The information resides in the Internet – I imagine towards the edge of whatever shape the Internet actually is – and seems to be there purely for me to find. Who else would be searching for this information – looking to write a book in which the hero, and occasionally the villain, and now and then something blurred grey-red and receding in the mirror, is Reddish? It enables me to piece together the beginnings of the place where I found myself, and realise how hard it is to truly know yourself. I can find out how Reddish materialised, the place where I lived then left, and eventually went back to in order to write a book about the north, of which it is a tiny part.

  Before the industrial era there were two notable houses in the Reddish area, Reddish Hall and Hulme Hall, and several small hamlets consisting of farmhouses and cottages. The opening of the Ashton Canal in 1797 precipitated the changes that turned Reddish into a place filled with houses, and streets, and families with children like me, caught in all innocence right where they were. During the next few decades Sandford, Reddish Green and Whitehall fused along the banks of the canal into a larger settlement.

  Nothing happened overnight, though. The Stockport Branch Canal passed through Reddish at the end of the eighteenth century, but it was fifty years before the first cotton mill was built in the area. The canal was heavily industrialised along most of its length, and was mostly used to deliver coal to the mills and factories on its banks, and to homes and steam engines. It also carried passengers – ‘an elegant boat for passengers and their luggage’, a shilling return in the front room, eightpence in the back – between Stockport and Manchester. It went from the Stockport Basin in a wharf and warehouse complex half a mile north of the centre of Stockport through Reddish and Gorton to Openshaw (from old English Opinschawe, meaning open wood), eventually joining the Ashton Canal. The Ashton Canal joined the Rochdale, the Duke of Bridgewater’s ground-breaking first canal, and the Peake Forest canals, to and from the Dukes Warehouse near Piccadilly in Manchester, and Hull, Mellor, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Saddleworth, Stockport, Oldham and everywhere in between.

  The Stockport Branch Canal didn’t have much immediate impact on Reddish, which was described in 1825 as having a population that was ‘but thin’. The pre-industrialisation pace of things persisted well into the nineteenth century, while Manchester tore up time and the past and zealously, even cruelly, remade human purpose. In Reddish, despite the canal, the world of George III’s accession (1760), a world in which there were no hard roads, no factory system, no capitalist manufacturers, no smelting of iron by coal, seeped into the next century. Things had barely changed for centuries and showed no signs of doing so. The Industrial Revolution, rather than being a sudden convulsion, was the diffuse result of a couple of centuries of gradual change. It was really an evolution, but this word imparts much less suggestive detail about the ultimate nature of the metamorphosis of the area.

  Locals had a static unrefined view of things before the rush and snarl of commercially generated change moved people into an always evolving society frantically, or dutifully, keeping pace with its own ruthlessly established pace. Manchester was transforming a few miles away, people being squeezed into a world making a new sort of noise that was not natural but soon came to seem so. Stockport was heaving, swelling and beginning to sweat, sending prodigious numbers of hats out into the wider world. How long could docile little Reddish, shyly tucked up against where the Pennines made their turn at the southern end of Yorkshire into the eastern end of Cheshire, resist? Then came the trains, and people began to pour everywhere, even into Reddish.

  In 1830, when there were 574 inhabitants, Reddish was called a township and within the parish of Manchester. Slowly, the mills, the entrepreneurs and the cotton industry turned Reddish into the place it was in the early twentieth century. The first industrialist to arrive was Robert Hyde Greg, son of Samuel Greg, who had built the pioneering Quarry Bank Mill at Styal. Greg built Albert Mills and bought the land around Houldsworth Square down towards Sandy Lane on the ridge above Stockport that would become South Reddish. Strict churchgoers with no tolerance of alcoh
ol, the Gregs developed the area, building cottages for their employers and providing facilities such as a small park, but didn’t allow public houses. (Maybe the Gregs’ pious control over South Reddish, leaving behind a pub-less inconsequential strip of housing, no place to find subject matter for het-up sick-at-heart songs, accounts for Morrissey’s sneering antipathy.) South Reddish listlessly sank into itself and thinned out before disappearing into the centre of Stockport, while at the other end of Reddish things got a little serious, and there were increasing reminders that it was of Lancashire, despite what anyone said or legislated.

  As soon as the freshly cut Branch Canal left the Stockport Basin by Lancashire Hill near the town centre, it ran into the farmland that Reddish essentially comprised, sloping down into the barely inhabited Reddish Vale. A spur of the canal running east from Reddish to a coal mine at Beat – also Beet or Beight – Bank near Haughton Green was abandoned when only partly built. When I was growing up in Reddish, there was little explicit sign that a few miles away there had been mining activity, a genuine sign of an industrial past on the very edge of south-east Lancashire, over the border from the very tip of the north-east of Cheshire. On the Cheshire side of the Tame was Bredbury, which by being on the Cheshire side meant that you thought of it differently, as though the difference between Lancashire and Cheshire was like the difference between somewhere painted in one colour, and somewhere of a darker, older, grimier hue. Haughton Green, like Reddish, was mostly rural farmland until the discovering of coal led to the mines.

  Coal mining in Denton and Haughton can be traced to the early 1700s, and there are indications that it went much further back than this. One early record can be found in the parish register of Denton Chapel (St Lawrence’s Church) for 1743: ‘Buried. John Bretland of Whernith, who was killed in ye Colepit in Haughton.’ There were numerous shallow pits throughout the townships of Denton and Haughton, but the names and even the whereabouts of many of these are now lost. The sites of some can be found on old Ordnance Survey maps, where they are marked as ‘Old Coal Shaft’ or ‘Old Air Shaft’ but without names.

  A canal running to these pits might have changed my whole view of the district where I grew up, made Reddish seem more specific, but there was no canal, or even the remnants of one, in the open land that poured away into the distance on the side of Reddish opposite where it was built up and already preparing to become the outskirts of built-up and leaking Manchester. The open country that spread out beyond the last line of streets and on the other side of the derelict brickie, where a solitary forty-foot chimney stack looked lost and a little lonely at the side of Harcourt Street, was where the brick and human spillage from Manchester, and Stockport from another direction, stopped.

  Look this way, towards Manchester, or Stockport, or Gorton, across roofs stretching away like solid grey tents, down cramped insular streets, a tangled, packed urban setting: but look the other way, and there was rolling, bucolic Reddish Vale, containing endless grass to sprawl all over, and plenty of woods and trails where it was easy to lose yourself. On one side an unbroken spread towards the classic scaly and scaled-down northern picture of cluttered brick and grim streets, on the other, a harmonious sweep down into the actual picturesque. I could break from one to the other in minutes, and coming to the country could be a pleasant surprise, but then coming to the unlovely streets could be exhilarating, and this constant criss-crossing from one landscape to another made the whole thing seem as much a personal playground as a home for hundreds of families.

  Reddish Vale even contained (and still does) a small but, by reputation, challenging eighteen-hole golf course laid out in 1912 by Dr Alister MacKenzie, who designed the Augusta National Course, home of the greatest golf tournament in the world, the US Masters. The River Tame winds its way through and features on seven of the holes. The course was carved out of a hundred acres of local farmland, ‘undulating but not too hilly’, as MacKenzie said. He described the turf as excellent, and was impressed by the natural surroundings. Even though it shares the same SK5 postcode as Westbourne Grove, the course was as remote to me as Augusta, as if there was some barrier that kept me out, kept me at the edges, where I might find and treasure the occasional chipped lost ball. For a while it was the southern limit of my young existence, a barrier between me and what was out there – Brinnington, Bredbury and Stockport, and further to the south-west Buxton, the Peak District and Derbyshire, and beyond that the unimaginable rest of the world.

  Reddish Vale was for me a place to explore tentatively, reaching further and further inside what seemed to go on for ever, a never-ending sloping wooded sweep of fields, trees, long grass, nettles, dock leaves, brambles, barbed wire, conkers, wild flowers, hedges, ponds, lanes, mounds, trespass notices, fences, acorns, sticks, ditches, paths, all cut through by the meandering River Tame, on its way via Saddleworth from the edge of the West Riding, separating Ashton from Dukinfield, and Lancashire from Cheshire, to Stockport, where it ended and began a new life. Bluebell Valley led to Denton Woods, and I never dared to swim near the Strines Weir, where water deflected from the Tame tumbled in a bubbly white rush. I suppose, compared to the unappealing pedestrian terraced narrowness of Reddish and Gorton and Denton – which were chained to Manchester – or Stockport, Reddish Vale was a comely paradise, with a hint of danger, a sudden eruption of wild flowers, unexpected trenches, overgrown thickets, magical groves, strange smells and hints of moats and castle ruins and even more mysterious possibilities, an outpouring of natural colour at the edge of where mighty made-up machine-mad Manchester dribbled to an exhausted spiritless end.

  To carry the Sheffield and Midland railway line from central Manchester towards Yorkshire, there was a viaduct consisting of sixteen arches. I don’t know how I knew, or who told me, but this impressive structure sweeping across Reddish Vale with monumental Victorian grandeur was looked upon as being a dangerous thing. Constructed in 1875, when the train had truly picked up steam, bringing speed and nearness to everyone, local wisdom claimed that a witch was disturbed during the building. She placed a curse on the damned thing soaring over her head, and over time it was passed down that you must not count the arches, or you would die inside a day. Perhaps this was because this hulking brick monster – which is either beautiful or horrendous depending on your point of view – sliced through unspoilt country allowing trains to spew malodorous steam into the air, ruining the deep green vale, the precious paradise that until then had resisted the rancid soul-destroying revolution exploding out of nearby Manchester. The viaduct was a filthy finger stretching from noisy Manchester, bringing some of the noise and filth with it.

  Counting the arches, which is an irresistible thing to do, as if to check or simply marvel at the number and their design – a symbol of progress if you believed, capitalist defilement if you didn’t – indicated you admired it and therefore deserved to die. The viaduct diluted, as rumours of murders and nasty surprises waiting in the woods also did, the idea that this was pure paradise. A tumble into a riot of nettles causing stings across the body that seemed like burns or getting stuck while trying to cross the weir near the viaduct and almost drowning would also remind you that this Eden was filled with its own threats and potential punishments.

  I never did count the number of arches on the viaduct over the Tame.

  38

  1936

  ‘I was born in 1936 in Castleford, Yorkshire. You’ll find it on the map – I’m the bugger that put it there. Where we lived, all the fellers were coal miners. Except me dad – he was a full-time, fully-paid-up, fully-fledged bastard.’ Vivian Nicholson.

  Cinema magnate Oscar Deutsch opened his latest Odeon in Bury. The Odeon chain was setting new standards in comfort, presentation and showmanship, and relished using the flamboyant new architectural language of art deco. To the downtrodden hard-working Bury folk of the mid-1930s, stuck in the seemingly endless Depression, it must have seemed as though a shiny luxury liner had sailed up the Bury Canal and dropped anchor.
Twenty years before television began to reach the masses, with entertainment still largely based around the wireless and reading, film’s ravishing visual escapism and otherworldly romantic expression experienced in the midst of this commercially confident opulence must have been hypnotising, even hallucinatory. Deadened workers in a world that had suddenly hit a dead end were shown extraordinary signs of life, which would inspire a new sort of obedience. They may have still been kept in their place, exploited for their labour and soon their ridiculous bravery, but some would begin to wonder what was out there, beyond the hanging smoke, constant brick and dismal routine.

  1935

  On his return to Parliament in 1935, J. R. Clynes was pressed to stand again for leader but declined. He remained a loyal and reliable elder statesman of the Labour movement until he retired.

  In 1935 George Formby made Off the Dole for John E. Blakely of Mancunian Films, a follow-up to his first film Boots! Boots!, again with wife Beryl as a co-star. Market trader Blakely had bought a cinema in 1908, when cinemas were often just rows of benches in converted shops or churches with sheets for screens. Twenty years later Blakely started making his own films, shooting rough-and-ready shorts featuring ebullient northern music-hall talent. By the time he shot the first two George Formby films – above a garage in London – Blakely had established his blunt, no-fuss, inexpensive formula, relying on the energy of the entertainers rather than sophisticated film-making. In the two films Formby made with Blakely there was no attempt to play down Formby’s happy-go-lucky Lancashire character, and audiences looking for mad but recognisably regional assaults on everyday routine loved him.