The North

by Paul Morley

  He used his meetings with industrialists, cotton workers and the unemployed to debate the relationship between local industries, imperialism and global economics. A crowd of 3,000 turned up to welcome him at Darwen by big neighbour Blackburn, ‘lovely little Dirty Darwen, ’tween two bleak hillsides, both bleak and barren’, the very essence of Lancashire, with weather conditions and environment perfect for cotton weaving, but he got off a station early, in Spring Vale. He spent two days touring several mill towns, staying in the homes of progressive Nonconformist industrialists. He met the mayors of Darwen and Preston, Manchester traders, local spinners and weavers, and numerous journalists. ‘Pray tell me,’ he asked at a meeting with unemployed cotton workers, ‘what am I to do with a fifth of the human race living on the verge of starvation and devoid of all sense of self-respect. It should occupy the attention even of unemployed Lancashire.’

  Lancashire and Gandhi stayed stuck inside their own historical and cultural contexts, with the severely declining Lancashire cotton industry still assuming its world-leading nineteenth-century golden age would yet return and unable to face up to its diminished role, and the dialogue between them did not live up to the expectations of both sides. Lancashire was out of date and out of touch, clinging to a notion of industrial superiority that clashed with Gandhi’s rejection of what he saw as Western industrial madness, even though much of Lancashire was now suffering from appalling poverty. Gandhi – romanticised by Lancashire as a humanitarian friend of the peasant – was not moved by Lancashire poverty. His enemy was exploitative British imperialism, and his trip was ultimately part of his greater plan to get the British working class to see the justice in Indian independence. He remained quite clear that Lancashire ‘could never hope to get back to the quantity of goods formerly supplied to India’, which the industry thought was its right and a vital element in its revival, but which Gandhi viewed as part of the enslaving of his country. Indian nationalists suffering at the hands of the British had nothing in common, he thought, with the poor in Lancashire, as much as they were themselves marginalised by power that rested elsewhere. It was a failed visit and soon faded into obscurity.

  Barbara Hepworth sculpted Pierced Form in 1931, the year she gave birth to her first child. Originally called Abstract and then simply Sculpture, this was an alabaster piece with a hole carved through the centre, where the invisible indivisibly met the visible. You couldn’t tell where something stopped and something else started – as if the northern idea of form was a process in which thoughts and inspiration overlapped and yet were kept apart. The holes were like portals through which you could move from one dimension to another. ‘I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone . . .’ she said. A year later, although he might have had the idea at roughly the same time, or a little earlier, Henry Moore made something similar, a hole in a sculpture, space within space – for Moore 1932 was ‘the year of the hole’.

  1930

  Edward James Hughes was born on 17 August, the third child of Edith Fararr and William Henry Hughes, at 1 Aspinall Street, Mytholmroyd, a small town close to Hebden Bridge in Calder Valley, Yorkshire, a forty-five-minute drive or train journey from Manchester and Leeds. The stone-built end-terrace house backed on to the Rochdale Canal, where Hughes caught his first pike. Beyond the canal was the main trunk road which connected the woollen towns of Yorkshire with those of the Lancashire cotton mills. Close to the canal and road was the railway, and rising almost sheer from the valley like a monolith was Scout Rock. Ted Hughes’ childhood home looked straight across to the surly cliff face of Scout Rock: it provided ‘both the curtain and back-drop to existence’.

  In this setting he learned the love of nature and its creatures. Hughes described the Calder Valley, with its poisoned canals, unpredictable weather and decaying industrial landscape, as his ‘tuning fork’ and the moors as ‘a stage for the performance of heaven’. He once said that he could ‘never escape the impression that the whole region was in mourning for the First World War’. The textile factories were closing and the Depression pressed down on the cobbled streets of towns and villages. He contrasted the atmosphere of futility and gloom in the towns with visits to nearby woods and lakes, which were filled with life and sheltered from the effects of industrialisation. There he fished, trapped and hunted.

  ‘Well, as far as my writing is concerned, maybe the crucial thing was that I spent my first years in a valley in west Yorkshire in the north of England, which was really a long street of industrial towns – textile mills, textile factories. The little village where I was born had quite a few; the next town fifty. And so on. These towns were surrounded by a very wide landscape of high moorland, in contrast to that industry into which everybody disappeared every day. They just vanished. If you weren’t at school you were alone in an empty wilderness.’

  In 1938 the family moved to Mexborough, a mining town in south Yorkshire. It was under the care of his teacher at the town’s only grammar school that Hughes began to mature, his work evolving into the rhythmic passionate poetry for which he became known. His father William was a carpenter but opened a newsagent and tobacconist shop on Main Street opposite St George’s Church. Ted was able to read the comics and boys’ magazines for nothing, and these were to be the basis of his first attempts at storytelling.

  Bernard John Manning was born on 13 August 1930 in Manchester. ‘I was born in 1930 in the Ancoats district of the city, and I never lived more than five miles from my birthplace. I always loved Manchester and her people, though that kind of loyalty and sense of belonging is never understood by the metropolitan elite who despise their own country. My dad was a greengrocer and it was a tough upbringing – the north was in a pit of depression and money and food were short. I was one of six children and was forced to share a bed with all my siblings, some of whom wet the bed. In fact I learned to swim before I could walk. I remember one night, my mother asked me: “Where do you want to sleep?” I replied: “At the shallow end.” The soles of me shoes were that thin that in 1936 I could put me foot on a penny and tell you if it were heads or tails. I went to an ordinary local school and left at the age of fourteen, taking up a job at the Senior Service tobacco factory in Manchester. From my earliest years, I had a bit of a talent for performing, singing in choirs and at work. Then, when I was fifteen, my life changed dramatically on being called up to serve in the Manchester Regiment of the British Army.’

  In 1930 Harold’s father Herbert Wilson lost his job. It was two years before he found another, and this necessitated a move to the Wirral, across the Mersey from Liverpool. Harold attended Wirral Grammar School and won an exhibition award to study economics at Jesus College, Oxford. After a modest beginning, Harold Wilson shut himself away and worked. Rather unexpectedly a promising student transformed himself into one of the most outstanding scholars of his generation. He studied, dabbled in liberal politics, went to hear a young Edward Heath play the organ at Balliol College and then went back to work again. He took no part in the Oxford Union, where Heath won the presidency in his fourth year.

  41

  In Reddish you could see the implacable hilly backbone of the nation, always present in the background, conclusively remote and imposing, especially for a seven-year-old frolicking inside a seven-year-old’s world, marking the immediate end of that world. You could see how fog, rain and snow almost permanently covered this sodden spine through a long interrupted winter that seemed to stretch between the beginning of September and the end of May. On cold wintry days when covered in snow the hills could seem mountainous and were very sure of their own superior position in the grand scheme of things, a scheme way beyond the understanding of someone only due to be around on the planet for a few decades and who in fact would only be hanging around for a few years.

  We weren’t caught up in the worst of the weather; the frosts were never horribly severe, and the rain didn’t fall all of the time. I remember sunny summers that seemed to fit into the exact shape and size of the class
ic school summer holiday as described at length by Enid Blyton. We weren’t immune, though, from the soggy effects of being close to where the bruised stricken moors and the menacing, patient Pennine range seemed to break the hearts of the sullen clouds in the sky between the battering winds from the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Manchester, and everywhere for miles around, suffered because of this clashing of clouds and winds right above our heads.

  These past few hundred years the sturdy abiding hills and moors have had to put up with violent man-made interruptions to peace and quiet, and even hope and reason, as parts of the land nearby, through some accident of not being on the right curve of a river, or in the best part of the valley, have been sliced, diced, battered, burned, crushed, skinned, torn, dug, maimed, destroyed and covered over with the solid but mostly always melting by-products of near-crazed human endeavour.

  They watched as, over a century or two, a stunning eruption of pioneering activity and lusty movement turned empty spaces split by ancient rivers and miles of quiet content country into a massive frantic montage of cities and anxiety that spilled over in random messy shapes, reaching as far as money, planning and energy allowed before petering out in a spiral of depletion. The moors, hills, fields, rivers and trees, this neck of the woods, the original landscape, which consisted of nothing but desolate windswept valleys, gullies, peaks, ridges, woods, shrubs and grassland, have been stained by the results of independent thinking, intellectual inquiry, economic development, political reaction, entrepreneurial vision, inspired madness and cultural innovations. The raw, unfilled land has been scarred with the inevitable consequences of decades of interconnected experimental thinking about the making of money, the establishment of community, the building of society and the convoluted realities of the class system. Reddish – and all those other places that packed in around it – was at the edge of this staining, and straining, this eruption of material, greed, organisation, competition, opulence, desperation and obedience, and I was one of the human examples of this massive experiment, which saw mass production lead to a shift in psychology and a different world to grow up in. I was an afterthought in an area that was itself an afterthought, even though, now and then, it was itself a gift, and was given gifts.

  Reddish perhaps owes its name to when, hundreds of years ago, it was little but a pitiless series of muddy fields – a ditch – and a fight of some sort, possibly even a battle, led to much bloodshed and, yes, a red ditch where blood mixed with mud. Gorton, following similar heroic principles, was Gore-town, from the gore that ran into a brook after a battle between brave defending Saxons and terrifying Vikings. Gor, though, in Old English can also mean mud or dirt, and also a triangular plot of land, a more mundane but perhaps more likely origin for the name, so perhaps derives from words meaning filthy brook. Because history is very much not a settled issue, and piles up at the edge of being forgotten unless someone’s got something to say about it, a fragile combination of clear evidence and something that has the stranger, dubious quality of a dream, it could be that ‘Reddish’ came about because the sky one night, those hundreds of years ago, had a distinctive reddish glow, or a leading light in local affairs, perhaps when there were only a dozen or so locals living in what was effectively the open air, had reddish hair. It could come from the reeds that there were everywhere in this mossy area – a plain old reedy ditch, rather than anything bloodier and more melodramatic.

  It may even be ‘Reddish’ because it comprises the remnants of words borrowed from other languages, dragged there by invaders or wanderers, a gaggle of visitors who were lost and decided to stick around for a while. A putting together of one sound with another, a name with a noise, a syllable with a meaning that has long dissolved, jammed next to another syllable with another meaning that didn’t make it past the thirteenth century. Reddish, made up of fragments, lost in time, not Lancashire enough to make me a Lancashire lad, not Cheshire enough to mean our family was affluent, on the edge of the edges of Manchester but not near enough to make me undeniably Mancunian, a mile or two away from being either really pleasantly rural or an even more wasted caved-in afterthought of Stockport. Reddish, within sight of a door to paradise, but stuck in a corridor that could eventually lead to hell.

  It is a ditch – and another corridor bringing to mind a bloody hell – that in the end may not suggest how Reddish got its name and where its history began, but generates the sort of intrigue that resonates through time and cuts a groove all the way to the Internet. There is a ditch dug into the ground which makes its way through the northern part of Reddish that shows how history is often entirely reduced to a mark in the ground, a pile of dirt, a desperate attempt to keep an enemy at bay simply by digging a hole, as if the very act itself can intimidate and repel invaders. History is made up of borders, some as epic, daunting and enduring and ultimately as unreal as Hadrian’s Wall, which marks the northern border of England metaphorically but not actually, and some as buried, lost and indistinct, and yet in their own way legendary and unreal, as the ditch that marks the southern border of Manchester. History is made up of rumours, which form their own fragile border between truth and fiction, between the real world and fantasy.

  The ditch winding across the southern edge of Manchester is now known as the Nico Ditch or Mickle – from micel, meaning large in bulk or great, ‘Nico’ itself possibly a corruption of micel, so simply the Great Ditch – and it runs through five miles of low-lying land from Ashton Moss at Ashton under Lyne – where Geoff Hurst, scorer of the 1966 World-Cup-winning hat trick was born – to Hough Moss at Urmston – a neighbour of Davyhulme, six miles to the south-west of Manchester city centre – and in between cuts first through Denton, where Geoff Hurst’s father was born in 1919, not long after when Denton’s felt hat industry was the largest in Britain with thirty-six firms directly involved. In 1907 the majority of the 16,428,000 felt hats made in England (worth £2,068,000) were made in Denton and Stockport. In 1921 the working population of Denton was 9,653, with about 41 per cent of those people in occupations related to the hatting industry.

  From Denton, perhaps marking how far south of the city Tony Warren’s Coronation Street could be set, the ditch weaves through Gorton, Reddish, Levenshulme, Burnage, Rusholme, Fallowfield, Withington, Chorlton-cum-Hardy (the settlement of peasants by trees near the water) and Stretford. Some argue the name Nico derives from Hnickar or Nickar, a water spirit of Viking myth, the God Odin himself in destructive mode, renowned for ensnaring and drowning careless travellers. As Hnickar, Odin was imagined to inhabit the lakes and rivers of Scandinavia. Noecan, meanwhile, is an Anglo-Saxon verb meaning kill, which would suggest the Ditch had a definite defensive function. The favoured theory is that it was a fortification intended to slow down or break up an attacking force.

  It could date back to Roman times, surviving as a rough trace of a possibly more systematic border structure, or it may have formed the southern boundary to Coel Hen’s sixth-century kingdom of Rheged. It might have been dug in the seventh century, marking the boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumberland, but was more likely constructed in the so-called Dark Ages at some point between 890 and 910, or possibly earlier, in 869, when the Danes were expanding in the area, moving towards what would become Cheshire and Lancashire. It certainly follows or shadows long-established borders between kingdoms, regions, tribes and counties. Manchester, as Manigeceaster, was apparently raided by the Vikings in 870, suffering severely and almost completely ruined. This seems to suggest that if it was a barrier hastily built to repel the Vikings it did not work, or the attacking forces merely went around it.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – written at the end of the ninth century, the earliest known history of England written in the English language, beginning with the birth of Christ – mentions the ditch, which was about five foot wide with a high bank on the north side, and documents it as an attempt to create a permanent defence against the Vikings. Legend has it that the ditch was dug in one unbelievable ni
ght by local inhabitants, who were each allocated a piece of land to dig up. They were told to build up the bank to their height. But a night’s work would not have been enough to create a five-mile trench in the land as deep as a man, and there probably weren’t enough men around at the time to cover the whole length anyway.

  The ditch, still sporadically visible amid the streets, cemeteries, golf courses, parks, paths and playing fields that now cover its route as it skirts the fringes of densely developed central Manchester, is a genuine missing link, as myth and reality, between shrouded Roman Manchester and the Industrial Revolution. Even if just a hastily dug act of fear as the Vikings stormed ever closer, it required in its own medieval way the sort of planning, dedication and strength usually ascribed to the Roman era and the Victorian Manchester that shook up the world, and itself.

  In Reddish it cut across from Gorton Cemetery a few hundred yards to the east of my primary school, in between the local park where as a school we played football, and Debdale Park, where I played pitch and putt. As I made my way within what for a time were the limits of my world, between my house and school, and sometimes further up the Gorton Road to Debdale Park, the ditch formed one of my borders. Whether or not it was an epic act of community defence against the ruthless Vikings, it became part of the internal territory I explored and claimed as I became a northerner.

  Again, I had no idea of this at the time, but it was one of the three main historical structures in Reddish which formed the triangle that enclosed me: the mysterious ditch that burrowed through from the earthy Anglo-Saxon time when England itself was forming and being fought over, divided, connected, named, owned; the sixteen-arched Victorian viaduct sweeping over the Tame, representing dynamic future-forming landscape-changing industrial expansionism; and a few hundred yards down the Gorton Road from my street in the other direction from the ditch, where the buses began their journeys to Debdale Park or the other way across to Parrs Wood and Didsbury, the small square named after William Houldsworth, the local industrialist known as the Man who made Reddish. Here was a man who fully intended to enter history, to make sure Reddish appeared in any twentieth-century version of the Domesday Book, and who did all he could to ensure that he did exactly that.