The North

by Paul Morley

  1886

  Self-educated, at the age of sixteen J. R. Clynes wrote a series of anonymous articles about working in a cotton mill. The articles showed how harshly children were still treated in textile factories. Clynes argued that the Spinners Union was not doing enough to protect child workers and in 1886 he helped form the Piecers Union.

  1885

  ‘The character is essentially Teutonic, including the shrewdness, the truthfulness without candour, the perseverance, energy and industry of the Lowland Scotch, but little of their frugality, or of the theological instinct common to the Welsh and Scotch, or of the imaginative genius, or the more brilliant qualities which sometime light up the Scottish character. The sound judgment, the spirit of fair play, the love of comfort, order, and cleanliness, and the fondness for heavy feeding, are shared with the Saxon Englishman; but some of them are still more strongly marked in the Yorkshireman, as is also the bluff independence – a very fine quality when it does not degenerate into selfish rudeness.’ How the often misinterpreted Yorkshire character was described by John Beddoe in The Races of Britain, 1885.

  Because of the bitter opposition of the Liverpool Dock Board and the railway companies it was not until 1885 that the Manchester Ship Canal Act finally received royal assent, clearing the way for the construction of the canal. It was another two years before enough finance was raised and work started.

  1884

  William Hesketh Lever started selling Sunlight soap to the mill workers of the north of England in 1884. Lever and his brother James, sons of a wholesale grocer in Bolton, bought a small soap works in Warrington in 1885. Five years later Lever Brothers was manufacturing soap at its own factory in Port Sunlight near Liverpool. Using copra or pine kernel oil rather than animal fats to manufacture soap and glycerine, the company produced a free-lathering soap which proved popular. Unusually for the time, Lever Brothers gave the soap a brand name and sold it wrapped in distinctive packs. Before Lever, soap was a cottage-industry commodity – you got the shopkeeper to cut you a slab. Lever Brothers pre-wrapped it and imprinted the brand on each bar. Sunlight Soap was primarily used for housework and marketed as ideal for the pre-treatment of stubborn stains, cleaning hard surfaces and hand washing after jobs around the house and garden.

  With the coming of the railways, the traditional wakes festivals became weeks when workers travelled to seaside resorts like Blackpool for their annual holidays. A town and its surrounding area would grind to a halt and workers plus families would board trains for the coast. Resorts such as Blackpool – and for the slightly more discerning, Morecambe – would be filled with holidaymakers. Whole streets would move from the cotton towns to the coast for one week of the year. In 1884 an article in the Pall Mall Gazette described the arrival of holidaymakers in Blackpool: ‘The wakes festivities and fairs continued in Blackpool with the building of the Big Wheel and the Pleasure Beach, the greatest wakes fair of all!’ Because of the overwhelming exodus to the seaside, neighbouring towns grew to hold their wakes weeks at different times. Blackpool simply could not have accommodated the whole of Lancashire in one week.

  The 1884 FA Cup Final between Blackburn Rovers and the amateurs of Scottish club Queen’s Park was held in London. The Accrington Times reported the Pall Mall Gazette’s reaction to the northern football crowd: ‘To the amazement of the populace the capital witnessed an invasion of Northern barbarians on Saturday. Hot-blooded Lancastrians, sharp of tongue, rough and ready of uncouth garb and speech. A tribe of Sudanese Arabs let loose in the Strand would not excite more amusement and curiosity. Whether it is eating or better still drinking, or whether there is a little rioting to be done or such a small matter of a house to be burned down . . . these Lancashire folk enjoy it with infinite zest . . . The looms will stand idle and the sons of toil will drink much more liquor than is good for them.’

  55

  I made it to Eccles without knowing anything much other than the fact that I had gone where my mum and dad had gone. The Isle of Wight melted away in my memory leaving just a few sticky images.

  Nearby, the film based on Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (written when she was nineteen) would be made by director Tony Richardson the year I arrived, 1961, three years after its first theatrical performance, but I wouldn’t know anything about that for a good twelve years. When I did watch the film, I felt I knew the place I was seeing – the shabby backstreets, bunched-up terraced houses showing no hint of anything whimsical, the cryptic array of walls, steps, bridges, alleys, waterways, towpaths, lamp posts, cracked concrete slabs angled and crooked under boisterously gambolling stone-grey clouds, the sense even in black and white, or perhaps because of the black and white, how filthy everything was, the sense of people trying to get out, trying to get on, trying to be seen, trying to be someone – much more than I did the Isle of Wight. I felt I belonged to that world, crushed between Salford, Manchester and the Second World War, between cynicism and naivety, between life and death, between hopeless houses and disused pubs, between crumbling walls and rippling black puddles, which was both something you needed to escape from, but which you relied on because it seemed so solid and shared, and lonely and desperate, but somehow, perhaps because of the combination of circumstances, mental energy, inherited mettle and physical strength that had created it all, containing a sepulchral beauty and a covert togetherness.

  Frank Randle

  In 2010 I asked my mother why we had moved to Eccles, about as far away from the Isle of Wight as you can imagine, beyond it seemed Prague or Belfast, certainly as alien to the land and character of my father’s Kent, and actually not that connected to Handforth, which although only a few miles away was planted in a different time. There seemed no family connection, no reason to move into the heart of Salford when not far off there was open country and gentler villages. Why not the Ribble Valley, Knutsford or Glossop, which superficially resemble the meadows and trees of Kent, the slumbering, winding roads of the Isle of Wight? My mum was very ill, in her early seventies, skidding through a series of nasty strokes gradually increasing in ferocity, her limbs and brain freezing up from Parkinson’s. I thought she might like to remember when she was younger and her life was beginning, and she hadn’t yet bounced through a series of menial jobs to bring some cash into the house. The eager spark in her eyes suggested, in spite of what happened during the next fifteen years, which ended with the violent, abrupt end of her marriage, that she did have fond memories of those late fifties, early sixties adventures.

  Apparently, because nothing ever seemed planned, except at the last minute or under duress, there was no real reason why we ended up in the middle of an area flaking away into archetypal post-war depression, waiting to see what might happen in Manchester, if not Salford, and what effect that might have on towns like Eccles, which had materialised in the aftermath of the rise and rise, and fall and fall, and resultant communal concussion of Manchester. It wasn’t as though the move had anything to do with romantic feelings for canals and flaky cakes, identifying with George Stephenson’s triumph when building the Liverpool to Manchester railway line over the seemingly impassable quaggy squishy Chat Moss, admiration for Elizabeth Raffald or knowing that the first general meeting of the Trade Union Congress took place in Salford’s Three Crowns pub in 1868. No sense of getting close to mighty, deteriorating Manchester, which was in desperate need of some sort of revival, and which therefore, if its recent history was anything to go by, it would, against all odds, achieve.

  According to my mum’s memory, fast degenerating like a post-industrial northern city, perishing around the edges and internally, but receiving no vital regeneration or renovation, she and my dad had come across our new home in an estate agent’s while staying with her mum and dad in Handforth. It was somewhere affordable and practical to live near my dad’s new job in Deansgate in the city centre, to finally start their life, or at least one that didn’t have parents, prisoners or the dispiriting after-effects of the war crowding around them
.

  We moved into a two-bedroom first-floor flat on Victoria Road a couple of miles from Salford Royal Infirmary, a mile or so north of the Ship Canal. I arrived in the north as an outsider, but immediately adopted a new identity in Eccles, in Salford, tarnished sidekick to Manchester. We didn’t land in Eccles amid a crushed row of squat terraced houses, next to a derelict building, rudely demolished homes and a scrappy patch of wasteland littered with war-era rubble, nettles, indeterminate organic material and puddles the colour of mucus – some might have considered we were in the posher part of town – but there was no doubt we were in Lancashire, even if that part of Lancashire pulled into something else by the weight and history of overbearing Manchester.

  My next set of flimsy fractured memories emerges from my time in Eccles, which included attending my first school, Clarendon Road Community Primary School. Probably because I was still southern soft my mum needed to physically drag me to the school on my first day. I remember being terrified and screamed loudly at the injustice of it all. Looking at the building now, a substantial multi-windowed triple-chimneyed two-storey Edwardian structure decorated with convoluted pinky-red brick patterns, built in 1908, slammed at the side of the pavement looking as out of scale with demure local kerb and low garden wall as a nineteenth-century mill, it’s no wonder I was apprehensive. It looks as if what goes on inside involves straitjackets, clanging metal doors, solitary confinement and random forms of punishment, and it perhaps scared me because the only building I could compare it with in my young mind was Parkhurst Prison.

  I had occasionally waved goodbye to my dad as he passed through the massive wooden doors of the prison, disappearing into a clanking dark inside I didn’t want to imagine. Being sent on my own into this giant brick building by my mother, who seemed insistent I should go, triggered five-year-old hysterics. Eventually I was dragged inside. My memory then goes blank, suggesting what happened next was either deeply traumatising or completely banal.

  We didn’t last long in Eccles. Enough in my shaky world for a Christmas nativity play at the school, in which I was the inn keeper, entirely forgettable, with one line to deliver – that the inn was full. Enough, perhaps, to begin the piecing-together of my important new identity, a process which became more intensive once we moved to Reddish.

  My sister Carol’s arrival as new-born Morley of the north confirmed my feeling that Reddish was where our family was at home, even though it had taken all of my life to get there. At the back of my mind, which was a long way from where I spent most of my time, where the Isle of Wight and Kent had melted into recent northern memories, I had decided that in fact I had been born in Eccles as well as in Farnham, Surrey, that somehow the two locations could be fused. I had arrived as an outsider, but very quickly I was being adopted, absorbed, accepted. And now, it seemed, the new me was about to be born in Reddish, Stockport.

  I was going to ask my mum exactly when we moved to Reddish, but before I could get around to it, she died. She took her north with her, along with her life, her irrepressible energy, her suicidal husband’s inner chaos, her chaotic memories, her limited stuck-in-the-sixties cooking and nosy, gossipy interest in the affairs of others in one crushing, freezing go. The lines on her face that first started to threaten her pale, lovely Celtic skin in Reddish were instantly erased.

  It was like what had happened with my father. He died before I could ask him all the questions I wanted to about his place in the north, about what he thought – about most things. Most of these questions were in fact provoked by the fact that he had died so young and so could not be answered. I had plenty of time to ask my mother questions, but in much the same way the questions seemed more urgent once she had died. One of the last conversations we had was about Eccles, and Reddish, and the journey there, which both came out of nowhere and was meant to happen.

  For the sake of this book – estimating, assuming, inventing, elaborating and consolidating in the ways that history most often gets written – I have decided that the exact day I arrived in Reddish with my mum and dad and three-year-old-sister Jayne was 13 June 1963. This was the day the Beatles played their one and only gig in Stockport – at the Offerton Palace Theatre Club, a converted cinema on Turncroft Lane typical of the clubs all around packed Manchester, where acts yet to be famous would perform, from Gerry Dorsey to Heinz and Shane Fenton, as well as the stars of the day, Alma Cogan, Lonnie Donegan, Johnny Ray, and those drifting the other way like Kathy Kirby. There were a lot of Palaces dotted around between Hyde and Bury, as well as the Empress, Silver Moon, Bossanova, Ponderosa, Regency, Domino, satisfying people’s almost pathological need to get out of the house, find release, burst out of confining routine, be entertained, leave their worries behind, with names designed to signify a glittering end-of-the-working-day escape into fantasy, clubs drenched in bitter, mild, smoke and red velvet curtains, non-stop entertainment on tap, where from the top of the stairs by the entrance, the bar and seating area were to the right, the stage and dance floor to the left.

  Sometimes the club was decorated with convincing tropical élan and/or intimate enough to make the audience feel they really were in a glittery fragment of Las Vegas that had somehow dropped on to the East Lancs Road or embraced tatty, charmless Oldham and Eccles. They sipped incongruous cocktails from delicate glassware or supped foaming amber beer from substantial glass tankards, winning or losing a few bob at the casino while a velvet-voiced crooner/compère in expensively cut gold suit and shoes made to glisten where the sun never shines, nicknamed Mr Manchester, a Miles Platting Dean Martin, convinced you that it never rained in Manchester, and glamour was never more than a few yards away. Under the ground, away from the factory, office, building site, railway, somewhere else, late at night, in the early hours, down the lit-up steps that led into the volatile promise of a good time the entrepreneurial energy of Lancashire mutated into the sort of play that kept life buzzing even as the sky was falling. Music hall might have been fatally wounded, but not the craving for punchlines, choruses and ferocious, uplifting charisma.

  Sir William Houldsworth, founding father of Reddish

  At the beginning of the 1960s, along the Princess Road in Moss Side, once home to the young Anthony Burgess, now the centre of the fluid self-regulating Caribbean community, there was the steamy Nile Club run by Tunde Moses, the temple of sound, knocking out keen, caustic rhythms not yet termed ska or reggae, next door to its fierce competitor, the Reno, beginning life as a Salvation Army hostel for African seamen, where they could grab a hot meal, a fag and a sleep. In these off-the-cuff unofficial haunts underground glamour drew Manchester hedonists on the hunt for illicit late-night thrills after the more regulated city-centre clubs had shut. Some, the hard-core self-conscious in-crowd, found their solace, their sensation, the room to move sometimes all through the night at the alcohol-free but highly charged Twisted Wheel. It opened in 1963 off Albert Square, in little basement rooms with bare brick walls painted red, black and white, and was initially a local home for connoisseurs of the recently born British blues scene. The rhythm and blues of Stax and Atlantic and the soul of early Motown took over for the elitist cliquish mods after the club moved in 1965 to Whitworth Street, the exultant sound mutating via Wilson Pickett’s ‘Midnight Hour’ into the more urgent, faster and physically demanding northern soul. It was called northern because it was the sort of tense elastic soul that wasn’t played down south at the time, and it attracted people from miles around before it acquired its second home at the Wigan Casino. The Wheel played serious music for serious people and always prided itself on not being as commercial as other clubs. Whenever what it played became chart music, obvious and overused, losing its rarity, its point, it would move on to fresher, rawer and hipper sounds.

  The Beatles had been booked to play in Stockport a few months earlier after their first minor hit with ‘Love Me Do’, but by the time they arrived had released ‘Please Please Me’ and the accepted, comfortable phrase when recording this time is quite sim
ply that ‘Beatlemania was taking the world by storm.’ Manager Brian Epstein honoured the contract he had made with resourceful local promoter and nightclub owner Sid Elgar for the group to play the tiny venue outside Stockport town centre for a few quid, before they raced off to play a second show at the Southern Sporting Club in Gorton, also run by Sid and part of the same deal. Sid always made sure the acts he booked played both Offerton and Gorton.

  The Southern was originally the Corona Cinema and later, in early 1971, became the Stoneground Club, where I would see many of my first rock concerts, confirming how Manchester clubs after the war if they wanted to keep up to date, chasing the smashing benefits of entertainment like it was going out of fashion, went from cinema and variety to blue comedy, to boozy dance, to raucous rock and roll, to louche cabaret, to current hit parade, to speeding soul, to underground hippy, to glittering glam and shiny disco, and, madly, unstoppably, beyond. The drink, drugs and clothing that accompanied each period reflected the onstage entertainment, the noise, gags and rhythm, and the changing demands of the customers, which were ultimately based around the same feelings of vagrant curiosity and a craving for something different, something imported and uncharted that could then become local and deliciously personal.

  The route from Offerton to Gorton would have taken the Beatles, experiencing their first flush of fame, music-hall zaniness flipped by rock and roll and on their way to druggy, imperial glory, down the hill into the sleepy centre of Stockport, through Mersey Square, nothing stirring but a few buses on the turn and the usual supping and smoking inside outlying pubs, and then up via boring South Reddish along the Gorton Road past the end of my new street, Westbourne Grove. So I like to think that as I was settling down for my first night in my new home, where I was going to make up a new life, at the end of the street the Beatles drove past the Essoldo cinema – possibly showing the first James Bond film Dr No with a theme tune arranged by John Barry, born in York, 1933 – like something out of A Hard Day’s Night, on the way from one tiny local venue packed with shocked screaming teenage girls born mere months after the war to another.