by Paul Morley
1642
Manchester has a population of 6,000. Salford has 1,500 citizens.
The nine stormy years of the English Civil War, actually three separate wars, resulted from a range of factors, economic, constitutional and religious, inextricably interwoven. The war which broke out in 1642 saw a broadly Royalist north and west ranged against a predominantly Parliamentarian south and east. Manchester was one of very few towns in Lancashire to support Parliament against King Charles I and can claim the first casualty of the whole war. In a riot on Market Street on 15 July 1642 Richard Percival, a linen weaver, was shot dead. Four days later this was announced in the House of Commons as ‘The beginning of Civil Warres in England: or Terrible News from the north’.
In September of the same year Lord Strange (James Stanley, heir to the Earl of Derby, born in Knowsley in 1607, devoted to the King’s cause), in command of between 3,000 and 4,000 Royalists, attacked Manchester along Deansgate and across the thirteenth-century Salford Bridge, at the time the only bridge over the Irwell. When Strange demanded that Manchester give up its store of gunpowder and its weapons, he was told that he would get ‘nothing, not even a rusty dagger’. At the battle’s height two barns caught fire, the resultant smoke causing confusion. As the smoke cleared it became obvious that the assault had failed. Strange and his troops abandoned the siege on 1 October. In the course of the week’s skirmishes the Royalists appeared to have lost about 200 men and the defenders about twenty.
As a consequence of this victory Parliament gave the town its first MP in Oliver Cromwell’s First Protectorate Parliament in 1654–5. Manchester’s new representative was Sir Charles Worsley, the son of a prosperous merchant from Platt Hall in Fallowfield, a zealous Puritan, lieutenant colonel of the Lancashire infantry regiment and one of Oliver Cromwell’s favourite major generals during fifteen months of direct military government, strictly governing a district containing Cheshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire with powers second only to Cromwell’s. The task proved so stressful he died in 1556 aged only thirty-five. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 Manchester faced harsh punishment for having supported Parliament and, like other boroughs enfranchised during the republican Commonwealth of England, it lost its MP. (It would have no seat again until 1832.) The Restoration, though, was not a ‘restoration of the natural and divine order’ but the beginning of a shift in power from monarchy to Parliament.
Part Nine
A special world apart
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll
92
My dad was in his own way as absolutely certain of his destiny as Fred Perry, but somehow it was all in reverse, and my dad was shrinking as fast as Fred was always growing. My dad moved from the south into the stifling backstreets of the north and eventual unemployment; Fred moved from the north to the south and eventually Jean Harlow and four wives, having spent enough time in Stockport never to lose his single-minded determination to get on, to get away from the base that moulded his fortitude and head where the action was. My dad was dead on course for an abrupt end inside the 1970s – a couple of decades ahead of Fred, born twenty-seven years before my dad – which would require a different sort of wreath.
After Woodsmoor and losing his job at Shell, losing his interest in playing table tennis and never really getting another proper full-time job, he kept trying one way or another for a few more years, not yet totally losing interest in life. We moved, when my sister Jayne was eleven, a few miles to the east, back towards the Pennines, to Offerton, very close to the school she was now attending – Goyt Bank Secondary School – with the Goyt flowing past between Marple and Stockport at the bottom of the school playing fields, on its way a few miles down to the north-west, where it would become the Mersey, passing near Carrington Street, where Fred Perry had been born. The move to Offerton was not a step up the social ladder, but it was still the right side of the Mersey, the Cheshire side, and instead of towards salubrious Bramhall it was towards pretty Marple and the tranquil, appealing Derbyshire border. My dad lost his garage, his modest driveway; the gold Vauxhall disappeared, and nothing as modern ever replaced it, but he gained a rough patch of green in front of our house, around which plain, modest but perky semi-detached houses were arranged. We were moving about but staying where we were. We were on a slow tour of Stockport, circling the racy source of the Mersey, with the newbuild shopping centre still at the centre of our world. Near our house in Offerton there was a miniaturised version of Merseyway, a compact pedestrianised precinct containing a few shops that demonstrated how the spirit of the precinct was moving through the country, removing nicely mismatched local shops, their faithful owners and their hardy awnings.
A BEA Viscount 701 at Manchester Ringway Airport
It was while we were living in Offerton, with Dad clearly not sure from day to day which way to turn next, that our collective family energy started to wind down, so that we barely noticed the effects when, for four months, the commercial use of electric power was reduced to just three consecutive days a week. This was caused by a coal shortage, the result of a fierce battle of wills between the powerful National Union of Mineworkers and Ted Heath’s unbending Conservative government, which searched for ways to conserve dwindling coal stock, and began an assault on the power of the trade unions that would continue throughout the 1970s. (My dad the Heath supporter viewed Heath’s great rival Harold Wilson as scheming and manipulative, and he easily made it through the 1960s without picking up any hint of fashionable disaffection with government and institutions, deeply suspicious of those who challenged authority and questioned Establishment practices. He would have probably appreciated Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Conservative backlash against post-sixties radicalism and general cultural disobedience.) The TV ended early, heating was unreliable, candles often required; food supplies were threatened – not that that made much difference to our sparse store cupboards, which were never known to contain enough food to last more than a couple of days. It became known as the three-day week, but by then all my dad’s weeks had a three-day quality, severely limited by uncontrollable forces and the battle of wills going on inside his head: three days of action, falling towards two days, and then one day, on the way to no days at all.
It was still a walk to school for me, but it took a little longer than from Woodsmoor, cutting down from Offerton to the Buxton Road. The journey into Stockport town centre on the number 16, which involved a gradual drop in height and then a final plunge through the medieval twists and turns around Hillgate into Mersey Square, and then on the 92, rising on the monotonously straight A6 through the nondescript Heatons and hum-drum, secretive Levenshulme to Manchester’s broadening city centre, became increasingly important to me. The borders to my inner and outer world were pushed further out, incorporating more land and landmarks, and bookshops, and record shops, and opportunities to define and refine who I was, and extend my own personal imaginative space.
My new identity, forged by the time I was thirteen and fourteen, based on my life in Reddish, corrupted by my time at Stockport Grammar School, embedded in various forms of self-education, started to involve various venues around Manchester where I went to see gigs.
Before I started to go to pop concerts as a fourteen-year-old, especially while I lived in Reddish, nights out had often involved visits with family or friends to Belle Vue, the ‘showground of the north’, a fantastical, absurd combination of the first privately funded zoo in the country, funfair, flea circus, Louis Tussaud waxworks, stock-car and speedway stadium, gardens, exhibition hall, circus and King’s Hall concert, boxing and wrestling venue, a couple of miles the other side of Gorton and Longsight from Westbourne Grove. (On 24 July 1926 Belle Vue held Britain’s first licensed greyhound meeting, using a recently invented American system with a mechanical lure and a track covered with straw. It was attended by 1,700 people. Manchester was considered a good place to hold the meeting because of its sp
orting and gambling tradition. As the Manchester Guardian put it, the crowd consisted of ‘fat men, very agile and earnest men with flat-brimmed bowlers, men with large confident silver name-plates in their buttonholes . . . smart young men and smart young women’. They watched six races each with seven greyhounds; the winner of the first race by eight lengths with a prize of £10 was Mistley at 6–1, racing 440 yards in 25 seconds. Word spread quickly. A week later 16,000 turned up, and 330,000 paid for admission in the first eleven weeks. A year later greyhound racing began at White City, home of the 1908 Olympic Games in London. Going to the dogs became a national pastime, working people appreciating the easily accessed urban tracks and the evening race times, with betting the main reason to go. Speedway started at the greyhound stadium in 1928 before moving to its own Hyde Road stadium a year later, where the Belle Vue Aces speedway team was founded.)
Belle Vue was a gaudy, faded inner-city simulation of seaside Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach that merely took a short bus ride to Denton and then a few more stops on another bus along the Hyde Road towards Kirkmanshulme Lane, which headed into Longsight. Among the bricks, run-down shops, bedraggled houses, broken windows and weather-beaten gasworks of the slimy, sorry Hyde Road, suddenly there were screeching monkeys in the middle of cramped concrete, rubble and metal, the huge entrance gates, glimpses of a high, high and menacing wooden roller coaster called The Bobs – a shilling, a bob, a ride in the thirties – flashing above the caged Gorton skyline, and a building sense of expectation intensified when the tangled smell of fried onions and petrol fumes got stuck into your nose. Looking back, it could be that the place never existed and was merely a kid’s dream, a fantasy of an imaginary place that could never have been, that was nowhere, because places as pleasure-packed with physical and metaphysical contradictions are impossible to build and can only be remembered.
Near your house in an ordinary street close to nowhere was a place where you could see fireworks splashing and bursting across the black sky; see explosive stock-car carnage; be too thrillingly scared at the thought of going on the swooping, rattling rollercoaster which looked like it could take on Houldsworth Mill in a monster fight and win, squeezing the life out of it, and which came with the sort of desperate screaming that confirmed there was real terror; watch the Belle Vue Aces on a Saturday night in the illuminated drizzly dark, stand on a corner and be drenched with sodden grey–red ashes as the rasping, slanting, 70-mph bikes skidded pressed to the ground right past you; see a polar bear that looked depressed, a giraffe bending over your head looking related (from where I was) to a dinosaur, chimpanzees morosely taking tea, a hippo sleeping in a pool, camels daydreaming above a boating lake, a numb-looking zebra, a lost-looking kangaroo, parrots that told you to bugger off; take a ride on an elephant or a ghost train or a miniature railway or the creaking but once-lovely Waterchute that eventually received a transfer into some obscure part of Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Belle Vue had begun as a humble early-nineteenth-century attraction founded by Stockport gardener and aviary owner ‘Honest’ John Jennison on a stretch of scrub and moorland used for rabbit coursing around a public house called Belle Vue near Ardwick Green. He took out a six-month lease on the land and planned relaxing botanical gardens with a few animals for extra interest. Within a year of its 1836 opening an advert in the Manchester Guardian stated that visitors could expect to see parrots, macaws, cockatoos, pheasants, peacocks, swans, geese, a borrowed pelican and various other animals (rabbits, dogs, goats, deer and a fox). Entry was threepence, for which patrons would also receive a drink and some biscuits. Jennison extended his lease to ninety-nine years. People came more for the animals than the gardens, and wilder, more exotic animals such as armadillos, monkeys, bears, kangaroos and an elephant were introduced. The elephant was bought for £680 from a menagerie in Edinburgh, and ended up walking for ten days with its handler Lorenzo Lawrence to Manchester after it wrecked the railway carriage that was meant to carry it south – an accidental or intended publicity stunt. After its death in 1882 a use was still found for Maharajah the elephant – its scrubbed, majestic skeleton became part of the eccentrically assembled attractions, eventually ending up in Manchester Museum, alongside other animals that died after service at Belle Vue zoo.
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Jennison family relentlessly expanded, landscaped and marketed the park and gardens with grafting, speculative Victorian economic purpose. With huckster passion and a hustler’s zeal, they attempted to eradicate boredom and misery, at least inside their artificial world. Brass-band competitions were held; firework displays took place, mazes, grottoes, roller-skating courts, sea-lion pools and boating lakes built, seductively isolated from but readily available to the real world. By 1925 the Jennison family had sold their attraction, and the zoo was transformed into a prototype theme park with the addition of the circus, stock cars, speedway, lakes, bang-up-to-date thrill rides, scenic railway, miniature village, ballrooms, ten-pin bowling – a layering, sense-overloading accumulation of fictional stages, fake spaces, simulated experiences, controlled dreams, pirate fantasies and epic caricatures of everyday life. For decades Belle Vue had an ebullient distorted grandness that mixed the seedy with the sensational, the quirky with the electric. In the 1940s and fifties at the height of its fame over 150,000 people would visit over an average bank holiday weekend, escaping one world to enter another, then escaping back into a now more charged and attractively less certain place.
In 1948 Mancunian Films detoured from its usual haywire comedy films, featuring excitable local music-hall acts from George Formby Junior and Frank Randle to Sandy Powell, and released The International Circus Revue. It used documentary footage shot around the pleasure gardens by Mancunian, material the company used in a number of films. The flimsy plot wrapped around the footage featured Bunny Graham, later to be known as Bernard Youens, who played Stan Ogden in Coronation Street from 1964. As Stan, married to faithful curlered Hilda, struggling against decades of rotten luck, he drifted from job to job, and was at first susceptible to violent rages. At various times, after years as a long-distance lorry driver, he was a milkman (early mornings compensated for by afternoons in the pub), a coal man, an ice-cream salesman, a chauffeur, a street photographer, a professional wrestler (in his only match he was thrown from the ring into wife Hilda’s lap) and an artist (creating sculptures from scrap metal; this backfired when his masterpiece was taken to the tip by mistake). However, in 1969 Stan bought a window-cleaning round, and this would remain his main means of support for the rest of his life. His first line, delivered in the Rovers Return, was ‘A pint of mild and twenty fags, missus.’ (Ogden, called ‘ghastly’, perhaps affectionately, by Sir John Betjeman, was a classic cartoon image of the oafish beer-swilling betting northern loafer, a warning to potential layabouts yet to lose their ardour and ambition, although Youens started out at Granada Television in its early days as a ‘velvet-voiced’ continuity announcer.)
By the 1970s Belle Vue was run-down and shabby, the spirited entrepreneurial momentum that had taken it from the 1850s to the 1950s at a pitiful end, the threadbare zoo heart-breaking, a badly maintained home for distressed animals, and the park falling behind the faster modern world, where reality was turning into a disorientating model of itself. Entering Belle Vue was less and less an escape into romance and exotica and increasingly a poignant visit to a fatigued zone of abandonment and despair.
An annual lick of cheap paint, the surviving circus tent, the non-stop Aces and hurtling rides didn’t disguise the fact that as a flamboyant fun complex Belle Vue reflected how the enterprising industrial city that once supported and used it for recreation and wonder had itself broken down. Cheery, kinetic Belle Vue became a derelict extravaganza in a ramshackle part of the city where acres of slum houses had been ruthlessly cleared away leaving brutalised remains. What had once strained to be more Las Vegas or Disneyland than Blackpool had shrunk to a fenced-in ghost town, and the city lost s
ome of the messier, pushier, wayward but exciting parts of its soul. The great, magnificently discordant profit-making industrial city had been replaced by a provisional half-hearted hybrid of the tentatively new and the torn apart, and, to the frayed east of the city, Belle Vue simply fell apart, as a going concern, as a special world apart, as wished-for reality, as if to show how the madly marvellous elements of Manchester had been chased away. The collapsed utopia inside the park proved as frail and stressful as the reality outside.
Despite its position in the middle of the dereliction, the wooden King’s Hall still had commercial merit in the early 1970s as a concert venue, and could hold a couple of thousand more than the Free Trade Hall in the city centre. The Free Trade Hall was where I had seen my first ever pop concert – T-Rex in 1971, as a fourteen-year-old travelling on my own on the 192 bus into the city centre and encountering a revelation. The north, my home, was still what it was, home, but it was now splitting off into new directions, an endless, stimulating other place always on the shifting verge of elsewhere. The gorgeously self-conscious attention-seeking exhibitionist Marc Bolan had become my own personal pop star, a replacement or supplement to the thrills and otherness collected and displayed at Belle Vue, a supplier of an intense fluid form of happiness, and here he was, in Manchester, within touching distance, infecting, intensifying my restricted local terrain.
Manchester, its compressed, ruined, resilient city centre laced with stagnant, abandoned canals, apparently derelict warehouses, grand but spooky remnants of the city’s glory years, rough-and-ready curry houses, random, reconditioned post-war newbuilds and truncated boarded-up backstreets, was now becoming part of my mental map, along with the tantalising, transient pop music that visited and left, and the two things fused for a while as I went to more gigs. These concerts, and the city that was emerging in my consciousness, beyond Stockport, became the centre of my learning, along with the reading that I made up as I went along, which had nothing to do with the Stockport Grammar School curriculum.
