The North

by Paul Morley

  95

  Guy Fawkes was born in York in 1570, probably at a house in Stonegate. He was baptised in St Michael le Belfry church on 16 April, three days after his birth. His father, Edward, a prominent Protestant in the city, died when Guy was only eight. His mother remarried, to a recusant Catholic, and they moved to the village of Scotton near Knaresborough. Fawkes’ father was descended from the Fawkeses of Farnley and was either a notary or proctor of the ecclesiastic courts and an advocate in the consistory court of the Archbishop of York. His mother was a Harrington, eminent merchants and aldermen of the city.

  1569

  The division of England into north and south can be traced back to the Romans. In the early third century ad Britannia was divided in two, with the north of England being granted the status of a separate province, Britannia Inferior, with its capital at Eboracum (York). The north was less settled, the scene of constant scuffles and disagreements with truculent, restless local tribes, and the border (Hadrian’s Wall) was falling into disrepair. As a result there was a strong military presence. The lowlands of the south-east were more prosperous, populated by those who had largely embraced the Roman way of life, and consequently were given more freedom in their own affairs, with a consular government based in Londinium (London). This was Britannia Superior.

  Around ad 296 the provinces were restructured again, by the Emperor Diocletian, who split each one in two. Britannia Superior in the south became Britannia Prima in the west, governed from Cirencester, and Maxima Caeseriensis in the east, governed from London. Britannia Inferior in the north became Flavia Caeseriensis, controlled from Lincoln, and, up to Hadrian’s Wall, Britannia Secunda.

  The relationship between north and south then ran through a remarkably regular cycle of independence and centralisation, fluctuating over periods of roughly 200 years. The last major attempt by the north to impose its will by force occurred with the rising of the northern earls in 1569. These magnates were unhappy with the Protestant Queen Elizabeth on the throne, and wished to replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The rebellion was launched at Brancepeth Castle, seat of the Neville family. The Neville fortress at Raby was also involved. It was a disaster for the north. About 400 people were executed, and fines crippled the northern economy, which did not recover for 200 years. The succession of James I in 1603 also had the effect of marginalising the north once again. As James was also King of Scotland, the border ceased to have any significance. The north was no longer a vital frontier zone; it was just the north again, a marginal area.

  Part Ten

  There must be change

  I was led to think that the smallest things may be secret mirrors of the past and that perhaps everything is a lock that might open a door somewhere or somehow.

  Thomas De Quincey

  96

  For those relatively few curious onlookers who turned up to see the Sex Pistols play at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976 it was not a watershed. It didn’t seem to be a momentous time when busted post-war Britain needed something to happen or it might come to a halt and then float away from Europe, into a cold isolated zone closer to Iceland and Greenland than the dominant, controlling centre of the world. None of that was apparent. In the 1970s there was not yet the frenetic information-age level of self-awareness and self-analysis about contemporary political and cultural currents, the propulsive, distorting energy of instant hindsight and the urgent making of connections. It wasn’t so easy to save up the past alongside the events of the day, and parade it all for immediate consumption and grading. We were simply where we were, and life was happening around us, happening to us, as absurd and frustrating as it all seemed.

  We were all of an age that meant that we came to music after the 1960s, missing out on all the trends, clubs, events, styles, fashions that emerged and developed back then, too young for the Twisted Wheel, vaguely feeling that we needed to find something that belonged to us, and represented where we were in social, political, cultural time and space, which was already something distant from the sixties and the early 1970s. We all read the music magazines, or we would not have turned up; we were looking for action, wherever it happened.

  We were all used to going to the Free Trade Hall to see concerts, because it was a fixture on all major tours by the main groups of the time. The gig we went to on 4 June was for most of us where we ourselves entered history, as a series of events, or one event adrift among many others that would be stored and pored over. We found that we were on our own, but we belonged to something in particular. It was definitely for me the first time that I connected with the history of the city, without it becoming apparent for decades. That history was channelled through the visiting Sex Pistols, so that my interests in music and ideas, in local interests and wider desires, collided inside a unique space that had opened up because of what had happened in Manchester over the last few hundred years, and what was happening in culture at a certain moment in turbulent, trapped post-war British society.

  The Sex Pistols arrived in this damaged northern realm as an underground rumour, an emerging, possibly demented pop craze, with something of the impact of pioneers who indirectly understood what the nineteenth-century poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold wrote in his book of essays, Culture and Anarchy – that the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. ‘The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still reaming the best knowledge and thoughts of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.’ And here were the Sex Pistols, tearaways in torn trousers that quite possibly had P for pauper, or pervert, or punk, but even philosopher, stamped on the backsides, bringing forth a whole new notion of sweetness and light. From where I had ended up, they were bringing culture, although at the time to me they were clearly the most exciting thing around if you wanted to know exactly where pop music was and where it was heading, and if you thought that was important.

  The original Free Trade Hall was built in 1838 on the corner of St Peter Street and Southmill Street, formerly known as South Street. This first structure took the form of a temporary wooden hall, which was built (reportedly by a hundred men in a hundred days) to hold protest meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League – working people protesting against the 1815 Corn Laws, which kept the cost of the common man’s staple food high. This was replaced in 1842 by a sturdier but aesthetically unimpressive brick building which also became the venue for concerts and entertainment. Demand soon grew for a grander building, which led to the opening of a third Free Trade Hall in 1856. The architect was one of Manchester’s most prominent, Edward Walters, who won the competition for a public hall to dignify a site associated with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws. Walters’ way of doing this was to make the hall appear to emerge, with cogent splendour, out of a Mancunian-inspired Victorian fantasy of self-assured Roman glory.

  Walters had also designed Harvest House, located at the end of Mosley Street, near Piccadilly, the first of the scaled-up palazzo-style warehouses to be built in the commercial quarter of the city centre. It dates from 1839 and was built as the offices of the charismatic radical liberal thinker, Richard Cobden, the champion of Manchester manufacturers, the prime political representative of the industrial north at a time when such men saw the government in Westminster as still run by the ignorant, semi-rural feudal south.

  Cobden was actually born near Midhurst, in west Sussex, in 1804, and spent his early life in poverty. The son of a failed farmer, sent to an uncle in Yorkshire, who treated him badly, he received little schooling and at fourteen became a clerk in the textile industry. His first known visit to Manchester was in 1825 as a commercial traveller. By 1832, a successful calico printer, relishing the fortune
that could be made in Lancashire at the time by the skilled and ambitious, Cobden was living in Manchester, on Quay Street. One of the country’s best-travelled men, he journeyed all over the world and developed a wide interest in history, economics, literature and foreign affairs. He came to believe that British foreign policy benefited the Establishment but handicapped ordinary working people. Writing as ‘a Manchester manufacturer’, he wrote two influential foreign policy pamphlets, England, Ireland and America, and Russia, which contained the essence of his thinking: ‘It is labour improvements and discoveries that confer the greatest strength upon a people. By these alone and not by the sword of the conqueror, can nations in modern and all future times hope to rise to power and grandeur.’

  In the late 1830s, a fierce opponent of social injustice, Cobden’s interests were more local. Writing under another anonymous name, Libra, he published many letters in the Manchester Times discussing commercial and economic questions and became a conspicuous figure in Manchester political and intellectual life. He championed the foundation of the Manchester Athenaeum (a society for the ‘advancement and diffusion of knowledge’) after seeing similar institutions in America, delivered its inaugural address, and was elected to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. In 1838 he became Alderman Cobden of Manchester in the city’s first municipal elections, having played a leading part in the campaign for the incorporation of Britain’s principal industrial town, which had previously been governed by the baronial court of Sir Oswald Mosley. His pamphlet ‘Incorporate Your Borough’ portrayed the struggle as one of democracy versus privilege, the rights of the productive classes against the rapacious aristocracy.

  Cobden’s attack on what he saw as an example of feudal governance was followed by his assumption of the leadership of Manchester’s campaign against the Corn Laws, which he saw as the citadel of aristocratic self-interest within the British state. As one of the seven founding members of the Anti-Corn Law League, he set out not only to rid Britain of the laws, which restricted the importation of grain to shield British farmers from competition, but to shape the identity of Britain’s entrepreneurs as a new social and political elite. ‘The corn laws,’ he wrote, ‘take from the poorest of the poor to give to the richest of the rich.’ The novelist William Thackeray predicted that Cobden could be a future prime minister. Between 1841 and 1847 he was MP for Stockport, giving him a national platform, and Robert Peel credited Cobden as the main influence on the repeal of the laws. The idealistic, passionate Cobden had done something that for years had seemed impossible: broken the power of the landowners and opened up the British market for grain to free trade.

  Cobden was also a dedicated campaigner for the world abolition of slavery and enjoyed considerable popular support. With the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, he made many inspirational anti-slavery speeches in Parliament and at large public meetings in and around Rochdale. After a period as MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire, he was Rochdale’s MP from 1859 until his death on 2 April 1865, one week before the Confederate surrender that signalled the end of the war and only twelve days before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

  ‘I see in the free trade principle that which will act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe – drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creeds and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace . . . I believe the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails. I believe the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires and gigantic armies and great navies . . . will die away . . . when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.’

  Apart from everything else, he helped provide the land for the building of the Free Trade Hall, one of Manchester’s most notable buildings, which became the permanent home of Hallé’s industrious orchestra; where in 1872 Benjamin Disraeli defended and praised Conservative principles and denounced radical forces in a landmark speech; where Manchester’s first cinema show was held in 1896, a programme of Lumière brothers films presented by the eccentric, multi-skilled mime, magician and tightrope walker, Félicien Trewey; where Churchill in 1904 as MP for Oldham spoke ‘in this great hall’ for ninety minutes in passionate favour of free trade; where the first suffragette protest was held in 1905, Christabel Pankhurst and a mill worker called Annie Kenney being ejected from the hall for interrupting a Liberal Party rally, then being arrested for obstruction outside, which instigated the Woman’s Social and Political Union campaign for the vote; where Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in 1908; and where anti-Semitic Mussolini admirer Oswald Mosley addressed a capacity audience of the British Union of Fascists in 1933, being heckled by Coronation Street writer Jack Rosenthal’s father, who got beaten up for his trouble.

  Around 1910 Ludwig Wittgenstein would dress up to visit the Free Trade Hall and whistle intently through entire symphonies as the Austro-Hungarian Hans Richter, director of the Hallé Orchestra between 1899 and 1911, colleague of Richard Wagner, dedicatee of Elgar’s First Symphony, conducted Brahms, Bruckner and Beethoven. The uniquely attentive Wittgenstein heard, perhaps, even though he had no words for what he would say, how the music should be played now that the age of mechanical reproduction was taking over and changing everything. In the late 1920s the twelve-year-old Anthony Burgess was taken by his father to the Free Trade Hall to see the Hallé Orchestra perform Wagner. A few of the musicians were Burgess’s father’s drinking pals, and the visit was part of his campaign to seduce, or perhaps distract, his antsy son with the power of music, which eventually succeeded to such an extent that by his late teens Burgess was determined to be a composer. The teenager became so curious about what music looked like, written down as a visual language, that in 1934 he would visit the newly opened Central Library, a Roman-inspired circular building on St Peter’s Square abutting the triangular town hall a hundred yards from the Free Trade Hall, and sit in its vast light-filled reading hall poring over scores by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, wondering what made them tick. At the time it was the largest library in the country provided by a local authority, excitedly visited by Ewan McColl on its opening day, a favourite spot of Coronation Street creator Tony Warren and Shabby Tiger author Howard Spring.

  Burgess’s first visit to the Free Trade Hall was not a great success, as Wagner failed to astonish him in the life-changing way hearing Debussy’s modern-minded, erotically alert Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune did a few years later on a crystal radio set he built himself – silvery wine flowing in a spaceship. With his dad, hearing Wagner solidly played by the disciplined Hallé, which he would later come to appreciate for introducing him to a wider classical repertoire, he was a little bored, and because they were standing at the back of the hall, his legs got tired. Enough stuck, though, to make him understand that serious music could be as memorable as the raucous dance tunes he enjoyed. He later remarked that the ‘heating grilles at the back of the Free Trade Hall gave off a strange musty smell which I was to meet again in Fraser and Neave’s tonic water in Singapore’.

  And then, forty-seven years later, in the Lesser Free Trade Hall, up above the main hall, more of a compact lecture theatre than a hall, a smell of Establishment polish merging with the lingering mustiness sensed by Burgess, playing rock music that was not necessarily revolutionary, but using provocative, restless language and looking as though they knew much more than their soft northern audience about the radical, political and theatrical history of the building and the rebellious air in and around the place, the Sex Pistols, as insurgent outsiders, took their place in Manchester history.

  Much has been written and said about who was in the small audience for that first Sex Pistols show, but there was some phantom presence of the writer of A Clockwork Orange, a book exploring the importance of moral freedom, who believed that art must be dangerous or it was pointless, curiously sniffing the air, while Wittgenstein’s ter
se note that ‘music conveys to us itself’ was living some sort of unearthly afterlife, and the ghost of the free-spirited Cobden – a preacher of the values of civilisation, demanding practical achievement and progress, intellectually internationalist but profoundly English, keenly aware of the various sorts of bondage that needed to be broken in a country where education was monopolised by the well off, where political and social tyranny was exercised by the aristocracy, the man who had achieved a revolutionary transformation of the business policy of the greatest commercial country in the world, who negotiated life as a series of engagements and personal reinventions – was perhaps looking on with some approval.

  Those of us there were not aware of any ghosts around us, but we were all about to become ghosts, ones that exist in the memory, and sometimes in history, which is silent and full of omissions, a hurricane of energy, another dimension, the history you can find ways to write about yourself, for yourself, as far as you can tell.

  97

  Google ‘Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall 1976’ or simply ‘June 4 1976’ and you can use the resultant 10,700,000 pieces of information to piece together a crudely helpful history of: (a) post-Hollies and -10cc Manchester music, (b) the birth of indie music and (c) the ‘greatest gig of all time’ that ‘changed music for ever’. The fact that if you Google ‘I swear I was there’ you come across more details about that Sex Pistols performance emphasises the show’s reputation, not least because, and this has become an integral element in the ensuing mythologising of the gig, that not that many people bought the fifty-pence tickets but thousands now claim they did, so that the book written about what happened is called I Swear I Was There, with the sub-title The Gig That Changed the World.