I come from a hick town. There are 100,000 people there, a third of a million if you count the borough, and at the time of writing we are the only town in Britain to have a Premiership football team and a Super League rugby side. But we are eternally, perennially, irredeemably hick. I only have to tell people in Guildford or Maidstone or Purfleet where I'm from and they begin to chortle, rolling the name around their mouth like an Uncle Joe's Mint Ball. Wigan: the Gabrovo, the Emden, the Oshkosh of Britain.
I don't mean the above to sound defensive but I bet it does, particularly if you're reading this in Aylesbury. I feel about Wigan like I feel about Catholicism, like some do about Hartlepool United or folk music. Being steeped in it, I'm allowed to make fun of it; I can sit around with like-minded friends and laugh about the lack of a decent Thai restaurant in Whelley or the townie beer monsters on King Street, or for that matter the flaws in the notions of purgatory or transubstantiation. But woe betide any 'outsider' who rattles our cage. Like a south central gangsta bandying the 'N' word with his homies, we have the credentials. We've earned the right to self-deprecate the hard way. We're allowed to take the piss. But if anyone else should – God forbid, a southerner – then hackles rise, whatever hackles are. I'm not proud of this. It's just the way things are. Outsiders making fun of our home town is fighting talk where I come from. Mind you, everything is fighting talk where I come from. I come from Wigan.
Even one of my favourite writers couldn't resist having a pop. On his famous English Journey, J. B. Priestley noted, 'Between Manchester and Bolton, the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there. That is probably the secret of the Lancashire working folk; they have accepted the challenge – they are on active service.' Of course, there speaks a Yorkshireman.
Eddie Waring didn't help the cause of Wigan's acceptance into polite, smart society. A famous rugby league commentator of the seventies and a small chap with a bizarre voice to boot, he was unequivocally daft, progressively more so once he became Stuart Hall's straight-ish man on It's a Knockout. His baroque style became a staple of bad seventies impressionists. 'Ah-Wig-anne ... in the ah ... hyooped sharts...' For years afterwards, if you didn't actually have a sense of humour, you only had to say 'Ah-Wig-anne' in the correct dopey intonation to get a cheap laugh, before you moved onto Pakis and mothers-in-law.
You can't argue with the fact that certain northern towns just sound funny. Because our place names reflect our Viking origins, the sounds are often guttural and wild to the gentle ear of the Home County dweller. Into this category, we can put Oswaldtwistle, Barnoldswick, Cleckheaton and Heckmondwike, places which actually sound like driving hail on a tin shed or the clacking of ill-fitting false teeth. Others appeal to the eternal schoolboy who sleeps within every one of us: Ramsbottom, Scunthorpe, Grimsby, Goole, Penistone. Wigan, though, isn't that side-splitting a name if you think about it. My town has been a comedy staple for many years purely by virtue of its associations – chiefly poverty, pies and piers.
Our associations with poverty stem from a visitor we had once in the 1930s. Eric Blair was a well-to-do southerner, an old Etonian who served in the Imperial Police in India. But his experiences there and among the poor of Paris and London changed him for ever. He cast off Eric Blair and became George Orwell, who in the mid-1930s travelled to Wigan at the instigation of the Left Book Club to write about the working class of the depressed north.
He lodged in various parts of the town and was appalled at what he saw. He couldn't believe the circumstances people lived in, or the vile and dangerous conditions in which they were expected to work. His descriptions of the hovels and slums of Wigan and the conditions of the pits and factories are written with a kind of cold rage that echoes down the years.
Orwell was the exact opposite of the modern left-winger, that delicate flower who marches against foreign wars and gets exercised over smoking bans but will not dirty his hands with anything as grubby or difficult as class and capital. He had little time for what we might call political correctness, multi-culturalism or moral relativism. His sympathies lay with those poor bastards at the bottom of the heap, below the bottom actually, lying on their stomachs chipping coal in water and blackness or, when they couldn't do that, wheezing in damp beds in the back streets of Wigan. As he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell knew that it was 'so much easier to feel yourself a Socialist when you are among working-class people. The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doctrine ... but he has the heart of the matter in him... The profoundest philosophical difference is unimportant compared with saving the twenty million Englishmen whose bones are rotting from malnutrition – the time to argue about them is afterwards.'
The Left Book Club hated The Road to Wigan Pier. They even tried to prevent publication. Publisher Victor Gollancz inserted a foreword distancing himself from Orwell's attack on the intellectual left. Orwell was vilified in the pages of British communist and socialist literature. He didn't care. He was too busy getting shot in the throat in Spain fighting for freedom, an altogether more dangerous assignment.
Though he was posh to his bones, Orwell's sympathies always lay with the working class. He had no time for George Bernard Shaw and his ilk, 'the more-water-in-the-beer socialist' as he scornfully called them. He liked a pint and a fag. So he'd be delighted to know that we've named a pub after him.
The Orwell stands on the jetties of Wigan Pier between an old mill that's now a concert hall and the backstreets of Miry Lane, presumably a swamp once, maybe even when George lodged here. It's never been a local of mine, though I did go through a phase in my early twenties of dropping in to clean out the money in the quiz machine on Monday lunchtimes after daft drunks had been feeding it all weekend. It's an ordinary boozer really. However, it's always been the most controversial alehouse in town.
When it was proposed that Wigan should have a pub named after the man who made us famous – and that's with all due respect to Dave Whelan, Billy Boston, Ian McKellen, Paul Jewell, Richard Ashcroft and the rest – a great many of the town's more clueless council types almost burst their aldermanry waistcoats in a mass harrumph. Hadn't he run the town down at every turn? Emphasised the emphysema and stressed the squalor instead of perhaps pointing out the excellent surrounding countryside or state-of-the-art bandstand in Mesnes Park?
Having never read The Road to Wigan Pier, they had, naturally, missed its point; an occupational hazard of not reading, listening to or watching things you pontificate about. It's a sustained polemic, a tour de force of reportage intended to inflame and anger. It's not a flipping tourist guide. The Wigan that Orwell found in 1936 was a grim, beleaguered slum (so was a great deal of Europe actually – designer outlets and frappuccino bars were pretty scarce back then). Orwell didn't flinch from telling the leafy shires of southern England just what life in the north was like. But he never sneers, he never mocks. The Road to Wigan Pier is a call to arms, not a hatchet job.
Some people have just come here to sneer and mock, though. Charles Jennings's 1995 book, Up North, is essentially an extended sarcastic diatribe intended, one assumes, to amuse people from Streatham. I found it about as funny as leprosy but then I'm a northerner; presumably too doltish to appreciate its withering wit. Jennings' book, it seems to me, is exactly what the misinformed think Orwell's is: lazy, contemptuous hackery from a posh, soft southerner. He considers visiting some other towns with 'resolutely northern handles' like, of course, Ramsbottom and Oswaldtwistle, but eventually picks Wigan because Jennings has read half of The Road to Wigan Pier. 'Mostly Wigan is a lot of hilly streets with gales blowing down them and lots of beaten-up people,' he concludes. You get the picture. And he's wrong. I think he must be thinking of Pendle.
I think Jennings, like Wigan's dozier officials, misreads Orwell as a scornful attack on the town. He cites a famous passage about the food on offer at his lodgings. 'The meals at the Brookers' house were uniformly disgusting... However tactfully I tried,
I could never induce Mr Brooker to let me cut my own bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumbs. For dinner there were generally those threepenny steak puddings which are sold ready-made in tins. For supper there was the pale flabby Lancashire cheese and biscuits.'
I have to say that I'm with Orwell on Lancashire cheese; anaemic, crumbly and tasting faintly of soap, the only way my grandmother could get me to eat it was by melting it on sausages. The reason she was so keen for me to consume the stuff was that she seemed to regard not liking it as an act of regional treachery tantamount to wearing a cravat or voting Conservative.
But, come on, British food in general must have been frightful in the 1930s. Lunch at The Ivy was probably cold brown Windsor soup followed by fillet of shoe leather with boiled turnip followed by lard and junket. It doesn't surprise me that Mr Brooker was sticking his dirty thumbs in the butter. It probably gave it a bit of flavour.
When southern gourmands discuss the shortcomings of the north, their plump lips pursed in displeasure, food is often chief among them. They may have a point. Even when I was a child in the sixties and seventies there was a deep-seated suspicion regarding people who got too excited about food, as if it spoke of an overtly sensual nature and moral laxity, like cigarette holders and bisexuality. Food was 'jackbit', 'scran' or 'nosebag'; fuel to be consumed in haste, taken to work or school wrapped in that unpleasantly greasy 'greaseproof' paper that bread used to come in.
Vegetables were boiled to within inches of their lives. If a trace of flavour remained, it was regarded as troubling evidence that the wretched tuber or crop hadn't been 'done' enough and would probably give you cholera. Every Sunday, a low green cloud of sulphurous cabbage would hang in the house all day, making even a reasonably cheery toddler's thoughts turn, by early evening, to the gentle consolations of suicide.
Home cooking never had the wholesome connotations to me it had to others. My aforementioned grandmother spent half the week baking and, bless her, the results were always terrible. Her blackcurrant tart was a glutinous mess of acidic fruit encased in flaccid pastry. No wonder I was so keen on convenience food. When I was about eight, I went to some kind of trade show in Wigan Park where Heinz, paternalistic local employers of thousands, had a food stall. A nice lady offered me a small plastic pot of a new line of theirs, Spaghetti Bolognese in a tin. I thought my head was going to explode. I felt like Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead must have done when they first took acid. Whole new vistas of monosodium glutamate and preservatives opened up to me. About six months ago, in an effort to get a Proustian rush, I bought a tin of the said Spaghetti Bolognese. It tasted like cold, rancid fishing bait. But back then, to a small boy weaned on leathery cabbage and doughy tarts, it tasted like liberation. I had tasted the future and it worked, Mum.
Some people, particularly of the older generation, get very partisan about northern food. The more disgusting its provenance, the more robust they get in its defence. Take tripe, for instance. Ever had it? Don't. It's absolutely vile. But my grandmother was forever trying to get me to eat it. Corrugated, slimy, cow's stomach lining drenched in malt vinegar? Yummo! Hand it over with all speed, Gran!
Often the wholesome names of Lancashire foods disguise their essential horror. Trotters, which sound quite cuddly, are boiled pig's feet. Haslet is basically compressed pig's face and is quite simply one of the most repulsive things I have ever tasted. Don't even get me started on brawn and tongue.
Black puddings, mark you, are something entirely different. A prince of foods and deserving of a fuller discussion in a little while. But one food more than any other has become proudly, humorously emblematic of the north in general, Lancashire particularly and my home town of Wigan specifically.
There are competing theories as to why Wiganers are known as Pie-Eaters. According to one, we acquired the name not because of our love of the pastry savoury, but from Wigan's abject collapse in the General Strike of 1926. Apparently, Wiganers took what managers offered, ate the humble pie that was being served up, and helped to break the strike thus gaining the contempt of workers in surrounding areas. The story goes that, in an act of defiance, Wigan folk reclaimed the 'pie-eating' insult and transformed it into a battle standard.
Personally, I'm very sceptical of this. I can't find any historical evidence for it and it sounds suspiciously like a terrible slur put about by Boltonians and jealous St Heleners. The truth, I fancy, is far more prosaic. Wiganers just really, really like pies. Hey, what's not to like? We can reel off the various bakeries and the top marques of this lovely lardy universe as if they were a mantra. First there are the major players of the pie world: Galloways, Greenhalgh's, Holland's, Sayers, Rathbones. Then there are the spirited independents like Twiss in Ince, Mr Muffin in Shevington and The Old Bakehouse in Orrell; real connoisseurs will take a bus trip to stock up on fare from these cult mavericks.
At the other end of the spectrum is that problematic, paternalistic pastry pariah Greggs. When John Gregg began making and selling pies in the 1930s, he had a single shop on Tyneside with a bijou bakery at the rear. When he died suddenly in 1964, his son Ian abandoned a legal career to take over the business. Smart cookie. Or pasty. Greggs now has more than 1,000 UK outlets and profits approaching £50 million per annum. But since they are not a Wigan pie maker, our respect is always grudging. They're too mainstream, too ubiquitous, too homogenous. They ruthlessly annexed the excellent Birkett's of Cumbria, whose Garlic Mushroom Slice was fabled among hungry northern vegetarians. And there's that difficult reputation as caterer in chief to Chav Britain, the staple diet of the hoodie hordes and the Trisha tribes.
Yet surely all northerners must secretly relish the fact that there is a Greggs in the West End of London and one tucked amongst the organic delis and import record shops of ultra-fashionable Portobello Road. This is the kind of relentless capitalistic expansionism we can live with, the northerning of the Home Counties, the light crusting of the soft south. There is a Greggs in Brighton, hardening the arteries of all those dance instructors and out-of-work actors. There are Greggs in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the nation's cultural heart, and in Cheltenham, where the beautiful, coltish daughters of the ruling class soak up their champagne with a Mexican Oval Bite. Greggs have even opened up a Belgian front with branches in Antwerp and Leuven. One day, there will be a branch of Greggs on the Champs-Elysées and the north will laugh. For the Reich of the Steak Bake will last a thousand years.
But here is a memento mori for the current Mr Gregg. Beware hubris and pie pride. Mark well the cautionary tale of Poole's Pies of Wigan. For years Poole's was Wigan's pie shop par excellence and non pareil. Every lunchtime the queue would snake down Station Road as hungry nurses, students, pensioners, policemen, accountants, teachers, brickies, drunks, laundresses, lighthouse keepers and loblolly men waited for their 'jackbit'. Then in 1998 came what has been described as The Wigan Pie Event Horizon. Bloated beyond all common sense by years of success, the Poole's empire somehow contrived to collapse in on itself in a huge calorific supernova, shrinking into a black hole like a dying star. No light can escape from the intense pull of a real black hole and so, appropriately enough, it was with Poole's Pies. All their shops disappeared overnight, their windows painted with whitewash so the townsfolk could not block the pavements nostalgically perusing the dark interiors. Wigan Warriors rugby club went into freefall almost immediately and have never recovered, though you can still get a Poole's pie at the van outside the JJB on Latics matchdays. Strong men queue there now for a Large Meat and Potato, heads bowed in silent remembrance of the days when Poole's were king. Pies cometh before a fall.
Our enthusiasm for pies has been immortalised in many a joke. What do you call four pies on a stick? A Wigan kebab. Why do meat pies have a hole in the top? So that Wiganers can carry them to parties like a six-pack. My favourite concerns a Bolton man who breathlessly tells his workmate from Wigan about a new lunchtime offer at the local pub. 'A
pie, a pint and a woman. 80p.' The Wiganer seems unimpressed. '80p!' repeats his workmate excitedly. 'Hmm,' declares the Wiganer warily. 'Whose pies are they?'
When I go home for the football and stop off at my mum's for a cup of tea, she always sends me on my way with pies straight from the oven wrapped in tinfoil. Still warm by half-time, my mates, my dad and I fall upon them with gusto as we dissect the first half's events. Wiganers feel, in their hearts, that there is no social that cannot be significantly improved by a pie.
But however much we love them, we know that it's these kinds of associations that both define us and somehow restrict us. It's one of those emblems, like whippets, clogs and flat caps that keep us in our place. A cosy but marginal place well away from the centres of power and the heart of the culture. A place that is forever 1932.
Wallace and Gromit live in Wigan. Did you know that? 62 West Wallaby Street, Wigan, Lancs. Before you ask, no, it's not a real street, though there'll be councillors who think we should have named after a street after them rather than George Orwell. But I'm not so sure. It's all very sweet and everything but essentially on the same old faintly patronising riff. Wigan, and by extension Lancashire, is quaint, parochial and a little behind the times. Maybe I'm being too sensitive; I do love the fact that Wallace reads Ay-Up magazine to catch up on celebrity gossip. It doesn't help, I guess, that the other foodstuff that Wigan is indissolubly linked with is a powerful ovoid of mentholated treacle rejoicing in the name of Uncle Joe's Mint Balls. They come in a bright red tin with a picture of a bibulous, rakish fellow in a top hat (Uncle Joe, one assumes) on the front. Their legendary kick was celebrated in 'Uncle Joe's Mint Balls', a song by local folkie Mike Harding: 'Uncle Joe's Mint Balls keep you all aglow/Give them to your granny, and watch the bugger go.' At any given moment, thousands of tins of Uncle Joe's are criss-crossing the skies in the holds and luggage racks of jet planes en route to tearful exiled Wiganers in Pensacola, Bogota and Vladivostok.
Pies and Prejudice Page 15
