I did walk along the bank on the common south of Stockbridge: the Test looked as pristine as a mountain stream. But this is Hampshire, not heaven.
The chalk streams are under many competing pressures, abstraction above all. Every time there is a drought, the river levels get lower and the most vulnerable dry up completely, because more and more is siphoned off upstream, threatening entire ecosystems, not just ducal pleasures. Hampshire is extremely adept at pretending it exists in its own safe, unchanging world. The trout probably believe that until the final, fateful nibble. But it can never be wholly true.
September 2012
20. Oh, Ena, where art thou?
LANCASHIRE
It was a week in a thousand. To be more precise, ten days out of 7,305. Preston Guild happens once in twenty years. In Lancashire, it was a byword: ‘He buys a drink about every Preston Guild’ or ‘My wife wants sex about every Preston Guild.’
It is a curious, fascinating survival. The origins date back to a royal charter in 1179; the first Guild ceremony may have been in 1328; there was definitely one in 1397; and the twenty-year cycle became immutable from 1542, with the pardonable exception of 1942, when there was a decadelong delay.
Something similar must have happened in half the boroughs of the kingdom. The local guilds operated as closed shops, protecting tradesmen from unwanted competition: there was a need to meet, just occasionally, to sort out the records and make sure the rights moved on to the next generation. It was a business meeting, but in Preston it turned into a fiesta, too well loved to let die when its original purpose vanished.
So it continues. Over the course of the ten days in 2012 there were four separate processions, some time-honoured civic pomp, balls, concerts and exhibitions, and a fringe thrown in. There are rituals understood between Guilds only by a handful of council officials: the wording of the Third Proclamation, who does what in the Trades Procession and so on.
This rendition seems to have been a success, after a sodden fiasco in 1992. Naturally muggins came up for the duffest day of the ten: the Thursday. ‘Ooh, you should have been here Saturday,’ said one Prestonian. ‘It were mental.’ Alas, the Guild attracted very little notice outside Preston, having to compete for oxygen with the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics and Paralympics, all of which are even rarer than Preston Guilds, mean men buying rounds and frigid wives getting randy. The Lancashire Evening Post’s contention that the place was being inundated by tourists seemed, um, fanciful. Those who did come were greeted by a series of used-car-forecourt-style flags along Fishergate and some rather baffling banners:
IT’S WELCOMING
IT’S INTERNATIONAL
IT’S BEING INVOLVED
IT’S GREEN
IT’S CREATIVE
IT’S BUSINESS
The Guild’s very rarity is its biggest problem. Annual events build their own traditions from the bottom up. The Guild has to be reinvented every time by the council: there was a hint of organised fun, reminiscent of the ghastly Millennium Dome, the government’s idea of how to celebrate a rarer event still.
The highlight of Thursday’s programme was ‘Business Day – the biggest networking event ever to be held in Lancashire’. I turned up, just a little late – as a serious networker should – and was admitted to a dark tent, which contained a small trade fair. There were a couple of dozen stalls promoting businesses that did not actually make anything, all of them with slogans starting with a gerund, and a slightly larger number of earnest young people in suits, most of them with large packs of business cards. The kind of people who call an H a haitch and call you ‘yourself’. It was desperate. I came away with two Roses’ chocolates inside a bag with various hortatory words: Grow, Influence, Inspire, Achieve.
As I left I passed a sign saying ‘See you at Preston Guild 2032’ and by the grace of God and the actuarial charts, I hope to do so, though not on the Thursday. This is the new Lancashire, I suppose, which looks much the same as everywhere else. What I was hoping to find was a remnant of the old Lancashire: a place where networking happened naturally, without anyone knowing the word; a place that was involved and welcoming without needing to mention it on banners. Is it still there, somewhere?
I arrived as a student in Manchester in the autumn of 1969. In pole position on Market Street, right next to Piccadilly, there was a UCP restaurant, then ubiquitous in Lancashire. It stood for United Cattle Products, which meant it sold tripe and the like. Mancunian kids’ joke of that era: If UCP on it, don’t eat the tripe. My advice, after a single visit: don’t eat the tripe.
The centre of Manchester still had a coal mine, the Bradford pit. There were backstreets that could not have changed much since Victoria’s reign, like Tib Street, which was full of little pet shops. Beer was cheap because there were at least a dozen competing local breweries, which nowhere else in Britain could match. George Best and Bobby Charlton were playing at Old Trafford. The Guardian was still in its ancient office in Cross Street and I went there on a university visit which, ten years later, after the building had been demolished, impressed the editor of the Guardian no end at my interview.
Manchester was no longer particularly smoky but it was grubby and, outside a few oases like the Guardian office and the Portico Library, rough. The only twenty-four-hour scene was at the Kardomah Café in Albert Square. There was no Chinatown; gay activity was very covert. And it rained; it really did. It hardly ever poured. It was something more than drizzle. It rained with a soft relentlessness. Imagine a toddler drumming their fingers playfully on your head for three years.
Students did not venture north of Manchester very often but I once went to Oldham, to watch football. All I remember is the cold, the fog, the primitive terraces and Oldham Brewery bitter.
‘Wren’s Nest, Egypt, India, Victorious, Provident, Hawk, Cromer …’ said Mike Harding. Those were the names on the Oldham cotton mills, when Harding was growing up, most of them proudly emblazoned on the chimneys. Bernard Wrigley, ‘The Bolton Bullfrog’ – like Harding a humorist, actor and folk singer – grew up in Bolton and never left. He remembers walking on the moors above town and looking down on a forest of chimneys. Now there’s just one left: the Falcon, which, oddly enough, was disused long before he was born.
The poetry of the names conceals the reality of life. Harding, growing up in Crumpsall in the 1950s, remembers gas lamps, cobblestones, clogs (‘they were always said to be better for your posture’), rickets (‘wishbone legs, still incredibly common then’) and the arrival of the first car on the street. On the other hand, there was the sense of community that produces humour. Humour, always humour.
The list of Lancashire comedians goes on for ever. Harding scrawled down twenty-five names in a minute before pausing for breath, but he could have added dozens more. Some of them, you could say, just happen to come from Lancashire. For others, the whole of their humour was shot through with Lancy-ness, from George Formby, senior and junior, to the modern Boltonian, Peter Kay. Charles Nevin, in his beguiling book Lancashire, Where Women Die of Love, lists a dozen more. And both of them failed to mention Al Read and Ken Platt and Hylda Baker and Jimmy Clitheroe, all of them Lancastrian to their very bones, only four feet three inches of them in Clitheroe’s case. There are Yorkshire comedians, of course, but their humour rarely depends on Yorkshireness: the particular shtick of Charlie Williams, who did lay on the Yorkieness very thick, was that he was black.
How do we explain this phenomenon? Why is Yorkshire so unfunny in comparison? Walter Greenwood, author of Love on the Dole, put it down to the weather: ‘Yorkshire faces the full blast of the easterly wind’ whereas Lancashire had a ‘wild, warm, amorous wind, wenching with fat clouds and leaving them big with rain’. Ooh! Not much frigidity, then.
Harding puts it down to the Irish influence: the tradition of the music, the put-upon self-deprecation, the storytelling of the seanchai. Yorkshire was influenced by the Vikings, not a whimsical race. Bernard Wrigley thinks it was the claustr
ophobic way of life: the acres were less broad this side of the Pennines and humour was a response to shared privations in a confined space. He also thinks the accent uniquely lends itself to a deadpan delivery.
There was not much humour among the haitchers of Preston. This officially is the county town of the rump Lancashire created in 1974. No county was sodded around quite so royally as the County Palatine: bits added here, taken away there, creating a camel of a county including large swathes of rural Yorkshire (such as ‘Barlick’, see Chapter 7) but not, as it happens, a single rugby league team worth mentioning.
The true capital of Lancashire is quite obviously Manchester. It is a staggeringly different place now: the epicentre of new-found northern confidence, full of skyscrapers, whooshing trams (many of them heading to ‘MediaCityUK’, previously known as Salford Docks), and haitchers in suits with wallets full of business cards. Two hours from London by train, it is now London’s northernmost exurb. I doubt if any tripe has been eaten in central Manchester this century unless it were served on a bed of rocket with a drizzle of raspberry vinegar.
Liverpool does not count in this context. Indeed, Liverpool could hardly ever count as part of Lancashire. It is too sui generis, too much a planet of its own. It has been far less susceptible to the kind of changes that have overwhelmed Manchester. I love it to bits, partly because it was physically spared the architectural ravages of the 1960s and 1970s. Lost in their own political fantasy, its councillors were too interested in changing the world than changing the face of the city. Hence the continuing splendour of the waterfront. Only recently has Liverpool got round to trying to bugger up all that.
Here, the Irishness is at its least diluted, to the point of Liverpool being Dublin’s easternmost exurb. Scouse is, I suppose, the accent you get when you cross Lancy and Liffey.
And a very strange thing: it is years since I have been driven by, or even noticed, a taxi driver anywhere else in Lancashire who was not Asian. In Liverpool, I have never had one who was not white.
The epitome of New Lancashire, and its most dramatic sight, is not in either of its big cities. It comes as you turn off the A61 at Horwich, near Bolton, and head east and downhill. To the north is the great dividing line of Winter Hill with its TV mast, separating the last vestiges of heavy Mancunian vowels from the rolled Rs of the mid-Lancs mill towns.
Straight ahead is the Reebok Stadium, home of Bolton Wanderers Football Club – ‘the Trotters’ – who trotted from ghost-filled Burnden Park near the town centre to the outer edge, handy for car and train, and sold the naming rights to a company that makes plimsolls (or, as they called them here, pumps). In the words of the club website, ‘the iconic Reebok Stadium is a versatile venue offering high end sport, entertainment, leisure and business facilities under one roof’.
Round it grew a whole new area, boringly named Middlebrook, and stuffed with shopping malls, car dealerships and the kind of chain restaurants that offer laminated menus the size of a tabloid newspaper, full of adjectives like ‘tender’, ‘rich’, ‘creamy’, ‘succulent’, ‘soft’, ‘classic’, ‘great’, ‘almighty’, ‘crispy, ‘delicious’, ‘tasty’, ‘fresh’ and, very probably, ‘iconic’, a clear indicator that the food is none of these things. Except for the stadium being devoted to an un-American sport, everything here would be perfectly at home in the outer reaches of, say, Waco, Texas.
The stadium is certainly impressive, with the floodlights right on top of the superstructure, though the effect is to give them a strange droopy shape, as though in mourning for the club’s latest defeat. The Lancashire mill towns were the seedbed of British professional football: the late Victorian industrialists who ran the teams paid big money to lure hungry (in every sense) Scots to play for them in an era when London was still treating the whole business as a jolly weekend runaround. Sixteen of the ninety-two clubs in football’s top four divisions are in Lancashire – way more than in London – and more than half either are or have lately been in the Premier League.
It’s not just the streets that were claustrophobic. Lancashire south of the Ribble is like the Middle East: first-time visitors to the Holy Land are staggered that Tel Aviv is an easy commute from the West Bank (or was until the Israelis stuck a dirty great wall in the way). And you don’t realise from outside that if sentenced to a Tuesday night in the Premier Inn opposite the Reebok when there was a full football programme but Bolton were away, you could skip all the tender, rich, creamy, succulent food on offer, pick twenty or thirty alternative matches in Lancashire or just beyond, and still be back tucked up by midnight. What I was hunting was old Lancashire rather than brilliant football.
So I went to watch Accrington Stanley play York City.
‘Wherever I go in the world,’ David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd was telling his audience, ‘they say “Where are you from?” “Accrington.” And the first two words you hear are “Accrington Stanley”.’
Since Lloyd makes his living as a cricket commentator and after-dinner speaker, and spends his life among sports obsessives, that’s inevitable. In other company he might hear ‘Accrington Pals’, the battalion of the East Lancs Regiment devastated at the Somme, or the rich red bricks known as ‘Accrington bloods’.
And he was preaching to the converted. He was addressing pre-match diners inside Accrington Stanley FC’s unpretentious hospitality room, many of them members of the Lloyd family, since Bumble was personally sponsoring the match. The club’s new chairman, Peter Marsden, had just announced the formation of a new board of directors, up from three to eighteen. This ran contrary to modern managerial thinking and, since it represented a board/average crowd ratio of less than 1:100, may be a world record. The Football League raised no formal objection but did think it might be better if they didn’t all troop into the boardroom at every away game and start scoffing the prawn sandwiches.
There was method in this madness, for this is no ordinary football club. This was one of the places football began. Accrington were one of the twelve original members of the Football League. But, being about six miles from both Blackburn and Burnley, and smaller than either, they struggled. In 1962, confronted with an electricity bill of a few hundred quid, the board panicked and resigned from the League. Offers of help came in but Bob Lord, the Burnley chairman and a powerful figure, refused to countenance an un-resignation.
The club disappeared; the old ground, Peel Park, was demolished; Accrington were replaced in the League by Oxford, a place with infinitely more people, pennies and potential. It was a symbol of the decline of towns like Accrington and the rise of the rich South, even in a sport as northern and traditional as football. ‘It’s so easy to go to Manchester United or City and get on the bandwagon,’ Lloyd was saying. ‘This is an obligation to us.’
Accrington was an old weaving town. Lloyd’s mum had to work eight looms starting at 5 a.m., coming home midday to make his dinner (the southerner’s lunch) and then at 5 p.m. to make his tea (the southerner’s dinner). His dad worked at Howard and Bullough – always known as Bulloughs – the vast engineering works that made, among other things, the spinning frames for the rest of the cotton trade. Most families led very similar lives. And it all faded and died, not dramatically like the football club, but gradually, a process so slow and inexorable it was hard to notice it happening. The mills closed; Bulloughs closed; the brickworks closed. And, like most of the Pals, they did not come back. But the football club did.
It was re-formed in 1968, and eventually found a new home, the Crown Ground, next to the remains of the most famous brickworks, the Nori Works (supposedly a misprint because the steeplejack put the letters on the chimney the wrong way round), just out of sight but not sound of the municipal tip.
And gradually the club roused itself from the deep obscurity of the Lancashire Combination until it found a go-getting chairman, Eric Whalley, who found a go-getting manager, John Coleman, who persuaded his Scouse mates to come and play. And in 2006, forty-four years after the electricity bill, Accring
ton Stanley returned to League Two, the rebranded old Fourth Division.
Nearly seven years later, they were still there, just about, having been rescued again in the meantime – by Ilyas Khan, the son of an Accrington bus driver, who became a Hong Kong banker. The aim now, said Peter Marsden, was to create a genuine community club, with £100 shares and no controlling sugar daddy. The board was not exactly community-based: Marsden was a London property developer and his colleagues included an Oxford professor and someone living in Brazil; even Lloyd, the purest of Accringtonians, has moved to Cheshire, as one does. So there is not much chance of them all turning up at once, for prawn sandwiches or even a meeting.
Loathing the excesses of modern football, I thought it was wonderful. The Crown Ground is tiny: though the crowd was computed at 1,506 it still looked well populated. It is so low-slung there was a 1,507th who was able to watch from his bedroom window above the stand. And they were so good-natured. The chanting between the rival fans was even borrowed from cricket. ‘Lancy, Lancy, Lancy, Lancy – Lancashire,’ chanted the Stanley ultras in the Sophia Khan Stand (named after Ilyas’s mum). ‘York-shire, York-shire,’ chanted the York fans behind the other goal: deeper-throated, less tuneful, less humorous, less accommodating.
The York team were less accommodating too, but I found myself drawn to Stanley, playing in blood-red, like the bricks. I know about Fourth Division football, having spent years watching Northampton Town, behind a man who shouted ‘Rubbish’ at intervals for decades, win, lose or draw. Here I found myself close to an old bloke in a ski hat who greeted each attack with relentless positivity.
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