Even the 1930s diesel looks fabulously chic and streamlined. Nicknamed the ‘Flying Banana’ it dashed from Birmingham to Cardiff just as quickly as the train does now, and while I don’t want to wade into the HS2 argument, it’s worth pointing out that Stephenson’s first ever passenger service of 1830 went from Liverpool to Manchester faster than today’s equivalent service. The buffet bar is fabulous; 12 or 13 green leather stools and a long, sleek counter with a glass and metal cake display. The effect is like Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ meets Brief Encounter. Interactivity, the holy grail of modern museums, is used judiciously here without everything having to be reduced to toddler-friendly games. One such game appeals though, a ‘Could you run a railway as efficiently as Brunel?’ type of thing. In my case, the answer would seem to be ‘no’, since every time I become quickly bankrupt after a major tunnel fire, although this probably wouldn’t disbar me from being CEO of one of our privatised franchises.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Stephenson died within weeks of each other. They were kindred spirits but keen rivals to the end. Brunel thought he was right to reject Stephenson’s narrow gauge of four feet eight-and-a-half inches for the ‘broad’ gauge of seven feet, which could accommodate bigger engines and faster trains. But he was wrong, as he often could be. He was brilliant, capricious, energetic, but sometimes impetuous. He was popular with his gangers certainly. ‘The little giant’ would often roll up his sleeves and work alongside the men, particularly when the work became more difficult or dangerous. After a force of 4,000 men and 300 horses had been working day and night from opposite ends of the Box Tunnel, Brunel was on the spot when the two drills broke through the rock and met. Ecstatic and grateful, Brunel took a gold ring from his finger and presented it to the ganger in charge. But when Brunel was shown a list of more than a hundred navvies injured in this project and admitted to Bath Hospital he commented, ‘I think it is a small list considering the very heavy works and the immense amount of powder used.’
I was told all this by someone who studied at the university that now bears his name. That university is in London. But Swindon celebrates Brunel too, if rather differently, in the Brunel shopping mall with its Brunel Plaza and Brunel Arcade. Isambard Kingdom himself would have enjoyed having a seat of learning named after himself, but equally would have had no quarrel with being commemorated in the retail outlets either. The profit motive ran as thick, dark and treacly as engine oil through Brunel’s innovations and adventures. It was as powerful an incentive for him as any scientific zeal or quest for immortality. Victorians like him, unburdened by our modern squeamishness about industry and class and their nexus, had no trouble yoking all these notions together in one superheated whole.
Though places like Magna, Beamish and Swindon’s Steam are celebrations of Britain’s industrial past, commodified as leisure, their relationship with the past is tricky and nuanced. In a Manchester museum of working life, the forerunner to its wonderful People’s History Museum, I once had my ticket stamped by a man who’d worked there decades before when it was the Pump House on Water Street, a hydraulic pumping station for the city centre. He was proud of his new job, but a little wry and rueful about how his working life had panned out. When Mark E Smith of The Fall came to the BBC’s new Salford studios to be interviewed by me for a radio show, he was greatly amused to be finishing his working life in the place he started it, except back in the 1970s, he’d been a messenger boy riding a moped along the rutted tracks between the long vanished dock offices where now there are concert halls and museums.
So the working past becomes a part of our future leisure, but which bits we take forward into that future is a matter of choice and emphasis. When popular entertainer Paul O’Grady made a TV series exploring such issues in 2013, it was originally to be called ‘Paul O’Grady’s Working Class’. This title gave an attack of the vapours to the then BBC One controller who insisted it couldn’t have the word ‘class’ in the title. So Paul O’Grady’s Working Britain, as it became, went out as a very different beast, cut from three episodes to two thanks to the excision of a ‘contentious’ section on council housing, and so changed that two academics from the Open University who worked on it asked for their names to be removed from the credits. The OU’s Jason Toynbee concluded, ‘When it comes to social issues I’m just not satisfied that the corporation is capable of taking an informed and critical line any longer. The urge to rely on celebrities and a tabloid narrative seems irresistible.’
Celebrity and tabloidism is blamed for infecting another great passion of the working north. The Labour historian Daryl Leeworthy said of sport in industrial Britain that it was ‘an articulation of working class self-awareness … [and] a mechanism through which working class desires and visions could be expressed’. Whether you take this view, or feel it was always only a game, I couldn’t go any further without living the sporting life.
CHAPTER 2
LIVING THE SPORTING LIFE
Scrumming down in Warrington and bikes and bowls in Gorton and Chorlton
North and South, our north and south, are creations of each other. They were forged in the same white heat and are looking-glass reflections seen through the grimy mirror of industrialisation. For long millennia of Ancient Britons, Romans, Vikings, Normans and more, north and south meant nothing more than compass points. London was no grander than York, and Essex was far less civilised than Durham. Chelmsford can argue otherwise till it is woad blue in the face.
But by the time Mrs Gaskell wrote the book of that name, North and South were as heavy as soot with meaning, their identities shaped by the Industrial Revolution and the coming of the factories. Proper, prosperous and respectable as opposed to dark, saturnine and unknowable, the south became Jekyll to the north’s Hyde, an analogy that would be even more satisfying if there were a place in the south called Jekyll as there is one in the north named Hyde.
The historian Richard Holt sees sport as fundamental to this:
The North and the South reinvented each other in the nineteenth century. Beyond the broad geographical boundaries of the Wash and the Trent, deeper cultural territories were carved out as the pace and scale of Northern industrial growth left the South behind … This was a new country with a new culture and professional team sports were a key male component of it. Sporting heroes gradually came to represent a distinctive idea of the North, of how Northern men saw themselves and how they were seen by others, including Northern women.
This to me is a self-evident truth, and it’s why sport was always going to make its noisy claim early in this book.
The best of sport has something of the night about it. The drama and romance of floodlit nights, wintry terraces, bosky parks and tracks, stamping feet, flapping arms, nocturnes of clouded breath and mauve sunsets, hipflasks and Bovril, sizzling sonatas of hot dogs and frying onions, the bowl of gold in the distance, cradled in the arms of the night, the crowd surging down rain-lit streets or roaring like the unchained sea beneath a darkened heaven dotted with stars.
I can go on like this for a while, to be honest. Do you want a go on this hipflask?
But I do mean every florid word. When I conjure up a classic sporting Saturday, that high holy day of the sporting week, the romance is not of perfect, clement afternoons on rollered, manicured greensward or balmy days on a gently eddying river. It’s raw winter dusks, the floodlights coming on at four at the end of another year, the great twilit final movement of the Grandstand symphony, the chattering of the teleprinter, David Coleman, Tony Gubba, sheepskin coats and muddied men under glowering skies, chips and fish, sausage butties, the Football Pink, smeared and blurry, still inky from the press rollers.
Back in the day, the good old, funny old days, there were even dedicated TV shows that elevated the commonplaces of after-work industrial sport into something glamorous of their own. Midweek Sports Special, a mainstay of my school nights, tried, gamely, to make Wednesday the new Saturday, and a cup replay at a freezing Roker Park or waterl
ogged Deepdale as glamorous as a trip to the Maracanã or Bernabéu. Still, it was well worth staying up for, if Mum would let you and if you’d ‘looked away now’ during News at Ten.
But ‘appointment viewing’ in my town was BBC 2’s Rugby League Floodlit Trophy. It featured the legendary Eddie Waring whose unhinged Doppler-effect delivery (‘Aaand the Castleford scrum HAALF got AAAWAAY with A VERRRRRY VERRRY bad TAAACKLE there …’) made him ripe for mockery and impersonation, something Mike Yarwood did every week. The show ran from 1965 till 1980, and I vividly remember the day when Stephen Hankin used a rude word at St Jude’s Juniors and, in blushing defence, claimed to have learned it from ITV’s coarse sitcom The Dustbinmen. Unimpressed, a stern-faced Mr Unsworth informed him he’d ‘do better to watch Floodlit Trophy’ on the other side. There were many sage nods of approval, including one from notorious crawler David Hughes.
Posh sport tends to happen by day. This may have a whiff of sweeping generalisation about it, but think. It stands to reason, as the famous West Ham supporter Alf Garnett used to say. Long sunlit afternoons at the wicket or the outfield, days on the court or the lawn, are only really viable if you don’t have a job you need to go to, and a country house you can. Henley, Ascot, Cheltenham, Cowes, all of these have major elements, either big days or famous competitions, that take place on a weekday afternoon. Imagine if the FA Cup final were held on a Tuesday mid-morning? In order to get the most out of ‘the sport of kings’, or rowing or eventing or shooting or any other of the sports of the gentry, you have to have a hell of a lot of free time and a pretty flexible job spec.
This would definitely have applied to Sir Henry Newbolt. Like Black Forest gateau, the music of Richard Clayderman and embroidered loo roll covers, the poetic works of Sir Henry are seen these days as a bit naff. But in his day – the mid-Victorian era – his stirring, patriotic verse, with its emphasis on stiff upper-lipped masculinity and the glories of empire, was quite the thing. If he is known at all today, it is for his ripping yarn ‘Vitaï Lampada’, the much parodied but well-loved tale of how lessons learned on the playing fields of Eton – or Harrow or in Newbolt’s case Clifton College, Bristol – could be transferred successfully to the battlefields of Waterloo, Ypres or Normandy.
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name.
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
The poem’s essential thrust – experiences gained in childhood play form the character of the later war hero – was turned into a popular Edwardian music hall song entitled ‘Two Little Boys’ sung by Harry Lauder, and which brought a distinctly un-swinging end to the 1960s when it was an unexpected number one for the now-disgraced TV entertainer Rolf Harris.
Many decades after Newbolt, another English public schoolboy, this time an old Etonian called Eric Blair, took a rather different view of the virtues of sport. In the mid-1940s, the Soviet football giants Dynamo Moscow made a visit to the UK to play some exhibition matches. In these days of the Champions League, and saturation TV coverage when the Sporting Lisbon back four are as familiar to the armchair footie fan as their own immediate family, it is impossible to really understand the excitement this occasioned. Capacity crowds filled the stadia, and press and politicians alike frothed and fomented. George Orwell though was not so thrilled.
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.
That ‘thinking people’ phrase is telling here. He means people like George Orwell, of course. For all his genuine socialist sympathies, Orwell could be something of a snob and his contempt – or at least bafflement – here for the average football fan is thinly veiled. He talks of ‘the vicious passions that football provokes’. He goes on:
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting … There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
Whether you take the Newbolt line or the Orwell one; whether you think that sport is a powerful force for good and an instiller of healthy virtues, or a mindless orgy of petty divisions and naked aggression, it is certainly about much more than lobbing some kind of ball about or running around a track. People often bleat about ‘keeping politics out of sport’. From Jesse Owens’ humiliation of Hitler at the 1936 Olympics to the sporting boycott of Apartheid-era South Africa, you cannot keep it out. Nor should you.
Sport – watching it, playing it, talking about it, betting on it – may be the first thing that springs to mind when we think of what working people have done for fun in their off-duty hours. But sport as we know it is a relatively modern phenomenon. The growth of sport and the rise of industrialisation go hand in hand. The Romans and Greeks languidly threw the odd discus about, all the while eyeing each other’s glistening haunches hungrily we’re told, but between the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of the nineteenth century, sport doesn’t seem to have been taken very seriously or occupied much of our time. Orwell had a theory about this naturally:
… organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses.
I think it’s fair to say that when down and out in Paris, London or Wigan, Orwell couldn’t often be found at the Parc de Prince, White Hart Lane or the DW Stadium.
There was sport of a kind before industrialisation. Drake finished his game of bowls before seeing off the Spanish Armada, and some think that a form of football called Harpastum – perhaps using a non-regulation human head – had been practised by the Roman legions. Women played sport alongside and against men. In Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare has women playing bowls with men. Pepys’ Diary records men and women playing against each other at the bowling alley and running races for bets. Women archers were often the biggest prize winners and big crowds would turn out for all-female boxing bouts until the coming of the Victorian era. But modern sport as we know it rises alongside the rise of an industrial working class and the changes in the way they worked.
The establishment of regular if scant-paid holidays, weekend free time and the coming of the Bank Holidays Act in 1871, was the harbinger of the Leisure Age. Workers’ rights to time off became enshrined in law. This made some people a little jumpy. Middle class fears over the latent energies and stirrings of the workers in our industrial towns and cities led to t
he encouragement of what was called ‘rational recreation’ and the rise of sports clubs, parks, baths, etc. The thinking ran that if the workers were burning off their excess energies kicking balls about and panting round tracks they would be less likely to ferment violent revolution and overthrow the bourgeoisie. So was born the ‘sports and social’ club where many of our oldest and most famous football teams have their roots. Aston Villa and Everton football clubs are examples of teams that were linked to local churches, and there were work-based clubs, such as those in the railway towns of Swindon and Crewe. Saturday began to become accepted as a half-day holiday for the urban worker, giving more time for attending and participating in sport.
Not always the sports you’d think of either. Though you wouldn’t guess from the gear of the committee of the Royal and Ancient club, St Andrews, golf had a pretty egalitarian start in Scotland. Tobias Smollett went to a golf ‘field’ in Leith in 1766 and observed, ‘Of this diversion the Scots are so fond, that when the weather will permit you may see a multitude of all ranks, from the senator of justice to the lowest tradesman mingling together in their shirts, and following the balls with the utmost eagerness.’ But it soon became established and viewed as the preserve of the rich male. Sports historian Dennis Brailsford has observed that ‘the only role for the worker was as club servant’. Municipal golf clubs and the rise of the game on TV has meant more popularity among the lower orders, but it still carries a bourgeois air, even if the plus fours have now been replaced by lemon pastel cashmere sweaters.
The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play Page 6
