The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

by Stuart Maconie

  When we’ve moved on, Simon tells me that Stefan is a very hot prospect indeed and there’s been interest from Australia, but Simon’s negotiating new terms for him here. I ask him why he doesn’t delegate. After all he has a full-time job as one of Britain’s biggest concert promoters. ‘I don’t trust anyone else not to fuck it up,’ he says, smiling thinly, as we head for the terraces.

  Yes, the terraces. No prawn sandwiches in an executive box for Simon. We stand with the fans on the terrace, some of whom nod to him as he goes by, but to whom he is clearly just another fan. He eats a Holland’s pie from the tinfoil as we chat about the game. I can’t imagine standing with Roman Abramovich in the shed end with a bag of chips. But this is the exact equivalent of that. Except I’m not sure that Roman Abramovich – or the Glazers or the Manchester City sheikhs or any of the other owners of big football clubs – had any preexisting (or indeed existing) emotional attachment to the clubs they own. I like this scenario. If we must have capitalist moguls (which is by no means proven) then let them eat smoky bacon crisps and pies and stand on terraces of the local rugby clubs they clearly love and have supported since they were 11. In the stands opposite, Simon points out an older couple sitting together – ‘Ian Brown’s mum and dad,’ he says indicating the lifelong Wire-supporting parents of the Stone Roses singer.

  As well as owners who stand with the fans, there are other things that may baffle the football fan or the rugby league virgin. Chris Hill’s job, as prop forward, appears to be to run directly at opponents as a kind of human battering ram and then fall down. The ref and his assistants are all dressed in pink and sponsored by Specsavers, which seems to me a deliberate and hilarious attempt to undermine them. More significantly, giant screens show video replays of disputed tries, which are judged on by a video official in a secret chamber somewhere (and by everyone in the ground of course). There is music too; brilliantly, a try for opposition Huddersfield is accompanied by the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

  For much of the first half Huddersfield are under pressure and pushed back into their own half. Three young women in replica tops at the side of us are in high-pitched high spirits. A thin man with glasses says, ‘It’s all us, isn’t it?’ But then things begin to change. Huddersfield snatch a couple of tries and go into the lead. Soon after, there’s a bad accident involving Warrington’s Welsh international Rhys Evans over in the far corner, when he lands on his head attempting to score a try. It’s obvious from his stillness, the reactions of the other players and the speed with which the medical staff dash across the pitch that something is very wrong. The game is held up for eight long anxious minutes, and then he is carried off to loud applause. Happily we hear that he came round in the dressing rooms. Later on, after a similar incident, an opposition player staggers from the pitch clutching a bloodied head. ‘You’re shit,’ shouts a bald man on the touchline, supportively. It’s all Huddersfield now. Their 600-strong travelling support who’ve come over the Pennines start singing incomprehensible songs. ‘We’ retaliate with loud chants of ‘Wire! Wire!’

  Simon introduces me to an Australian agent who’s over here scouting new talent. He’s a thick-set chap in a tweed jacket and jeans who actually uses the expression ‘fair dinkum’. He tells me that Wigan, though a big club, have never really had any top French players because of the language difficulty. Even the ones whose English is good find Wigan English perplexing. He disappears at half time and then turns up pitchside with the legendary Alex Murphy. ‘Murphy the Mouth’ or ‘Yapper’ is a legend, the cocky, loquacious former Saints and Warrington player who was never trusted in Wigan even when he was our coach, and who left us after punching the chairman in the face in an argument over a 20 quid bonus. Classy. Today he’s on his best behaviour in front of a crowd who clearly adore him. The Aussie agent hops over the touchside fence and comes back to us and I buy him a half of lager. ‘That’s fair dinkum,’ he says.

  Warrington, egged on by the partisan crown, louder and lairier after their half-time beer, try and make a good fist of it. Partisan they may be, but not blinkered. ‘They are playing well,’ says one of the young women grudgingly of Huddersfield. When one of the Yorkshire team’s stars intercepts a pass and begins a breathtaking run chased in vain by a Warrington full back, head in hands, the thin man with glasses says, ‘Goodbye. Give up son. You won’t catch Jody Broughton.’ He doesn’t. In the end, Wire lose. Simon slips away to his car and his Kate Bush emails, and I stroll back down Mike Gregory Way.

  I pop into a couple of the pubs, diligent as ever in my investigations and research. In The Rodney, a DJ is playing a selection of nineties northern lad rock, The Verve, Oasis, Stone Roses (maybe Ian Brown’s mum and dad are in), and in the corner on a huge screen, a cluster of drinkers are watching Sky Sports coverage of the game we’ve just come from. The trailers and credits feature huge, bulky animated and armoured robots playing rugby. This may go down well with the kids, but would seem to me to entirely miss the point. It’s the fact that the blokes playing tonight weren’t steel-plated automata but regular blokes who bled when you cut them (and got told they were ‘shit’ for their pains) that makes the game so visceral and compelling. We can feel their pain.

  As I can of player Danny Brough who is subjected to a touchline interview as he trudges from the pitch. ‘Two games left Danny? Where do you think you are?’ I have no idea what this question means, and I’m in a warm pub with a Jameson’s and haven’t spent the last hour-and-a-half running several miles, lungs burning and being battered and bludgeoned into the damp northern turf by massive blokes. ‘Steady,’ says Danny, which is better than I’d have managed under the circumstances.

  You also realise that the game is very different watched on TV and experienced from the touchline. Both perceptions are valid, but they are really entirely separate events and one must understand this. I realise that often when the crowd were most passionate, most vehement, most secure in the certainty of their judgement and the incompetence of the officials, they (we) were wrong; completely, laughably wrong. The thin man with the glasses, the girls in the replica tops and the whole terrace behind me bayed for the ref’s blood when he disallowed a try by Warrington’s Ben Harrison. But on screen, it’s clear that several players were miles offside. There’s no debate from the pundits, no controversy at all. But that doesn’t mean that the supporters were wrong. They were watching a different game, a different beast.

  Trying to find the gents at the back of the Kings Head I wander into a huge, almost empty room in which some kind of disco is happening. A very odd kind, though, held in what seems to be the garden furniture bit of B&Q and where some vaguely soft porn animations are playing on a huge screen to ‘December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)’ by the Four Seasons. Like much of the north’s nocturnal entertainment, it is both exhilarating and nightmarish.

  Back in the main bar, two gangs of supporters of either team are chatting amicably about, for some reason, taxi firms. ‘Back in Huddersfield, none of the taxi drivers are English.’ ‘No, none of ours are either,’ says a Warringtonian. You brace yourself for some racist jibe or slur. But it doesn’t come. They move on. It was just a statement of fact, offered for information, and I remember that the greatest hero in the history of the sport in my town is a mixed race Welshman called Billy Boston, the sixth of 11 children born to an Irish–Welsh mother and a Sierra Leonian seaman and, arguably, the greatest player to ever play the sport; swift, skilled, powerful, and the first black player to be picked by the British Lions. He later ran pubs in the town, though he himself, now 80, will never have to buy a pint in Wigan or indeed the north ever again. A year or two back, he and I were both given civic awards by the town. It was a genuine privilege for me to be classed in that company. Also, seeing my dad reduced to a star-struck groupie in Boston’s presence was wonderful.

  The station platform is thronged with Huddersfield fans heading home. There’s a young geeky looking lad with a poster that says ‘Huddersfield, home of Rugby L
eague’. There are students and old timers and, on the other platform, four glam girls in black micro-skirts are giggling and teetering, surely headed for late night revels in Manchester. The atmosphere is warm and beery, lively and welcoming, and I realise that these are my people. Whereas others might find it dull or intimidating, tacky or incomprehensible I’m at home here in the raw northern night with these hardy folk.

  I remember once watching Jonathan Miller, then one of the geniuses of Beyond the Fringe now an opera director, being very funny on Parkinson about Motocross. Having watched it often on Grandstand, he said words to the effect that it was as a sport the very dictionary definition of the word ‘lugubrious’; filthy, wretched blokes riding bikes around in the mud of godforsaken northern quagmires, watched in a continuous sheeting rain, by other men in pacamacs and rain hats. To me, this would be vastly preferable any day to sitting through Verdi’s Otello again but, hey, I like Jonathan Miller. And if he and Alan Bennett want a really exciting northern night out, Motocross without the lugubriousness, they should come with me to Belle Vue Speedway.

  Belle Vue. Just the name starts a ripple of nervous anticipation somewhere deep down, brings out the excitable child in anyone who remembers it from anywhere near my patch. Depending which bit you recall, which night you remember, which exact vintage you are, Belle Vue meant Lions, Tigers, the Firework Lake, the Wall Of Death, the Caterpillar – Ride in the Dark, elephant poo, motorboats, a chimpanzees’ tea party, the Lake Hotel, a scenic railway, a toboggan, Peggy the Leopard, the helter-skelter, even The Clash playing live in its Elizabethan Suite. For generations of thrill seekers across the northwest, it made Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome look like a Godalming Harvester. It was danger, romance, ludicrously transplanted wild animals, furtive sex, punk rock, music hall, motorbikes, parrots, booze and light orchestral music. I adhere very strongly to the dictum that there is no such thing as ‘fun for all the family’. But Belle Vue’s decades of random madness delivered something irresistibly like it. It certainly got a lot nearer than Euro Disney.

  It was the brainchild of an enterprising gardener called John Jennison from Stockport. Originally a pub, Jennison developed the unpromising site in Gorton, Manchester into firstly an aviary, then a zoo, then added a racecourse, a concert arena, a funfair and finally everything else imaginable. When I was a kid if you told me Belle Vue was going to open a Cape Kennedy-style rocket launch pad, a convent, or a robot controlled abattoir-cum-prison, I’d have believed you, so breathtakingly nuts was its scope and variety.

  Belle Vue originally wanted to cater to the gentility, but it soon became a magnet for the pleasure-hungry shift workers. In 1848, there were complaints about ‘local roughs’ trying to dance with the middle-class ladies on the dancing platform – which sounds brilliant – and then soon after, further complaints of said roughs dancing with each other. You can’t win if you’re a rough, can you?

  For 150 years, the park was a Mecca for northerners, except unlike the actual Mecca you could get hammered there and have a bacon buttie, so it was way better. ‘The Playground of the North’ it styled itself, and for once maybe the adman’s hype was true. Crowds flocked to it, lured by attractions like the ‘Siege Of Delhi Firework Display’, more pyrotechnics on the lake, much-loved roller-coaster ‘The Bobs’ and monkeys boxing each other.

  Later, sport and pop music and food and fairground fun made it a magical place for we sixties and seventies kids. I made the trip several times back then either as a toddler in my dad’s sleek, racy secondhand Ford Capri GT1 (we graduated to this, weirdly, from a Wolseley Hornet) or as a teen on the number 32 bus painted in the famous ‘fried egg’ livery of the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive. However I arrived, I had rarely been so excited in my young life. Music, food, girls, darkness, mystery, what boy would not be enthralled? But, struggling to compete with trendier, flashier and, let’s face it, probably safer attractions, crippling debts closed it in 1982. But the memory lives on. Actually, more than the memory lives on. A large part of the site lives on, and the Belle Vue Aces live on, swaggering romantic buccaneers of the wonderful thing that is Speedway.

  The first customers to Belle Vue came by horse-drawn omnibus from Piccadilly, the last departure coinciding with the 6pm shift finish for most Manchester workers. These days you can come by your own horseless carriage, or make the five-minute journey from town to Belle Vue station, built for the park’s heyday and still just about operative.

  Just down the road, through an autumn haze, I can make out New Belle Vue, which in its blue-and-yellow colour scheme looks like a maximum security Ikea or a militaristic Gala Bingo, perhaps a Chechen Gala Bingo that has been occupied by anti-government rebels. That afternoon I’d tweeted to the effect that I was making my first trip to Speedway at Belle Vue and had solicited any sage advice out there. A lady called Suzanna Cruikshank replied, ‘As a lifelong attendee of speedway, I recommend low expectations and a warm coat …’ Not a great night out then, I mused disappointed but, no, she was teasing. ‘No, you must go! The smell, the sound, ahhh I miss it. They are against my childhood team Coventry. But do take a warm coat.’

  So I did, and paid my £7 to watch the Belle Vue Aces versus Coventry Bees in the Elite League of British Speedway. In case you’ve heard of speedway without knowing exactly what it is, put simply, it’s a motorcycle race on an oval track of dirt or shale usually over four laps. But, as I’m about to find out, this doesn’t really convey its unique appeal and ambience. This is going to be my first live experience of it, although when I was a student I nearly went with some friends who had a memorable night out. As the bikes rounded the first corner, bringing up a wave of shale, one of my mates was struck on the head and knocked out by a piece of flying rock and everyone spent the evening in A&E.

  Before that, when I was very young, somewhere at the blurry edge of memory, I recall that Sportsnight With Coleman would sometimes, on a thin football week I imagine, bring us speedway highlights from Wolverhampton, Scunthorpe or Workington. It seemed to me even as a child that as a TV spectacular it was somehow lacking; gloomily monochrome and a tad predictable in that whoever was in the lead at the first corner stayed there all race. Overtaking was rare, if not unheard of. There are names from this time that ring vaguely, yes, lugubrious midweek bells – Peter Collins, Ole Olsen, Barry Briggs, Anders Michanek and others. But the undoubted star in this muddy firmament, the one speedway rider that most non-devotees can name, was Ivan Mauger. A Christchurch born Kiwi, Mauger came to a one-bedroom flat in south London as a 17-year-old with his even younger bride to become speedway’s greatest star. He rode for Belle Vue Aces as well as Exeter, Hull, Wimbledon and Newcastle. Six times world champion, he was awarded the MBE and, much more importantly, the accolade of being a Desert Island Discs castaway where he picked two Herb Alperts, a Jim Reeves, a Roger Whittaker, some selections from Oliver! and a Maori choir. He and Raye are still together half a century on, and now live in contented retirement on Australia’s Gold Coast.

  It must be a lot warmer there than it is here. I’m in the queue for the chippie van, since greasy foodstuffs eaten al fresco is one of the great delights of outdoor sport at night, and it affords a good vantage point to take in the sights. The crowd are a fabulous spectacle in themselves. No boring uniformed ranks of replica tops or corporate logos here. On display are yards of battered leather and frayed denim, big coats, the odd ‘sheepie’, loads of retro embroidered patches and much flashy bike gear, as you’d imagine. Plus beanie hats. Lots of beanie hats. If not a beanie hat, then a cap covered in enamel badges, clearly the mark of the real aficionado.

  It is primarily male, as you might think, but not exclusively so. Some girls cling, maybe long sufferingly, to the arms of intense boyfriends, but there are gangs of girls here, too, laughing and blowing on their chips. It feels like a very northern translation of an American sporting night out; quirky, full of offbeat, budget razzmatazz and ritual, part cup final, part bonfire night. Speedway is not exclusiv
ely northern, of course. Though Belle Vue Aces are one of the sport’s glamour clubs, Poole and Kings Lynn are the current top dogs. But the place it holds in local affections can be seen from the fact that a nearby street on the housing estate is named after legendary Aussie manager of the Aces Johnny Hoskins.

  Munching thoughtfully on doner meat, chips and curry sauce, I soak up the atmosphere. The crackling PA is playing a great selection of vintage disco records interrupted by the odd cryptic announcement that doesn’t make much sense to the uninitiated. One of the races seems to be sponsored by ‘George Heartthrob Dental Boss’ but I decide this must be a mishearing. Chip poised midway to mouth, it is in this unflattering posture that, naturally, I get recognised. Sometimes on book researches, this can be a bind – the loss of anonymity can compromise the author’s independence and also make me feel less glamorously like a spy. But the upside is when you meet someone like Ian, who turns out to be heavily involved with the running of the Aces on a voluntary basis (as, like so many minority sports, Speedway survives on passion and enthusiasm).