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

by Stuart Maconie

  Not every old school supporter took naturally to new and very different ideas, like FC United LGBTQ, the team’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other minority sexuality supporters. But the ‘narrative’ (sorry) is one of progress and success. They have found kindred spirits with Rob Lees and the MaD Theatre Group, who have similar aims for the accessibility of theatre for working-class people. Their relationship began when FC asked some of our youth members to run workshops before games with their fans. A play called She’s Just Nipped Out For Fags at Bury Met in 2008 was staged as a joint venture with MaD and FC. Fans filled the theatre with flags and scarves creating a football crowd in a theatre and special FC/MaD half and half scarves were produced for the event, which supporters still wear to matches.

  Perhaps the main thing I like about FC United is the refreshing lack of mardiness and cant that characterises modern football: Robbie Savage bleating that ‘you can’t do that’ about a fans’ boycott; grown men spectators, who spend all match viciously abusing players and then become delicate flowers who complain to the police if one of them answers back; players not celebrating goals against their old clubs out of ‘respect’. FC United, a club forged in adversity and with a political will, don’t seem to have any of this feeble baggage around them and I like them for that. These are ordinary men and women taking charge of their own destinies and communities. FC may have a lesson for all of us in spheres of life far away from Gigg Lane.

  In their refusal to knuckle under and bow down to vested interest, money and power, they have less in common with most football fans than they do with, say, the people who defied landowners to reclaim the high hills of the north during the Kinder Scout trespass of 1932. Like football, taking to the hills has always been a powerful diversion and recreation of the northern worker. As well as his ambivalent love letter to Salford, ‘Dirty Old Town’, now taken up by FC United, Ewan MacColl commemorated the trespassers in a song called the ‘Manchester Rambler’ whose narrator has ‘been over Snowdon … slept upon Crowdon … camped by the Waynestones as well’:

  I’ve sunbathed on Kinder, been burned to a cinder

  And many more things I can tell …

  I may be a wage slave on Monday

  But I am a free man on Sunday

  A L Sidgwick summed all this up brilliantly in a piece of 1912 that never fails to stir. ‘And in the darkest hours of urban depression I will sometimes take out that dog’s-eared map and dream a while of more spacious days; and perhaps a dried blade of grass will fall out of it to remind me that I was once a free man on the hills…’

  Dog-eared map, pork pie and Thermos in hand, I was off to join the free men and women. In the words of Walt Whitman the great American poet and egalitarian:

  Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.

  Healthy, free, the world before me,

  the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

  And I chose to go to one of Walt Whitman’s favourite places; Bolton of course.

  CHAPTER 8

  GETTING A BIT OF FRESH AIR

  To Catbells, Anglezarke and Werneth Low, and a drop of wine with Walt Whitman

  As clockwork as the first cuckoo, and as seasonal as the snowdrop, it comes around. Regular as the backward and forward motion of the clocks, the springing forward and falling back that no one ever remembers with complete confidence, whether it is backward or forward or darker or lighter in the morning or evenings or both. With every public holiday comes the refrain from officialdom on high: ‘Don’t travel unless it’s absolutely necessary’.

  This official advice is routinely and irritatingly given during spells of bad or, as I like to think of it, completely normal winter weather, or over Easter or bank holiday, when trains are needed most, to remind us that said trains won’t be running and there will be, in the three most chilling words in the English language, a ‘replacement bus service’. But the unnecessary travel admonishment annoys for two distinct and separate reasons. Firstly, exactly who is making all these unnecessary journeys? What are we, a nation of flâneurs and idle boulevardiers? If I can get away without going to work when there’s three feet of snow and the trains aren’t running, believe me, I try.

  But secondly, much of the gaiety of life is gained from doing things that aren’t absolutely necessary. Things that are pointless, ad hoc, speculative, silly, and therefore good for the soul. In that category I would put the unnecessary travel that compels you to follow that path as it rises, to wonder what’s over that next hill, that leads you to the tops of those hills, through forest tracks, over rolling ridges and along rivers to the sea. There’s a Thom Gunn poem called ‘On the Move’ that for me gets right to the core of this impulse:

  At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

  Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

  One is always nearer by not keeping still.

  Stirring words for me, speaking of urgency and momentum, vigour and action, all the stuff that the Romantics like Wordsworth and Rousseau believed that striding out into the world should be about. It is the spirit of the famed painting by Casper David Friedrich, ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’. You know the one; a young chap in an overcoat stands on a crag with his back to you. He gazes out on a landscape covered in the aforesaid sea of fog, which partly obscures nearby ridges, shrouds the mountains, forests and plains, all the way to the far horizon. Quite what he is doing I don’t know. Many a critic and commentator have argued over this. Is he surveying the landscape he has mastered, conquered by an act of physical will? Or is he contemplating his own insignificance in the face of nature’s majesty and power. Who can say? I know what he isn’t doing though. Rambling.

  In the same way that birdwatchers don’t actually like being called ‘twitchers’ (they prefer ‘birder’), if you’re a walker, I bet you don’t like being called a rambler. I don’t like it either. I know it’s the name of a fine organisation that campaigns tirelessly for our rights to roam and such, but it conjures a drippy Fotherington-Thomas type in a woolly hat and a little knapsack skipping down a path saying ‘hello clouds, hello sky’. That, or someone who’s going a little senile. I don’t want to come over as some ‘macho’ walking bore here. I have little time for the ‘heads down’, ‘route marcher’ walker, the one who measures his day in miles and peaks rather than views and conversations and experiences. The type of SAS wannabe who’s been up Scafell 42 times but not lovely litte Loughrigg Fell because he doesn’t bother with ‘the small stuff’. The one who never stops for a flask or a butty but stomps out ahead of his long suffering wife and kids, who secretly hate him and are hoping he falls into a ravine.

  No, begone with that. But we deserve a name that implies purpose and dynamism rather than losing one’s thread in the middle of a dull anecdote. When the Ramblers Association rebranded some years ago in an attempt to sound more youthful and inclusive, they dropped the Association and became ‘Ramblers’. Personally I don’t think that ‘association’ was the problem. One contributor to WalkingForum.co.uk who styled himself ‘Angry Climber’ was, as you might have guessed, really tetchy about it all. So tetchy he didn’t bother with full stops: ‘I know the ramblers association have tried to relaunch themselves but the biggest dislike I have of them is purely the word Ramblers I think it just is an old fashioned word used by old fashioned people and that is the main reason it is particularly the older generation that go on these walks’.

  Tricky one. Even if you don’t like being called a rambler, there’s the weight of tradition and a grand old reputation to contend with. Ramblers have been called Ramblers since the days of the Kinder Trespass. The association grew out of the Communist British Workers Sport Federation, which has something of a ring to it, I think. Anyway, I have on my desk before me two slim volumes, which show their age by the innocent pleasure they take in the word ‘ramble’.

  One is a reproduction of E Mansell’s The Rambler’s Companion of 1937, reprinted later as The Wayfarers Book. You can
now pick it up in a facsimile edition to feed our nostalgic ache for a different England, that gentle ache evident in our longing for Keep Calm and Carry On mugs, Downton Abbey and Michael Portillo pootling about on rickety trains in a canary yellow sports coat.

  Mansell calls this sweet little book ‘a collection of scraps and oddments’ and these are his random jottings and musings about the things one might encounter as you ‘rambled’ through our green and pleasant land before the Second World War. He describes and explains the miscellaneous delights encountered – windmills, dolmens, the Parsons Posts of Yorkshire, men on stilts picking hops in Kent, tithe barns, dove cotes, dew ponds – in the manner of those kindly teachers or favourite uncles that have probably never existed, his briar pipe in hand as he leans thoughtfully on a five-bar gate. Rich in detail, it sings of a vanished England before the coming of the agri-barons and the polytunnels, a land of churches and farms, sleepy villages and quaint traditions like the Biddenden Dole, where bread and cheese are given to passing strangers. It’s only when you come to the chapter on those delightful old artefacts the ducking stool, the whipping post and the pillory that a different, darker side of pre-industrial England emerges.

  The other book on my desk is a few decades earlier and from a different England still, from the last days of that prelapsarian Avalon before the shadow of mass industrialisation and war darkened the land. It was also before recreational walking in the country had gained its political edge. The book, which I must have found in some now forgotten dusty second-hand bookshop, is John T Hilton’s Wigan Town and Country Rambles: With Views and Interesting Historical Incidents. It was published in 1914, just weeks before the Great War changed the country and the world forever, and put paid to the long summer evenings of country walking for a generation. It has become a cliché to talk gravely of the lost idyll of England before the First World War. But there is truth in it. Some of the sentences in Hilton’s modest book have the same elegiac sense of that faded world as the music of George Butterworth or the poems of Housman.

  To be in the lanes and meadows in the warm days of summer, within hearing of the swish of the scythe or the whir of the reaping machine, to see the work of tossing and the binding of sheaves, and to hear the voices of the harvesters, gives zest to life … the trilling notes of the thrush, the humming of the bees, the silvery ripping of the brook and the loud rushing of the waterfall.

  At this point, I had to turn back to the cover to make sure that this was the Wigan I knew, and not a village in Laurie Lee’s Gloucestershire with the same name. But it was. Advertised at the rear were the pubs and shops I remembered from my childhood; ancient and fusty old institutions by then but in John T Hilton’s day they were brash new enterprises and upscale attractions: ‘The Minorca Hotel And Grill Room; Private Rooms For Select Parties’, which by the time I was in my teens held a cool midweek northern soul night, or Pendlebury’s Furniture Store offering ‘Gunn’s Sectional Bookcases, the most satisfactory way of keeping your books commodious and adaptable’, or the Royal Hotel where I would skulk in the back bar as an underage drinker. In 1914, it was a ‘Commercial, Family And Motorists Hotel convenient for all places of public interest and electrically lighted throughout’.

  The subtext of Hilton’s book, actually the explicit thrust, is the old notion of mens sana in corpore sano; a healthy mind in a healthy body, and thus a workforce fit for the demands of industry thanks to time spent in the great outdoors. ‘The highest medical authorities have pronounced in no uncertain voice the great need for the workers of this country to avail themselves of more active recreation. The needs of the times demand it.’ To this end, Hilton comes up with, in best Edwardian style befitting the frock coated and collar studded pillar of society on the frontispiece, ‘a tribute of praise to his native town whose scenery for miles around cannot be surpassed for its pleasing variety and rural beauty’.

  This is admirably loyal of Hilton, but manifestly crackers. Wigan’s rural beauty cannot be surpassed? Had he not seen any watercolours of the Alps? Had he never been to the Lake District? Had he even wandered about in his tailcoat on the dunes at Ainsdale? Had he, in fact, been anywhere at all except Wigan? My home town in 1914 was not the smudge of post-industrial sprawl it is now. But even then it was no Buttermere.

  Still, well played for the team John T Hilton, who goes on to describe the various bucolic excursions available from the town – Haigh Hall, Fairy Glen, Parbold Hill, Ashurst Beacon, all of them known to me from healthy and not so healthy teenage days, sometimes with fizzy pop and grazed knees, other times with Lambert & Butler and Merrydown cider. Best of all these itineraries lies just outside the town, where the ground rises high beyond these days the white metallic spider of the once Reebok, now Macron Stadium. The West Pennine Moors; playground of Wiganer and Boltoner for centuries, and the place where every 31 May Walt Whitman gets a most unlikely birthday party.

  Walt Whitman never came to Bolton. But the town regard the great, revolutionary American poet as a favourite adopted son to rank with Peter Kay, Ian McKellen or Big Sam Allardyce. The Whitmanites of Bolton have been singing Walt’s praises, often literally, since J W Wallace of the town, chum of Keir Hardie, fell under Whitman’s spell. Wallace was smitten with Whitman’s progressive philosophies and inspirational verse concerning comradeship and the open air, and instigated a correspondence with him starting – ahh bless – with a birthday card in 1887.

  He was not alone in his admiration. Many of the early English socialists were fervent Whitman fans, and their magazines regularly carried adverts for his verse manifesto Leaves of Grass. Whitman, with his rakish bohemian cap and dress, his shock of snowy hair and beard, was a rock star Gandalf for the burgeoning Labour movement in Lancashire. One of their number, Boltonian Allen Clarke, wrote that ‘it is fitting that Bolton should be distinguished above all towns in England by having a group of Whitman enthusiasts, for many years in close touch, by letter and visit, with ‘the Master’, for I am sure Walt Whitman, the singer of out-door life, would have loved to ramble our Lancashire moorlands.’

  He never did get around to that. But the Whitmanites of Bolton soon began to do it for him, roaming the moors of Rivington and Anglezarke, and celebrating Walt in these walks and recitations. In 1885, in a terraced house in town, they set up the Eagle Street College, a gathering of kindred spirits inspired by Whitman’s verse and teachings. Walt was touched by all this fervid fandom and reciprocated with letters, poems, papers and even a stuffed canary that form the basis of Bolton Archives’ Walt Whitman Collection, the finest repository of Whitman related material outside of America. I myself have donned the latex gloves and leafed through these valuable papers and such, when I made a radio programme about the Whitmanites of Bolton and went walking with them over the moors.

  Yes. The Whitman Walk is still going strong. I made my way up to Barrow Bridge a few years back to join the celebration that still takes place each year on the Saturday nearest to Whitman’s birthday. And what a day it was, egg-yolk yellow and egg-shell blue; a watery heat rippling over Adlington and Horwich, with the larks and song thrushes putting on a fine al fresco concert. But pleasant though it is, there’s more to the original and the revived Whitman Walk than birdsong and pretty views. Many of the Whitmanites today are part of the town’s Bolton Socialist Club, an organisation that brings together under its (reddish) rainbow coalition trade unionists, vegan punks, Trotskyists, CND-types and generally anyone whose thinking runs a little leftward or outside of the mainstream. If you set out to design an organisation with the express purpose of making the throbbing artery in Sir Bernard Ingham’s temple explode, it would be the Bolton Socialist Club.

  The original celebrations of Whitman’s birthday went on long after the deaths of most of the original participants (and Whitman himself), but petered out in the 1950s. In the early 1980s, though, Paul Salveson, researching a doctorate on Lancashire history, came across the records of the Eagle Street College in Bolton Library. Fascinated and inspir
ed, he enlisted his mates from Bolton Socialist Club. These new Whitmanites revived the tradition of the Whitman Walk in 1985, at the high water mark of Thatcherism, as a celebration of other, more human values. There are now seven plaques devoted to Whitman and his Boltonian brethren dotted about the town and the surrounding moorlands. The walk, which takes many of them in, is open to all and has become popular with liberals of every hue and allegiance, old school Marxists and the gay community, as it seems pretty clear now that Whitman and many of the Whitmanites were probably gay, though not always ‘out’ in today’s sense.

  The early Whitmanites would take a brisk walk up Rivington and then across the moor, sporting sprigs of lilac and reading from their hero. Once on the tops they’d commune with nature, sing a few songs, read a little more Whitman and refresh themselves with the passing round of a three-handled ‘loving cup’ containing spiced claret, before taking the long route back to Adlington. This remains the pattern today though the loving cup, as I can vouch, now holds a decently robust supermarket red rather than spiced claret.

  Obviously, desiccated cynics will find all this ‘weird’. But most good things have a little of the weird about them, or at least the unusual. In these terrified times, when the slightest deviation from the norm, the regular and the party line, the uttering of anything that might offend or perplex or go off script must be avoided and apologised for, we need more of us unafraid to go against the grain, to change the narrative, to think the unthinkable, to propose a different way. Humanity moves on not by acquiescence but dissent, and there’s a modest reminder of that up on the moors along the Whitman Walk.

  We started at the old mill hamlet of Barrow Bridge and finished with very welcome ice creams at the Bryan Hey Farm tea room. But we stopped for a Thermos, a handful of wine gums and a moment’s reflection at a low stone plaque embedded in the grass bank by the moorland path. It’s a commemoration of an act of mass trespass that’s less well known than the one on Kinder Scout. But it speaks of the same impulse. Freedom.