Yorkshire historian David Pickersgill writing on the Langentian blog cites local bottle manufacturer William Breffit, who in a letter to the Castleford Gazette in 1878, wrote: ‘to spread among our workers, and the boys and girls of our workers a knowledge of the true principles of political economy [was] the surest method of preventing strikes and their numerous attendant evils [and of] securing to them those blessings which attend provident habits and an economical expenditure of wages’. Pickersgill concludes, ‘in other words, that the purpose of educating the working classes was to make them compliant employees at work, upright citizens at home and to instill in them a passive acceptance of the economic and social order.’
Working men’s clubs had a similar genesis, developing in Northern England, Wales and the Midlands in the late nineteenth century as places where men – and only men – could attend lectures, read and play games. They arose from the temperance movement and in the beginning didn’t serve alcohol. They soon evolved though into that curious beast of my youth that was part pub, part music hall, part leisure and community centre. Being allowed to go to ‘the club’, Poolstock Labour, Newtown ‘Workers’, was always a huge thrill. Although by anyone’s standards, they must have been Spartan and basic, even the Formica and cigarette smoke, snooker tables, silvery stage curtains and the rest had a kind of secret, elusive glamour to a child.
The Reverend Henry Solly founded the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union (CIU) in 1862 and, though their heyday is gone, you will see the CIU logo on – and use your CIU card for admittance to – many such clubs all across the north. To be part of the CIU was to be ‘affiliated’, a catchphrase said with oozing northern relish by Colin Crompton as club secretary on TV’s fictional The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club. That an affectionate parody-cum-full-scale-recreation of a night out at a northern working man’s club could be a primetime seventies TV mainstay shows just how socially significant these clubs were, as well as just how much TV has changed.
In the background at the Wheeltappers lurked the shadowy cabal called ‘the committee’, a politburo of men who met in rooms choked with blue smoke to discuss club business. Wedded to the democratic principles of those old lefty founding fathers, or perhaps because it mirrors the power structures of their bosses and is a sort of ‘dressing up’, the workers have always loved a committee, and like nothing more than convening meetings, taking minutes or making a ‘point of order, Mr Chairman’.
There were only two people at the inaugural meeting of the Association to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men on 16 May 1903. Albert Mansbridge and Frances, his wife, met in their terraced house in Battersea with Frances famously contributing 2s 6d from her housekeeping money as a working fund. In what can’t have been a close fought election, Albert was voted ‘Hon. Secretary pro tem’. Two years later, there were a thousand people at a meeting in Birmingham in which the organisation was renamed the rather more progressive sounding Workers’ Educational Association.
Down the years, the WEA has had its critics. It’s been loathed by the right, naturally, as it seeks to empower working people. But it’s also been lambasted by more po-faced elements of the left for filling the heads of the proletariat with useless bourgeois book learning. It seeks to integrate them into society as it stands, in all its inequality, and distracts them from the proper business of barricade building and brick lobbing. I always think that if you can manage to annoy zealots of both persuasions you must be doing something right. But then I am probably biased. When I was out of a job in the mid-1980s, the WEA put some work my way and thus I spent several mornings a week in a cheap suit telling redundant textile workers about the joys of R D Laing and Philip Larkin.
Larkin probably hated the WEA; or he would at least have pretended to. He’d have written obscene and vituperative letters to Kingsley Amis about it. I think – and I realise that this is what is called being an ‘apologist’ – several of Larkin’s more unpalatable ‘opinions’ were probably affected to annoy Terry Eagleton and the Marxist critics who held academic sway in the eighties, or at least exaggerated after a couple of stiff gins just to amuse himself and Kingsley. Clive James put it another way, and more beautifully, when he said that he probably ‘disliked multiculturalism because it altered his bolt-hole version of England, and that he could no more stand alteration than an institutionalized prisoner can stand being issued with a new cup.’
But, assembled together between two covers – as they were by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 – those many, many letters offered us a lurid picture of a ‘hang em and flog em’ reactionary, closet racist and splenetic Thatcherite. Odd, then, that he should spend most of his productive life in Hull, a tough northern town famed for its fish and chips, rugby league and pugnacious socialist politics, literally on the glorious occasion when Hullite John Prescott thumped that Tory farmer with the mullet who threw an egg at him.
Larkin didn’t automatically take to the place. After three weeks there, he wrote to a friend, ‘Yes, I’m settling down in Hull all right. Each day I sink a little further.’ Four months later, he was even more forthright, ‘God, what a hole, what witless crapulous people, delivered over gagged and bound to TV, motoring and Mackeson’s stout … a frightful dump.’ But slowly he began to love it, or at least to respect it, and would offer up occasional and muted praise; ‘as good a place to write in as any’ he wrote in the foreword to an anthology of Hull poets and continued ‘Hull has its own sudden elegancies’.
In 2013, Hull was named UK City of Culture for 2017, provoking the expected snickering in some quarters. The leader of the campaign of rival bidder Swansea was cheap and ungracious, saying the people of Hull would ‘at last have something to look forward to’ and even those you’d have thought would be sympathetic, like Prestonian cricket legend Andrew Flintoff, tweeted, ‘It’s not April Fool’s Day is it?’
What Larkin would have made of it, we will never know. Neither can we know whether we would have been amused, delighted or horrified by one of Hull’s latest cultural attractions, the Philip Larkin trail. This is, to quote the literature, ‘not only a literary journey, but also journeys through diverse landscapes and rich architecture and, seeing the city through a poet’s eyes, to gain a philosophical view of the place where Larkin lived and worked for three decades.’ He came here at 32 and was Hull’s university librarian from 1955 until his death in 1985. Hull was also home to another great post-war poet, Douglas Dunn. Stevie Smith was born and raised here, and both Roger McGough and former poet laureate Andrew Motion studied at the university in the Larkin era. Peter Porter, the great Australian verse-smith (yes, I know but there’s only so many times I can say ‘poet’) said Hull was ‘the most poetic city in England’.
It’s appropriate that it was the need to earn a crust that brought Larkin here, since no one has ever written better about the daily routines and strictures of work. As one of his many biographers James Booth said of him ‘Larkin is virtually alone among 20th-century poets in writing in a natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment’. He wrote about it with a kind of grudging tenderness in poems like the famous ‘Toads’, although in a scribbled verse in one of his letters to lover Monica Jones, he was less equivocal:
Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT.
Of his adopted city, Larkin seems to have liked the fact that Hull was a city that rolled its sleeves up ‘a working city, yet one neither clenched in the blackened grip of the industrial revolution nor hiding behind a cathedral to pretend it is York or Canterbury’. Hull has no beauteous cathedral but it has something to my mind just as gorgeous and stately, the Humber Bridge.
I arrive in the city at dusk, and the magnificent span is stark and monumental against the darkening sky, a ribbon of lights and pa
ssing traffic. When it opened in 1981 it was the longest bridge of its kind in the world, linking some of the most remote and inaccessible areas of England. Larkin relished Hull’s isolation, famously saying that when journalists decided to venture up to doorstep him, once they’d seen how awkward it was to get to Hull, they’d stay on the train and bother fellow poet Basil Bunting in Newcastle instead.
Larkin’s first volume of poems was published by a DIY publishing house called Marvell Press, run by a couple of twentysomethings from a terraced in Hessle, a small ferry port now in the shadow of the Humber Bridge. On the opposite bank, at the actual foot of the bridge, south of the estuary in Barton upon Humber, is another fabulous example of what can be done with the dereliction left by retreating industry and political neglect – if you have talented and hardworking people determined not to let their towns stagnate. Barton is a fine town anyway, once a major medieval port, and prosperous and busy throughout the Georgian and Victorian period as you can see from the architecture. But one of its pride and joys (and major employers) was Hall’s Barton Ropery down in Waterside. They sent ropes all over the world from here – to the shipping lines, then as vital equipment in two world wars and then to the mining industry, until that was destroyed in the 1980s. After that, the ropeworks struggled and was finally bought and asset-stripped by a competitor.
The ropeworks languished until, in 1999, an artist called Liz Bennet and some likeminded souls turned it into what is now: artists’ studios, venue, theatre school, museum, exhibition space and a brilliant café in what is a truly unique place. Ropes can’t be made round corners so they needed space. The Ropewalk at Barton is the longest listed building in Britain, a quarter of a mile long but just 30 feet wide; rope-shaped, in fact. If you’re in the area, drop in. Over the bridge from Hessle to Barton, turn right into Waterside, you can’t miss it.
Several legions of French folk are enjoying a trip across the Humber on the night I come to town. Supporters of the Catalan Dragons from Perpignan, the only team from outside England in the English rugby Super League, are trooping down Clive Sullivan Way, named after a former Hull player of legend. Hull itself has two Super League teams, Hull and Hull Kingston Rovers, or Hull K R as they are known. The existence of two big teams in the one town tells you how serious the north takes its rugby league. But it’s also simply a fascinating quirk, throwing up the questions all local derbies in the ball sports do for me. Who supports who? Why? What informs the choice? Family? The part of town you grew up in? Religion? Class even? Is the Hull rivalry cordial like Liverpool’s or corrosive like Glasgow’s? One of the fiercest, not to say poisonous football rivalries I know of is between Witton Albion and Northwich Victoria, next door neighbours in a little Cheshire town. No, me neither.
I’m headed for the Royal Station Hotel because, well, I like old school railway hotels in our industrial cities, and also what better place to base myself for my Larkin Trail than a hotel he wrote a poem about. ‘Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel’ is about work, about transience and boredom, and the melancholy passing of time in our cities.
… the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
The tone is morose and everyday, typically Larkin, but it concludes with a flourish that is Larkin too, an image that pulls you up short with its mystery and grandeur.
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.
Larkin described this old Hull landmark as ‘isolated … like a fort’, but tonight it glitters. The salesmen may have gone back to Leeds but the well-heeled of Hull have come out to what used to be rather quaintly called a ‘dinner dance’. The bar is filling up with couples in tuxedos and cocktail frocks. Most are middle-aged, striking women with Friday hairdos, husbands pulling at their tightened collars or fiddling with unfamiliar and constricting dickie bows. One or two though are in their twenties. Perhaps he is trying to impress her with adult sophistication, to woo her with his easy familiarity with the wine list and the fish knives, while other suitors stick to Nando’s. Good luck to him, I think. One woman in sheer satin and clicking heels slips past me and out through the revolving doors to have a smoke on the glistening pavements on what has become a filthy night. It takes commitment to be a smoker (or a vaper) in the north these days. In my smoking day, you could do it anywhere. Now it is as proscribed and furtive as drinking meths or sniffing glue.
As the night is foul, but I don’t fancy the dinner dancing crowds in the restaurant, I dash across the road to an Indian restaurant. I get the last table in the house, which is actually for ten people. Ludicrously, I sit there at the head of the restaurant, alone and splendidly isolated, like some seventeenth-century monarch at Versailles or a nutty dictator or the King of Hull. The service moves at glacial speed with the waiter occasionally lapsing into both French and Spanish for no reason I can fathom. The whole thing feels like one of Buñuel’s crazier movies.
Dabbing the last of the distinctly average bhuna from my lips, I re-enter the Royal Hotel. The mood is more raucous now, the volume higher, the ties askew and the pinching shoes kicked off. The lady who slipped out for the smoke is looking decidedly out of it, slumped on a banquette, eyes rolling wildly. Is she ill or just hammered? It’s hard to say. Paramedics have arrived and one, a small balding man in black paramilitary outfit with red scissors tucked into his armband, is being infinitely patient and gentle, stroking her cheek, looking into her eyes, one imagines to see whether it’s just alcohol that’s the problem. Eventually they steer her protectively out to the ambulance and I am once again glad to be part of a nanny state. It occurs now that the kindly paramedic and his skilful colleagues may soon be out of a job.
It’s the dregs of the evening, the foamy end of the pint. Everyone is florid and unfocused, blurry and boozy. The men are shouting and the ladies are shrill. The prim choreography of earlier is now a scrum of staggering and wobbling, unsteady men holding out winter coats for ladies who miss the sleeve every time in burlesque drunk fashion. When the African cleaners start to arrive, models of melancholy poise by contrast, I decide it’s time to take my well-thumbed copy of Larkin’s High Windows to bed and bring my Friday night in the Royal Station Hotel to a close.
Next day I breakfast at Café M, a classic greasy spoon of the kind I have much time for. Sundry generations pile in for Saturday breakfast, and one old chap in flat cap and muffler seems to be the Don Corleone of the place. People stop by his table to pass on well-wishes, grasp his hand, pat his shoulder, as he works his way steadily through the Pensioner Special Full English Breakfast (£3.95). Some even crouch by the table to confer with him. I once sat next to Terry Wogan at the Sony Awards and it was a bit like this. All the black clad waitresses are Polish, naturally. Mine is from the shipyards of Gdańsk. She must feel at home in the fresh salt air and harbours of Hull, where the townsfolk call themselves Codheads.
I’ve decided to use the Larkin Trail roughly rather than religiously, and let it lead me around Hull as I see fit. Walking down the street as I leave Café M, a man comes out of a lighting store with a large pink elephant under his arm. This naturally grabs my attention. ‘I’m not stealing it,’ he shouts across the road to me. ‘It’s my shop. It’s pink to distinguish it from all the bloody white ones I’ve got in there.’ I take it trade has been better.
In 2003, in a poll conducted in a book called Crap Towns, Hull was deemed the crappest. Being partisan – come on, you’d noticed, hadn’t you – I’m always looking for metropolitan snobbery in such stuff, the same snooty disdain that fills the restaurant review pages of the posh papers when Aubrey can’t get decent meze or gravadlax in Crewe when he’s changing trains. Well maybe it was crap in 2003 but it certainly isn’t now. The Hull I’m playing the poetry flaneur in this crisp Saturday mor
ning is a handsome town with wide streets, big, bold squares and little cobbled alleyways called staithes. The Museum Quarter has branded itself MQ and has eight free galleries. I am much taken by the giant mosaic toad, a nod to Larkin’s classic poem ‘Toads’, outside the Streetlife Museum. A plaque by the sculpture says ‘initial concept’ by Sue Meritt. Hmm, initial concept by Philip Larkin surely?
The museum is a powerful reminder of something I touched on earlier; how lively our streets once were. The attendant says to me, ‘Funny the things we once took for granted,’ and I know exactly what he means. The craftsmanship and care invested in these everyday accoutrements of a bygone age are evident. The trolleybus and steam trains are works of art, especially a mahogany and teak one with carvings of grapes known as the Grapes bus. The Morris Minor van, even the tins in the shop window, glow with a patina that’s more than just nostalgia – Merrills Custard Power, Grenville blancmange, the buttered Brazils. All of it reminds me of something Larkin once said about his work: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace. Everyday things are lovely to me.’
There’s a great picture gallery of Hull through the ages. In this one, two kids loll on a doorstep. It’s taken in 1977 but it could have come from the thirties. Here’s one of Hull’s most famous and best-loved sons, the late Mick Ronson of Bowie’s Spiders from Mars, in pear drop collar and floral jacket. A little girl comes up to me as I’m making notes and her mum intervenes, ‘Don’t disturb him, cuddles, he’s working.’ She gives the child a handful of sweets and then says, ‘Blood sugar levels having been restored, we shall go on our way.’
Outside the museum is one of Hull’s signature sights, a cream phone box. When all the UK’s other exchanges and private telephony companies were absorbed into British Telecom, Hull’s municipally owned provider, Kingston Communications, remained obstinately and curiously independent. Thus it has its own exchange, its distinctive phone boxes and ‘really shit internet’, as one disgruntled local told me. He told me this in the bar of the Ye Olde Black Boy, part of the Larkin trail and one of the Hull pubs he liked an occasional drink in. Ye Olde Black Boy is a dark and intimate cave of a place where Larkin, a huge jazz fan, would come and talk music with his Hull mates, and where he once gave a talk in the back room on one of his heroes, the clarinettist Pee Wee Russell. The pale, sullen girl behind the counter can’t do me a coffee and so, even though it’s the middle of the day, I make do with a single malt. She brightens when a lanky boy comes in and hands her a catering pack of Twix. ‘You’re a star,’ she says breathlessly and with wholly unnecessary gratitude. I detect a subtext. ‘Did you have a good night?’ he asks taking up position alongside her behind the bar. She rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t ask!’ I wish he would, at least while I’m in earshot.
The Pie At Night Page 14
