True North

Something for Christmas...

2011-11-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

I'm still checking in here from time to time and have several matters to post about when I get time. Sorry for the delay.

Meanwhile, this latest product has quite a lot about the North in it: The English Village, published by Michael O'Mara.

Goodness, you can even get it on Kindle, the first time that's happened to me, although Morris Minor and A Mini Adventure are going that way shortly.

More (quite) soon. All warm wishes M

Back at last

2011-03-31T03:43:00.000-07:00

Goodness, it's been a long time. I am sorry. The trouble is, that we are spread so thinly out here, like some sort depressing sandwich filler, that it's not easy to find the opportunity to update. Here I am, though, partly to let you know about one ray of sunshine: the Guardian's Northerner which has changed from an email to a blog and now appears more often; every day in fact, so far. Here's hoping that Helen Carter and I, and with luck other contributors soon, can keep that up.

Another book meanwhile. Years ago, when I was on the Bradford Telegraph & Argus just after completing my journalist's proficiency test on the Bath & Wilts Evening Chronicle, there was a very nice, gentlemanly chap in the echoing old building which housed the paper, the former warehouse of Milligan & Forbes, celebrated textile men in their Victorian heyday. He was called Hew Stevenson and he was the big chief, the MD of Bradford's subsidiary company of Westminster Press (a great Northern institution, WP, which survived the 1930s depression in part because its Liberal, and often Quakerly shareholders were content to go without a dividend for quite a few years to see it through).

Well, Hew has now written an excellent book about his family firm - or firms, because their interests in the North East extended from chemical engineering to ownership of the Shields Gazette, which later joined the WP stable too. On the way, one of the vast and varied Stevenson tribe picked up the ownership of Vulcano, the islet off Italy which gives us the word 'volcano', to extract sulphur from its still-active crater (until in 1881 it blew up, and that was the end of that).

Jobs for the Boys (Dove Books) is a mighty tome and costs £30 but it paints a marvellous picture of Northern (and originally Scottish, admittedly) energy and enterprise - of the kind which is no by any means dead. I've just done a Northerner on Barnsley football club becoming the first in the League to be powered entirely by solar electricity. The £1 million contract went to a cutting edge firm in nearby Dodworth.

Dem stones

2010-10-27T23:15:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of True North there's a section on the numinous nature of the region's wild landscape. Religious or not, visitors are seldom unmoved by landscapes such as Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, and shrines such as the little chapel of the 'Four Cs', saints Cedd, Chad, Caewlin and Cynebil, at Lastingham. One regular walker is the rock musician Julian Cope (The Teardrop Explodes, Brain Donor et al) who is greatly interested in other rocks - the mysterious monoliths and stone circles left by our ancestors in the distant past.

Penny and I, and a group of friends from my old Bradford Telegraph & Argus days, discovered the excellent circles and other remains above Boot on a week's walking holiday at the end of last month. Take the path through Eskdale Mill (run by a delightful family and still grinding flour with its two huge waterwheels), climb the fellside through an abandoned group of farm buildings and loop gently to the left. At least three circles lie in the tawny grass with views of Harter Fell one way (above) and the Scafells another. Certainly a numinous place.

Cope doesn't describe these ones but he has a good selection from the North in The Modern Antiquarian, (Thorson's 2000), including some in places since disturbed by modern man, such as fields by the M6 at Shap. The book's only disadvantage is its vast size, a monolith in itself and impractical to take on walks.

Walk cheerfully over the world

2010-10-25T12:37:00.001-07:00

Cumbria's fells are associated with my great namesake, Alfred Wainwright, whose seven guides to the Lake District mountains contain much interest beyond his meticulously detailed, spidery ways to the summits. As a person, alas, he holds very little appeal for me. Read Hunter Davies' biography Wainwright (Orion 2002) and I think you'll see why. More appealing in character, although not so inspired an author, was his immediate predecessor William Palmer, whose output was even more prolific than AW's. So prolific, indeed, that some suggested of his more far-flung walking guides that he might not actually have been to the southern parts of the UK which he described.

I spoke about Palmer to a meeting of the Wainwright Society a year or two ago, after a friend lent me one of his early books which had handmade drawings on the lines of AW, although nowhere nearly as accomplished. Was Palmer an influence on the great man, I speculated? Anything he could do, AW could perhaps do better? And if something such as the Palmer book could get into print, then why not Alfred's own work? It cannot be proved, I don't think, after working my way through assorted Palmer papers in the Cumbria county archive. But books such as Wanderings in the Pennines (Skeffington and Son 1951) froms whose endpapers I took this map, are an enjoyable read and have odd treasures, rather as the Pennines' barren wastes do too.

A walker really after my own heart was Benny Rothman, the Manchester Communist who played a robust part in the opening-up of miles of previously private footpaths, notably on Kinder Scout where he was arrested at the Mass Trespass in 1932. I devote a long section in True North to the radiant idealism of men such as Rothman and the joy which they took not only in the hills and wilderness - something eloquently shared by Wainwright - but more important, in seeing their fellow human beings indulging in the same delights. AW surely had that deep down, but he knew how to hide it. Rothman and his pals feature deservedly and heroically in Freedom to Roam by Howard Hill, published by Moorland in 1980. Does anyone recognise my title for this post btw? It's George Fox's famous instruction to Quakers, which continues: "answering that of God (or we might also read Good, MW) in everyone."

Lights, action, lakes, mountains...

2010-10-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

When you get to Cumbria, one of the joys is the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, the classy phoenix which rose from the ashes, or at to be more mundanely accurate, the departure of the famous old Blue Box mobile stage. My family and I had a memorable evening in the latter during its final Cumbrian days, swaying in the wind as we gripped our seats in the curious assembly of a convoy of lorries which adapted - like one of the 'transformer' children's toys which were a fad at the time - into a full scale theatre, complete with auditorium and ice-cream girls. Alan Hankinson tells the story of this Northern wonder in The Blue Box, published by Bookcase in 2009. My illustrious colleague on The Guardian in the North, David Ward, has brought the story up to date in sparkling style with Encore!, also published last year by Bookcase, which tells how the fine new building came to be. The original Blue Box is now at Snibston, near Coalville in Leicestershire, no longer mobile but up and running under its proper title of the Century Theatre - see www.centurytheatre.co.uk

Much instruction and joy is to be had from both, as from a plethora of local histories of West Cumbria, the Lake District's plain sister, where I hoovered up booklets such as this The Parish of Lamplugh, edited by Betty Marshall and Anne Lister and published in1993 by Lamplugh parish council. I was enjoying a week with friends in the serene beauty of Ennerdale at the time. Reading the booklet at night, after crawling up to bed following a day on Pillar or Gable, reminded me usefully of the great industries which flourished - Seker, Marshon et al - and still flourish - Sellafield notably - so close to the quiet paradise of the fells. And of those which flourished and still flourish in the heart of the National Park, such as the slate-mining at the top of the Honister Pass. The sky doesn't really look like that at Lamplugh, btw, Sellafield nothwithstanding.

North-Westward Ho!

2010-10-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

No one has complained (yet) but the last few posts have been shamelessly Yorkshirist. Time to go somewhere else, and how better than on the Settle and Carlisle railway line? The southern extension of this to Leeds, and ultimately London, runs below my house in the Aire valley near Apperley Bridge; and I was looking at the most dramatic point on the whole line only on Sunday, when a group of us strode in bright sunshine from Ribblehead to Oughtershaw. The famous viaduct and the ghostly site of its once swarming 'Navvy Town' was behind us all the way.

It is hard to believe, nowadays, that the line very nearly closed in the 1980s. The Battle for the Settle & Carlisle by James Towler (Platform 5 Publishing 1990) tells how determined and knowledgeable community activists saved the day. Towler, who died in 1999, was a mighty warrior who was once told by an opponent: "The trouble with you is, you travel on too many trains." How pleased he would be, today, to see how the line which he helped to save, as the dogged and learned chair of the north's regional transport users' consultative committee, has become a thread connecting regeneration between the West Riding and the Cumbrian-Scottish border.

Cumbria. That means floods, and much has been written about recent ones, from Carlisle's inundation in 2005 to Workington and Cockermouth's devastation last year. Coincidentally this excellent study Floods in North West England: a history c.1600-2008, came out from the Centre for North-West Regional Studies at Lancaster university in December, the 16th, impressively, of their occasional papers. I must collect the other 15. It was providential to me, putting some of the more dramatic headlines and analyses into a long, soaking context of unruly rivers and rain. I apologise to the joint authors for my inept scanning which has removed their names. They are Sarah Watkins and Ian Whyte.

God's own council

2010-10-24T23:50:00.000-07:00

One of the great shames of modern life is the absence of the West Riding county council, which was probably the best local authority ever known. Its combination of Labour members from what is now South Yorkshire, Liberals from the textile belt and Tories from around Ripon made for an atmosphere of vigorous but co-operative debate; a sort of coalition atmosphere before its time. As mentioned several times already on this blog, it also employed the greatest local authority education officer ever known in the UK, Sir Alec Clegg. I was reassured (with justification as it later turned out) when my two sons went to our local high school, Benton Park, and I read that it was originally commissioned by Clegg (who, typically, used a leading firm of architects, Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners. In Sheffield, he commissioned a comprehensive from Sir Basil Spence. Shades of Zaha Hadid designing the new Evelyn and Grace Academy in Brixton; trying to raise everyone's game).

I read anything I can about the WRCC, and declaim at talks, to the point of tedium, my nostrum about schooldays when I was proud to come not only from England's biggest county (Yorkshire, of course) but also its second biggest (the West Riding, which was larger on its own than rivals such as Lincolnshire or Devon). The West Riding County Council 1889-1974 by Brendan Barber and Maurice Beresford (published by the successor West Yorks Met County Council in 1979) is a concise introduction. Its cover may inspire you to go to Wakefield where the original County Hall is well-maintained, down to the proud stone collars carved with WRCC which hold in place its mighty drainpipes. Meanwhile publications such as Leeds Archives 1938-1988 (West Yorkshire Archive Service 1988) show the continuing lively existence of some services which the WRCC ran so well. The splendid Headingley Test ground lawnmower and other ancient material shown in the picture at the top come from that.

Starchitects

2010-10-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

Leeds has an interesting tradition of thoughtful architects, from Cuthbert Brodrick who built the mighty Town Hall (and then retired very young to live with a mysterious woman in a Paris suburb), to the current Civic Architect, John Thorp. John is the last person in Britain to hold this title, and has lived to see the city's architecture department shrink to himself from over 400 staff - such has been the reduction of directly-run municipal services in the UK. John's book on his skilful and patient 'urban dentistry' in modern Leeds is due out in the next year and much anticipated. Meanwhile, I have made use of, and much recommend, these books: Leeds, the back-to-front, inside-out, upside-down city (Stile Books 1979) a short but typically original series of ideas about the city by the late Patrick Nuttgens, who was professor of architecture at York university before becoming director of Leeds Polytechnic, now Leeds Metropolitan university. And How to be a Happy Architect (Black Dog Publishing 2008) a similar sparky collection of notions from Irena Bauman, who stirs up things architecture and planning-related most successfully in contemporary Leeds.

Barnsley chaps

2010-10-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

The Aspects of... series is one Britain's biggest and best collection of books on local history and - Hooray - its publishers Wharncliffe are based in Barnsley. Their excellence lies in commissioning local historians to contribute examples of original research which build up fascinating local histories, free of the endless recycling and repetition which - however useful for an introduction or general knowledge - limited the use of guidebooks for True North. This volume on Barnsley itself, for instance - and note that it's the fourth - has pieces on a shepherd, a Victorian 'magnetic healer' called The Superlative Professor Best, and mediaeval stained glass. There's also a fascinating piece on two brothers called Illingworth, sons of a Barnsley farm labourer, whose energies were released by emigration to the United States where both became steel-making magnates and millionaires. The cover of this volume also points up the way that the series reveals the whole context to cliched images of placess. You wouldn't maybe think that this vast mansion was in Barnsley. But it is, Wentworth Castle, sister stone elephant to Wentworth Woodhouse mentioned three posts below. It now flourishes as the Northern College, which gives a second chance at higher education to those who missed out first time. The gradual restoration of its gardens (one of the best rhododendron collections in the UK, among other things) has also won many awards.

Breaching the peace

2010-10-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Considering the strength of the average Yorkshire Tyke's sense of identity, it's interesting how many battles have taken place across the county. I remember being taken to Marston Moor (1644) when I was still at primary school - actually because my father was campaigning at the time for Parliament to be moved there from Westminster (it's a nice open space close to York and a move would still be an excellent plan). A street in east Leeds called Penda's Way recalls the elusive battle of Winwaedsfield (655), whose supposed site shifts about wildly depending on archaeology's latest metal-detecting extravaganza. Wherever it took place, it was hugely influential in Britain's progress from paganism to Christianity. The Northumbrians beat the Mercians ten-nil. Yo!

Another great local battle always fascinates my mother, ever since she was told as a child that the Cock beck on the outskirts of Leeds, towards Tadcaster, flowed red with blood for days afterwards. This probably was the case, since the Roses battle of Towton (1461) was the bloodiest ever fought on British soil. Some 26,000 men died (but the Yorkists won, so that was all right). We've also got Stamford Bridge (1066) and a sea battle off Flamborough Head (1779) which I've written about in the Guardian many times because divers are always trying to find the main ship involved - the Bonhomme Richard, whose commander Paul Jones was the buccaneering first 'admiral' of the American rebel fleet which won the engagement. Even more embarrassing for the Royal Navy than HMS Astute's recent problems off Skye. Yorkshire Battlefields by Ivan Broadhead (Robert Hale 1989) has been a trusty friend.

Well met by moonlight

2010-10-23T11:04:00.001-07:00

There was a time when many people would have been unable to complete the artist's name on this catalogue, which I have only managed to scan in part. Not any more. Just last week, a painting by the Leeds policeman's son John Atkinson Grimshaw went for over £100,000 at auction in Alnwick, Northumberland. The couple selling the moonlit study of Liverpool's Salthouse dock had bought it for £100 in the 1960s. That was in London's Burlington Arcade whose dealers always charge premium prices. The value of money has changed since then, but only enough to mean that the £100 is worth £1440 today.

What is it about Atkinson Grimshaw? Easy, most people would say. The moonlight. And there is another example of a point I bang on about in True North: the fact that easy cliches about dark grimness in our region are tosh. The book gives lots of examples of Northern light, from Leverhulme's Port Sunlight on the Wirral to 1930s Fresh Air & Light schools in colliery towns all over the region. Grimshaw is another example and I specially like his work because, as the introduction to the book featured in my picture says, "Grimshaw's moonlight fell on all his subjects, from landscapes to city streets. Always, though, there are people about..." Their presence (even though I have failed to scan in the oarsmen and other figures on my picture, maybe because it's of London...) is another attraction of the True North. The book, incidentally, is the Catalogue of Leeds City Art Gallery's exhibition in 1979 which gave the AG revival legs. The introduction is by Dr David Broomfield who was then head of art at Liverpool Polytechnic, and a Grimshaw specialist.

Making do

2010-10-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

I argue the case in the book True North that the tradition of inventive manufacturing up here is alive and well. The story of the late Jimi Heselden is an example which I would like to add to future editions: a charismatic inventor who used his mining redundancy after the 1984/5 strike to set up a hugely-successful business making his Bastion gabions which defend NATO bases and hold back floodwaters all over the world. He also illustrated another argument which I try to make - that many of the industrialists were great philanthropists too, a tradition obscured in both social history and - especially - fiction by the dramatic struggle of the workers against less enlightened employers. I don't mean to plug my operations generally, but I recently tried to make this point on Comment is Free on the Guardian's website - see www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/17/life-lesson-jimi-heselden - after attending Heselden's funeral, held at his factory. The thread was interestingly sympathetic.

Anyway, here are a few books relating to this subject. First, from the very non-industrial paradise of the Hambleton Hills, comes Robert Thompson, the Mouseman of Kilburn by Peter Thompson (Dalesman 1979) which tells the story of the famous woodcarver whose mice delight children (and others) who hunt them down in churches and other places where Mousey's work is to be found. The skill is what normally excites people about Thompson, but I also admire a man, son of the village joiner, who set up a lasting business and prompted many others to start. I remember doing a Guardian piece about the remarkable cluster of furniture-makers which has grown up around Thirsk, including Antony Gormley's older brother John, sadly deceased, who started the firm of Treske, by Thirsk train station.

I referred to Sir Titus Salt in my Comment is Free piece, and I have mentioned some of the many, instructive books about him in posts below. Less well-known is Sir James Roberts, who bought and rescued Salt's (and the village of Saltaire) when the mill went bust in 1892. He revived both and is properly remembered by Roberts Park, on the far side of the river Aire from the village. I've got this excellent article from the Yorkshire Journal about him, Silk-hatted Bradford Millionaire by Peggy Hewitt, which she sent me in a photocopy. The YJ was a beautiful and interesting but short-lived production in the 1990s and early 2000s by Smith Settle of Otley.

Finally for now, you can still find excellent bargains at the works outlet shops of Northern businesses. This Factory Shop Guide by Gillian Cutress and Rolf Stricker, who first published it themselves in 1987, is out-of-date now and such things are largely replaced by the internet. But we used it to our advantage, as sweeping velvet curtains bought at a bargain price from the factory shop in Lister's titanic old mills on the hilltop in Manningham, Bradford, remind all visitors to Wainwright Towers.

Get ready for a bit of reading

2010-10-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Aaah... Bit more time now, with my companion moths blog www.martinsmoths.blogspot.com just gone into hibernation. So I will try to catch up after the very erratic progress of True North in recent months. Sorry.

I was on the M1 near Rotherham this week and just caught a glimpse of Keppel's Column, one of the four great follies on the Wentworth estate (above, from above and beautifully betrayed to GoogleMaps by its shadow), whose history and beauty - as a great dark hole at night amid all the lights of urban South Yorkshire - is so well described in Catherine Bailey's Black Diamonds, praised in a post some time ago. Follies are always fun to see and explore, but they almost always have a deeper interest; in the case of the Wentworth ones, they introduced me to the strength of support in 18th century England for the American rebels. The Wentworths, including the Marquis of Rockingham who was twice Prime Minister, were staunchly in this camp. Their own, Northern, sense of independence was one of the reasons why. As for Keppel, he was another sympathiser with the Americans, a highly political admiral who was also an MP and would, I am sure, be full of comments about British foreign policy were he alive today.

Follies and similar curiosities are everywhere in the North. Just two examples of books which have helped me with them, for now, but I'll add others. The Story of Nun Monkton by Rosemary Enright, a beautifully-produced and characterfully-written book, published by a group of local villagers, has this nice picture of the Payler monument in the Priory's grounds. It serves as an excellent introduction to the dead end community near York, where the Alice Hawthorn pub, named after a racehorse, has - thank goodness - reopened after a period of closure. http://the-alice.co.uk/

The East Riding Treasure Hunt by Howard Peach (Smith Settle 1995) is full of goodies in this, often-overlooked part of the North. My favourite is the Waggoners' Memorial at Sledmere, erected by Sir Mark Sykes to honour 1200 farmworkers from his estate who formed an expert battalion of horse-handlers in the First World War ( a similar operation to that so eloquently dramatised by Michael Morpurgo in The War Horse). I especially like it in part because it gave me the chance to fulfill one of my ambitions - to get the word 'wainwright' into The Guardian as a common noun. Sad, I know, but we all have these whims.

Drewe fails to draw

2010-09-20T22:58:00.000-07:00

Just a short note. I'm away from my books but want to recommend some film-related ones. The prompt is going to see Posy Simmonds' story of Tara Drew enjoyably turned into a film, albeit one which struck me and Penny as more 'TV-sized' than up to the big screen. We went to see it in its first week of release at the Leeds-Bradford Odeon in Thornbury. Do you know how many other people were in the cinema? Six. Guess how many giggles there were apart from our own, fairly regular ones? One.

It was an interesting cultural experience which I haven't yet worked out. I'm sure it packs them in amid much hilarity at the Screen on Islington Green. But I think that it is a very metropolitan subject and world, seen with a very metropolitan eye, for all that its very metropolitan characters are operating, uneasily, in a region of great distinction, Thomas Hardy's Wessex; specifically Dorset. They didn't really seem to be there. The landscape was just scenery, and that would have been still more the case had Posy chosen instead our Northern Cotswolds such as the lush county swathes of the North Riding or parts of Lancashire's Furness.

There's a bit in True North about the way that Hardy's land is affected by superficial imagery as badly as the North, and Tamara Drew is further evidence. No offence to Posy. She, Penny and a colleague once played cricket for Cosmopolitan against the New Statesman, and the Guardian's then, delightful, film critic Derek Malcolm, also batting for Cosmo, wrote a poem which started: 'Penny, Pandora and Posy - a trio of which to dream.' I only dream of one. The match was also notable for Martin Amis's playing for the New Statesman and being determined to win at all costs, bowling at the heavenly trio as if they were Test players.

Welcome blaze of colour

2010-09-20T00:07:00.001-07:00

No I am not dead. Sorry once more for another lacuna (the title btw of the excellent Orange Prize-winning book I'm reading by Barbara Kingsolver). It just takes too long to do the cover-scanning etc to add to the bibliography in these busy times. Fear not, though, it will be completed.

For now, I just want to hail a new set of postcards available at Leeds tourist office in the station. The colour may be a bit over the top, but I sympathise with that, so relentless is the tide of grey, grim Northern images. Still. Yes, I am perhaps becoming obsessesd and will maybe go mad, but it is lovely that another publisher has seen the bright, light, exciting side of Leeds (as Keith Waterhouse does in City Lights, very warmly recommended many posts below).

It is not a minority view. London publishers exert far too powerful a hold and they want a grim North, troubled childhoods and the rest. But the very cheerful woman who sold me the cards was as delighted as I was. We also compared notes on the city's new open-top sight-seeing bus (a blindingly obvious butt of metropolitan scorn but excellently previewed by the Guardian's Leeds blogger John Baron on www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/2010/apr/25/leeds-city-centre-tourist-bus) and agreed that the commentary is ace and told us both things we didn't know. Hope they're true...

You can also tour Leeds at weekends by canal and river boat. So bin all that stuff about 'capital of empty flats' etc and come and enjoy. The two cards I've featured show (below) St Paul's House, which is that colour, and (top) offices in Park Row, which aren't quite, except during outstanding sunsets or when you've been smoking something you shouldn't have been. The sky above St Paul's House is also genuine. Leeds is dryer than Barcelona, remember.

WHOOOOOOSH!!

2010-07-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have so rubbish about keeping this up to date recently. My companion blog about my moth trap has kept me busy, and there's always a little light journalism for the Guardian to get done. But I have to post today, after one of the most extraordinary experiences in my Northern reporting life: Penny and I spent the day at Castle Carr and saw its amazing fountain come to life.

I'm blogging about this on my True North blogspot because it is a wonderful example of the 'green and the grey' Northern countryside which forms one of the chapters in the book. The ruined Victorian hunting 'lodge' (actually a 17-bedroom castle which makes the Devonshires' place at Bolton Abbey look like a cottage) is at the head of a lovely, lovely valley which is also full of monuments to Calderdale's great industrial past. Some bring tears to your eyes, such as the gravestones of 'orphan child workers' at Wainstalls mill (now converted into flats), but others like Castle Carr have you jumping up and down with glee. The estate belongs to a characterful farmer and retired magistrate called Frank Schofield, a piratical figure with an eye patch and long white hair, who opens it every now and then for good causes.

The fountain is its glory. Even at Chatsworth, I have not seen a plume to match this - a vast column of peaty spray thrust upwards by simple gravity descent from a reservoir on the moors high above. On the way home with our friends Brian and Elaine Craven, to whom unlimited thanks for inviting us along, we went through little paradises such as Jowlers (see pic above) and Booth. I could die of happiness but won't. Here are some more pics...

The ruined castle from across the valley:

And here it is close-up (a previous owner seems to have had ambitions to use it as a quarry, but what's left is in good hands now):

Here's the ground-plan when it was sold in 1874 after the poor guy who built it, Captain Joseph Priestley Edwards of Fixby Hall, near the M62 at Ainley Top, died in a train crash and his family weren't interested in keeping it on. Thanks to the very nice gentleman who lives nearby and brought these plans along to the Cat-i-th-Well pub where we ended the walk with Timothy Taylor's and a hog roast:

Now, this is what the fuss is all about. Looks quiet, doesn't it?

But what's this?

And this?

and THIS?

No wonder that brollies sprouted like mushrooms....

Because here's the fountain at its glorious peak (and it lasted for 15 minutes, until the moor-top reservoir was almost drained):

I'll find out when it's next going to be open and will post here, to let you know and spread the word. Oh, and further to prove my True North points, P and I and the Cravens saw a notice at a farm on the way back saying Eggs For Sale. A lad appeared and we asked to buy half-a-dozen. "We've only quails' eggs left," he said, apologetically. New North - True North - or what?

A mighty dynasty

2010-05-13T09:28:00.001-07:00

Kitson is a famous name in Leeds, and in many spheres. The family founded the famous Hunslet Engineering Works whose trains are still to be seen all over the world, some of them puffing up the Andes to Lake Titicaca. There's another one on the Snowdon Mountain Railway and we've got this nice picture of a retired loco slumbering away at Kirkstall, where enthusiasts run a narrow gauge line through the woods from Kirkstall Abbey. By the way, if you are in those parts, the Abbey House museum is great - as is the abbey itself, of course, plus its excellent new interpretation centre, and the cafe/restaurant at Abbey House is just tremendous. Delicious food and really nice staff. See www.leeds.gov.uk/page.aspx?pageidentifier=982E07BA1BEE64708 0256E1B0043190A.
Anyway, the Kitsons also entered politics as Liberals and produced two sons who were great patrons of the arts. Sydney was an architect who designed a number of villas in Leeds and the original building of the College of Art whose alumni include Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth (check out the new Hepworth gallery opening in Wakefield next year - www.hepworthwakefield.com. He became the biggest collector of Cotman watercolours in the world and left the bulk of them to Leeds city art gallery although the Victoria and Albert, which was bequeathed a smaller number, fought a desperate but I am glad to say unsuccessful battle to get hold of Leeds' allocation. The story is well-condensed in Cotmania & Mr Kitson by David Boswell and Corinne Miller (Leeds City Art Galleries 1992) which accompanied a very good exhibition.
Sydney's brother Robert was an equally generous patron of the arts, responsible for the wonderful mosaic by Sir Frank Brangwyn in St Aidan's church. This was originally to be a fresco, but Brangwyn declared Leeds' atmosphere too mucky and insisted on the much more expensive tiles. St Aidan's got their own back in a Yorkshire way only ten years ago, when the congregation organised their own cleaning of the mosaic with off-the-shelf materials and a ladder lent by one of them, who worked for the fire brigade. Art experts were in fits, but they did an excellent job.
Robert retired to Taormina in Sicily on his doctor's advice (what a nice doctor to have) and built the famous and wonderful Casa Cuseni there, with more work by Brangwyn. He was so popular that during the Second World War, the locals hid his valuables while he was in exile, and chose him as their mayor when he returned as soon as Field Marshal Kesselring and his Nazis had cleared out. The Kitsons' story unites many aspects - enterprise, philanthropy and art - which deserve a greater prominence in the history and image of the North. For the Casa Cuseni, which until recently has been for sale, though you'd need oodles of cash, see www.casacuseni.org The little pocket book at the top incidentally, is for 1885 and was given to me by the marvellous Enid Lakeman, lifelong campaigner for proportional representation, when I worked with her at the Electoral Reform Society in 1971. She must be strumming her harp at the moment, with Britain's fab new reforming coalition. Her father worked at Hunslet Engineering and the book belonged to him.

Cinema gris

2010-05-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

The North has its own version of Cinema Noir, best summed up by Beryl Bainbridge's remark, when filming a documentary on Tyneside, that only a TV crew would choose to go to the beach at Whitley Bay in December. Rain, mist, soot...it all continues up to the present day, vide the recent exciting but grimissimo TV adaption of the Red Riding trilogy by David Peace. I have a bash at all this in True North and I have been helped by many books which explore the wider and much benign overall tradition of films about, and made in the three regions.Talking Pictures, The Popular Experience of the Cinema, edited by Colin Harding and Brian Lewis (Yorkshire Art Circus 1993) was one of the first, excellent publications to come out of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford - a brilliant location for such a place, with many of the locations used in the film of Keith Waterhouse's wonderfully celebratory Billy Liar nearby. Sorry about the blue line on the cover; that's my incompetence with Adobe Photoshop.

An even better look back is contained in the 324 pages of Movie-Makers and Picture Palaces by G.J.Mellor (Bradford Libraries 1996). A treasure trove.

Finally Dorothy Newlyn's Theatre Connections (Newlyn 1995) is an autobiography by a woman who was instrumental with her husband Walter in getting us the fine West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. Apart from telling the story of that campaign, she is also enjoyable and interesting on the theatre and cinema of her Yorkshire youth.

Not dead, just busy elsewhere

2010-05-05T05:45:00.000-07:00

Goodness, sorry (again). It's been more than a month. I really apologise; it's been the election and this and that and the fact that the moth trap is up and running again and I can't resist doing blog entries for Martin's Moths (check out via the profile section on this page, and enter a new world).
I'm also a bit de-motivated by the lack of controversy about my assault on the Grimsters. This isn't just here on the blog, but I've been surprised at talks I've done in Newcastle and Hexham, that there hasn't been more of a fightback by the old Northern guard. At Northern Stage, they put up a lot of the gritty grey photos which have so dominated the Northern canon and we had quite a good discussion about that. But most people seem to be taking my Cheer Up Everyone trumpet calls like lambs. I must just show you my own grim and gritty slide which I showed at Newcastle (satirically, in the same breath as telling everyone how unsurprised I was to be staying at the Grey hotel in Grey Street). That was unfair, mind. It just happened to be Earl Grey rather than Earl Light, although his tea is notably lighter than the standard dark brew.

I took this pic in March and when I went back at the end of April for the Northern Stage talk, the slogan had been sprayed over. But it is a good question. I must find out why the hideous but strangely beguiling walkway below the High Level Brdidge came to such a sudden stop. The metal edge of the HLB, far above, is encrusted with dead pigeons incidentally. I wonder if the Kittiwakes got them.

However, the bibliography must press on, and here are another three publications which I have learned from and enjoyed. Some years ago, I went for a walk in Buck Wood, above the river Aire and Esholt sewage works near here, an area much pleasanter than it sounds. My stumbling across some old foundations led to making a Radio 4 programme on open air schools, because the concrete traces are all that is left of Thackley Open Air School. The programme in turn reinforced Christine Alvin's intention of writing a book on the place, about which she knows much. The result is The School in the Wood, Friends of Buck Wood 2008, which you can get direct from fobw@ncalvin.f9.co.uk.

Thackley is a comfortable and lovely spot. The centre of Bradford has notorious problems, with a huge hole where the Westfield development has run out of private cash. The easing of the recession (fingers crossed) should see work start again, but meanwhile the city council is bravely pressing on with its plans for a mirror pool the other side of the City Hall. Excavators are already at work. You can read all about the underlying thinking in Bradford Centre Regeneration Masterplan, Will Alsop Architects, 2003, probably not easy to get hold of but Bradford council or Alsop's should be able to point you in the right direction.

Finally for now, I like detailed books by enthusiast for recondite subjects, which often contain unexpected wider social issues overlooked by more general historians.
One such is Bradford City Tramways 1882-1950 by D M Coates, Wyvern Publications 1984. It helped me, too, when I was tracking down the former workshop of Bill Cull, the man who made Issigonis' Mini work with his continuous velocity joints - see A Mini Adventure by myself, Aurum Press 2009, if you want to know more...

A little bit of this...

2010-03-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

..and a little bit of that... Here's a foursome of books from the North East which show the diversity of life in that part of the North, for better and worse. Gary's Friends by Adrian Clarke (West Pier Press 2007) is a photographic essay on a group of drink and drug abusers on Tyneside and Teeside which may sound off-putting but is actually a riveting social document. It shows how closely a dismal way of life may be related to something quite different; one of the people who bravely agreed to be photographed and tell a summary of their life story is a cousin of Bob Crooks, the marvellous, long-standing chairman of Durham county council who features in True North. Another of his relatives was Sammy Crooks, the England footballer, and a third was Mayor of Durham city. The role played by family breakdown in creating individual disaster is desperately apparent in this book.

There's more gritty material in A Hole Like That - 13 Cleveland Poets, edited by Mark Robinson (Scratch 1994) and just one of shelves of excellent verse to come from the North East's grassroots (which are, after all, the home of the famous Bloodaxe imprint - www.bloodaxebooks.com - among others. It isn't only grit, though. The poets also reflect on the beautiful countryside which surrounds the industrial heartland by the Tees.

Off to the coast next, in the company of All Her Glories Past by David Phillipson (Smith Settle 1994), which tells the story of the Zetland lifeboat and her immensely long service at Redcar where she remains a visitor attraction.

Similar, lesser-known attractions abound in The Hidden Places of Northumberland and Durham by Emma Roberts (Travel Publishing 2003), which also has handy recommendations of places to stay on a visit. I have more than half-a-dozen Southern friends, who are otherwise staunchly metropolitan, but never let a year go by without a visit to Northumberland, both inland in the lovely and lonely National Park, or along the sensational coast. Alnmouth is the second best treat from the East Coast mainine after Durham and Holy Island is extraordinary. The pub there is the only place in the UK where I have listened to compatriots speaking English and been unable to understand them. Emma Roberts' book is one of a 'county' series and I've made good use of the Yorkshire volumes as well.

Oh, just as a PS to this post, I had a wonderful time at Headingley LitFest, helped by knowing almost every inch of that distinguished suburb. This is a genetic thing. My mum, who came to the talk and enjoyed the scones and butterfly buns (as I did), was born in St Michael's Villas and was also left wailing as a toddler in Shire Oak Road - where the talk was - by my Grandad who thought she'd shut up if he pretended to abandon her and hid behind a wall. She claims it just made her bawl louder than ever. The Litfest has posted a generous account of proceedings on their blog at http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.com/2010/03/martin-we-loved-you.html I immodestly like the title of that link...

Tales of the Unexpected

2010-03-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

One of the characteristics of a journalist, or at least of this one, is an eye for the odd or unusual. In terms of the North, this is also a good way of getting stories from the region into the national media, so I have built up a major sub-section of my Northern book-collection on the Unexpected. Take for example The Sailing Ships and Mariners of Knottingley by Ron Gosney and Rosemary Bowyer (Ron Gosney & Sons undated but 1990s ISBN 0 9534696 0 3) which I recall reading with astonishment when the author gave me a copy. Fifty miles from the North Sea, the little town near Wakefield built and launched ships on the Aire and Calder Navigation which sailed as far as South America. The book is a model of its kind, with maps of where Knottingley ships were wrecked and extracts from masters' logs such as 'It was my painful duty to secure Charles Sayes by putting him in irons'. In terms of my wider arguments about the North, the book illustrates how major industries can come and go, with an emphasis again on the unexpected. When times are bad, we need to remember how the next invention and source of employment often takes us all completely by surprise.

By contrast, a long-standing success story is William Santus & Co of The Toffee Works, Wigan, who make the legendary Uncle Jo's Mint Balls. For a precis of how a good product, well-made and marketed, stands the test of time, get A Sweet Story by Fiona Lydon (William Santus & Co 2005). It's a very slim booklet but has excellent material on how it paid to be a Methodist if you wanted a job at Uncle Joe's in the early days, and the words and music of Mike Harding's memorable anthem They Keep You All Aglow.

Cemeteries next. What a wonderland they are for the historian - and for imaginative primary school teachers, like our boys' John Coates at Rawdon CofE who had his classes roaming St Peter's graveyard and listing the many strange (and ordinary) names and fates to be found engraved there. A paragon in this world is Undercliffe in Bradford. My vicar uncle in the city, Rev Chris Hollis, excited my interest early on by telling me there was an entire row of memorials on the cemetery's fine hill, with its excellent views over the city, to steam laundry proprietors. The cemetery is very well-recorded in Undercliffe - Bradford's Historic Cemetery by David James and the outstanding Northern photographer Ian Beesley (Ryburn Publishing 1991).

The Lake District has been meticulously charted, nay trampled, by historians and writers, but it too can still come up with little-known or overlooked treasures. One of the best, and duly becoming better-known as a result, is Blackwell, the wonderful Arts and Crafts house outside Windermere built for the brewer, Lord Mayor of Manchester and philanthropist Edward Holt. He rings all the bells in my chime about such Victorian magnates often having a very strong social conscience. Among the many good things he did was provide holidays at Blackwell for underprivileged children from Manchester. All this and much more is described well in Blackwell - the Arts & Crafts House by assorted and modestly un-named members of the Lakeland Arts Trust which published the book in 2005. I very strongly recommend a visit - see www.blackwell.org.uk.

Heads and Hudds

2010-03-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm just off to talk to the AGM of Huddersfield Civic Society, where I'll pass on a couple of gems from Phyllis Bentley (see post below). One is the brief observation of one of her characters in Quorum, a talented and sensitive teacher who has chosen to stay in the North in spite of tempting offers in London: "There is colourful truth about the West Riding textile industry as well as sombre truth." This hits precisely one of the nails which I have also tried to strike in True North, on the need for a wider picture of the industrial North than cliches about trouble at t'mill. As Bentley also describes well, every great industry had - still has - a fine artistic and design section, which has played a part in the flowering of art in the North, from the Gregory Fellows at Leeds Uni, to the Northern Arts Prize.
I knew a real-life Northerner who made the same choice as Bentley's fictional teacher - John Walker who died last year at the age of 97. After getting a sky-high degree at Cambridge, he was invited by Maynard Keynes to take a job in the Treasury, but returned instead to run the family blanket mill in Cleckheaton. He never regretted it, and enjoyed curious moments such as his return to the mill after presiding over the committal of the Yorkshire Ripper as a Dewsbury magistrate. "Before I give you any other information," he told the workforce, who were agog at a time when near-hysteria had gripped this part of the world, "Let me say first that the blanket covering Sutcliffe as he went into court was one of ours."
Bentley also makes a quite different observation, elsewhere in Quorum, which appeals to another of my lifelong campaigns. I've it tucked away in my folder entitled Those Were Not The Days/There's Little New Under The Sun: "Teachers nowadays had so many administrative tasks, so many forms to fill, so many responsibilities for the physical and economic welfare of their pupils, that they hardly had time to teach, much less to live any private and personal lives." That was in 1950! If you meet a teacher grumbling away in this vein, much as farmers do, read it to them.
Meanwhile, here's a puff for the current Headingley LitFest in which I'm playing a humble role - lots of draws including David Peace, excellent writer but sadly a King of Northern Noir, and Prof David Russell on Phyllis Bentley, yo!. I hope you can read the programme if you double click on the pic, but if not, check out http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.com. Actually, my bit's a bit blurred due to my incompetence, but it's on Sat 20 March at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama in Shire Oak Road at 3pm. As I mention far below, David Hall's Far Headingley, Weetwood and West Park (Headingley Village Society 2000) gives you an idea of the incredible amount of interest - people, places, history - to be found in this one suburb. And that covers only part of it...

Sorry, Phyllis

2010-03-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

I was over at my Mum's at the weekend and noticed that she'd just finished reading a battered old novel with a blue binding. I picked it up and have subsequently been engrossed. It is Quorum by Phyllis Bentley, and it has made me realise that I should have done more about Bentley in True North. Here she is, in the pics above, holding the same pose some 30 years apart. She is mentioned in the book, but overshadowed by Lettice Cooper. Let me put that right now, online, and hope that I get a chance to add a bit more about her in future editions of the book. She has the same powers of accurate observation as Cooper, and a similar warmth and sympathy with the views of the different protagonists in Northern industrial dramas. Her best-known book is Inheritance and here's a picture of John Thaw and his leading lady in a 1967 BBC TV adaption which also starred Michael Goodliffe and James Bolam. This sort of 'regional novel' was upended by the much sharper, angrier and therefore more widely appealing books of the 1950s Northern literary renaissance - John Braine, Stan Barstow & Co. But, as I argue in the book, their talents distorted the rounded image of the North as portrayed by the likes of Cooper and Bentley, who to my mind are also much subtler than their more famous contemporary J.B.Priestley. I enjoy his work, but its Dickensian exuberance takes several steps away from real life at the time. We need contemporary Bentleys and Coopers to dispel the last tatters of Grimness Up Here. Helen Cross (My Summer of Love - Bloomsbury 2001) is one such. I'm keen to find and read others, and would be grateful for being pointed in their direction. If anyone knows the name of the actress in the picture with John Thaw, I'd be grateful too. It's either Madeleine Christie or Judy Wilson, I think.

Shanks's pony

2010-03-09T09:17:00.000-08:00

By far the best way to get to know a place is through walking. The North has produced some especially famous pedestrians: my great Lakeland namesake, for example, and his predecessors Mountford Baddeley and William Poucher. The latter drew routes on photographs which he waited hours to take, to get the best possible light. He was helped in this by his job as a senior research chemist for Yardley, whose cosmetic products he sometimes wore as extra protection against the cold. There's more in True North, plus a paen to Benny Rothman, the great trespasser, whose buoyant good humour contrasted with the dourness of Wainwright, whose lightness of touch was confined to his writing. I quail and retreat at the task of listing all the walking guides which have influenced True North. There are scores of them. Nay, hundreds. Click on the picture above of just some of my regulars and note the regularity of the word 'pub.' Without one of these, no walk is complete.
I don't bang on too much in the book about the Grade 1 countryside such as the Lakes and Dales, for the simple reason that so many other people have done that, many of them brilliantly. Instead, I've tried to highlight the joys and interest of walking in cities, towns and connurbations. So here's a big thankyou to Walks around Red Brick by Maurice Beresford (Leeds University Press 1980). Anything by Maurice Beresford is worth reading and re-reading). His book deals with Leeds. A comparable study for York is A Walk around the Snickelways of York by Mark W Jones (1983 and often republished). Snickelway is Yorkese for what we in Leeds call a ginnel and Londoners an alley, or occasionally, if not versed in medicine, a back passage. Another good guide is Walk the Kirklees Way by Nigel Patrick and Peter Williamson (Huddersfield Examiner 2002). I also like Footpaths of Leeds Book 2 by Hilary and Peter Dyson (Leeds Civic Trust 1998), which wends through the suburbs, often scorned but crammed with the fascinating and unexpected.

When we were very young

2010-03-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

Northern childhoods form a famous and wonderful canon of literature. An excellent example from it, which I discuss at some length in the book, is William Woodruff's celebrated The Road to Nab End - an extraordinary Northern childhood, and its sequel Beyond Nab End. The 'extraordinary' thing for me is not the almost Pythonesque setting of Woodruff's birth and upbringing in Blackburn, but the way he describes the cheerfulness as well as the hard knocks. He put this positive attitude to good effect himself, becoming an internationally respected historian before the books brought him a different sort of success relatively late in life. Nab End has an interesting history; first published as Billy Boy by Ryeburn in 1993, it was a slow burner, until it took off, renamed, in a Little Brown Abacus edition in 2000. The original subtitle was also more subdued, and accurate: A Lancashire Childhood. Beyond Nab End is good but not as good. Little Brown Abacus published it in 2003. Talking of Blackburn childhoods, Hunter Davies' biography of the fellwalker Alfred Wainwright (no relation of moi) is fascinating. AW was an extraordinary character, although to be honest, not one with whom I'd have wanted to have tea. That's Wainwright, the Biography (updated edition, Orion 2002),
Another and more famous Northern writer now: Lewis Carroll, Child of the North by Anne Clark Amor Lewis Carroll Society 1995) is a handy account of the Alice man's upbringing at Croft, where William Hague and Tony Blair's constituencies used to face one another across the Tees in the days when one led the Government and the other the Opposition. Edge of Darkness, Edge of Light (Souvenir Press 1977) is a moving autobiography of his childhood by R C Scriven, the blind and deaf writer who amassed enough powerful images of the world during the eight years before deafness struck, followed some 20 years later by blindness, to colour marvellous radio plays and much other writing. Finally, for now, a long-standing Guardian reader, Marjorie Jones, sent me her Count Up to Ten, an account of a Bradford childhood in the Twenties (MJ 1987) which I thoroughly enjoyed. I think that everyone should set down their life story, and get a tax rebate for lodging it in the British Library.

A bit of fun

2010-03-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

There's quite a lot in True North about the region's comic tradition, both the conventional comedians of the past and their successors such as the League of Gentlemen who have made such excellent hay with all the terrible cliches still believed in too many quarters down South. Alas, I don't think the awful goings-on in Royston Vazey have helped us that much though. I have - genuinely - met half-a-dozen people in London who think that our life really is, more-or-less, like that.
On a less well-known level, I've had endless pleasure from the witty work of John Morrison - for example his View from the Bridge trilogy (Pennine Pens 1998 onwards) which plays pop with the upper Calder Valley. Hebden Bridge is disguised as Milltown, with a recognisable cast of types congregating at the Grievous Bodily Arms. I also much enjoyed Women are from Venus, Men are from Mytholmroyd (Mutton Stew 2000). John's moved to the Lake District now but continues to write, not just humour but good guidebooks too. Another jolly scale on Northern cliche is The Thoughts of Betty Spital (Yorkshire Arts Circus 1987). Read, for example, of her work through the Sheffield Pensioners' Liberation Army to promote youthenasia. There is much more in this genre, and I'll return to add titles as I creep along my shelves.

Straight talking

2010-03-05T23:48:00.001-08:00

Continuing from the post below (Do you sometimes feel that blogs should be read standing on your head?), Neil Henderson has written from France, picking up on the book's section on music and kindly sending me a copy of the Christmas 1975 hymn sheet for the 'pub carols' which maintain a venerable tradition north and west of Sheffield. He also picks up a mistake which, alas, has become part of my genetic code; I always belt out 'Hail Shining Morn!' in the car on my own, when it should of course be 'Smiling'. Sorry. Duly noted and passed to the publishers. It's a very fine hymn sheet, including not just HSM and the other old favourites, but the Holmfirth Anthem Pratty Flowers with its Napoleonic reference, surely unique to carols: 'Wilt thou go fight yon French and Spaniards?' (Double-click on the pic to make the words large enough to read). I'm also hugely indebted to Mr Henderson, as all Northerners will be, for his reminding me, and now us, of the motto of his alma mater Penistone High School: Disce aut discede - Learn or Leave! You don't get plainer or blunter than that.
While on the subject of music, a bit more bibliography: An Improbable Centenary by Adrian Smith, Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestral Society 1990, tells the story of the said orchestra in wonderful detail. A Voice of Singing by Arnold Taylor, Horsforth Choral Society 2003, does the same for these singers. Neither book is likely to have a vast readership, and yet both tell you much about a century of Northern life in the first case and 78 years in the second. Another sort-of-musical delight is the affectionate portrait of the late Derek Enright MP, The Man Who Sang Yellow Submarine in Latin, Pontefract Press 1996. If you don't already know the reason for the title, you'll have to borrow or by True North to find it out.

Readers write

2010-03-05T23:24:00.000-08:00

As well as providing much-appreciated corrections, readers of True North so far have sent me lots of excellent new material which I hope to use in future editions. One of the first, from Edwina Clements of Kilnsey, picked up on the book's passages about garden estates in otherwise industrial towns and ended marvellous reminiscences of her own, from childhood in Oldham. I had not heard of the 1909 Beautiful Oldham enterprise, although Mrs Clements makes it sound like an exercise absolutely out of my own heart. Her parents moved in 1940 into a semi on one of its consequences: Oldham Garden Suburb. The house backed on to Bell Fields, a wild, green area between the estate and Bell Mill, and she writes: "This was our playground where I once found a skylark's nest and lots of wild flowers including an early purple orchid." I remember finding my first early purple orchid, in north Leeds, and being amazed that a flower with such an exotic name (and associated then only with the lavish hothouses of wealthy businessmen such as Isaac Holden of Oakworth - see True North), could be flowering wild near our house. Mrs Clements says "I've never lost my interest in nature that started there." Same here.
This isn't all nostalgia either. Mrs C was Rose Queen in the Oldham Garden Suburb Tenants' Association festival of 1956, and she went back to the 100th festival last August. "It was a joy to see the present community thriving with the same great enthusiasm," she writes, adding only a small old-North coda: "despite the heavy rain." Oldham GS has got an absolutely excellent website, www.oldhamgardensuburb.co.uk, from which I have pinched this picture of street cherries in full bloom - eat your heart out, Surrey - plus the Rose Queen Festival in 1936. To prove the robustness of the tradition, just check out their 108-picture slideshow of last August's festival, which you can even watch in 3D. Mrs Clements will be in there somewhere.

Waterworld

2010-03-02T13:35:00.001-08:00

Rivers play a more dramatic part in defining the landscape of the North than they do in most other English regions, thanks to the long spine of the Pennines (hills whose distinctive inhabitants will get a post of their own shortly). Rain comes down in torrents on the watershed and so we have big, big rivers snaking away on either side, leading respectively to the Irish and North Seas. Sentimentally, I hanker after the latter's old name, widely used until the First World War, of the German Ocean. There's a very good recent collection of essays on one of the grandest waterways in Mersey - the River that Changed the World (Bluecoat Press 2007), including one by my long-standing Guardian colleague David Ward, whose retirement triggered True North when, incredibly, not a single colleague in London applied to fill his shoes. On the Yorkshire side, I have made much use over the years of the reprinted series on Yorkshire Rivers (Old Hall Press 1998), originally written for the Yorkshire Weekly Post at the turn of the 20th century. I have a lot of other books on the subject, which I'll add here as I rediscover them, but for now I'll mention Yorkshire's River Aire(Terence Dalton 1976) by John Ogden (not the pianist), with a chirpy introduction by Jimmy Saville who reveals a plan to kidnap the whole world and bring them North. Also A Ball - A Square by John Springer (Richard Netherwood 1996) which introduces the waterways of the North, inlcuding canals, to younger readers, plus those young at heart, through the adventures of a fictional group of children on a narrowboat in real-life settings.
Finally, for now, I have used a trove of leaflets such as Public Art Walks in Tyne and Wear (TyneWear Partnership 2006 {I think}) which concisely introduce their users to possibly unexpected waterside beauty in the North East. Click on the pic to see details.

Back in action

2010-03-02T00:02:00.000-08:00

Many apologies for the long delay - I haven't died or broken my leg in the snow. I've been on four weeks' sabbatical, a very civilised practice which the Guardian still offers for every four years' service in spite of its financial challenges. Penny and I were in Sri Lanka, where the North-South division has had terrible consequences. Like everyone who visits the beautiful island and its great people (to at least half of whom we now seem to be related through my older son's marriage) we hope that they find a way to go forward together.
One thing which has helped bridge some of England's infinitely gentler division has been a fair distribution of well-paid and talented medical people across the country, a point highlighted in True North. As with the universities, but in striking contrast to the media, medical excellence is as common in the regions as in London and several books on my shelves explain why. Pig in a Suitcase, the Autobiography of a Heart Surgeon (Smith Settle 1999) is one, describing the remarkable career of Geoffrey Wooler. The way he saved the life of Lord Woolton at the Conservative party conference in Scarborough in 1952 is strangely gripping. Another very significant Northern doctor was Sir John Charnley, inventor of the hip joint operation which keeps so many of us pottering along. John Charnley: the Man and the Hip by William Waugh (Springer 1990) is a very good biography, and Charnley's career is well set in its wider context in Opposite the Infirmary by Penny Wainwright (Thackray Medical Research Trust 1997), which describes in detail Charnley's collaboration with the Leeds medical company which made the artificial joints to his extremely demanding specifications. Penny - none other than my wife, so I declare a very strong interest - also tells the story more briefly as one of the contributors to Leeds City Business (edited by Katrina Honeyman and John Chartres, Leeds University Press 1993). It was significant, and wholesome, that Charnley required any surgeon wishing to carry out the operation to spend a couple of days with him at Wrightington hospital near Burnley, where this ground-breaking process was pioneered.

Sorry, I forgot...

2010-01-28T23:17:00.000-08:00

...another outing is on Saturday, 1st May, at the lovely and lively town of Hexham on the Tyne, sweeping along with joy in its heart because the South Tyne has just met the North Tyne a mile or so to the West and they must have much to discuss. Hexham stages a really good book festival every year - see www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk/home - with all manner of authors and events. On Mayday afternoon I'm going to be chatting with Ian Thompson, whose new book The English Lakes is about to come out from Bloomsbury, and Harry Pearson whose peerless review of True North in the Daily Mail (not always an agent of darkness) you can read here: www.thefreelibrary.com/Cold+hands,+warm+hearts,+but+no+chips.-a0210858243

The horse's mouth

2010-01-26T13:29:00.000-08:00

I can't pretend that controversy has exactly raged on this site so far. I hope that it's proving useful as a bibliography, and I very much appreciate the corrections which have all gone to the publisher. But I'd been expecting that the Grim North Brigade would march into action with drums beating out a dirge. Not a bit of it. They're skulking in their tents. This has been the case even to the extent that the Today programme on Radio 4 had real trouble finding anyone to debate with me until good old Arthur Smith stepped up to the line. Maybe people don't think it's still grim after all? If only. One of the spurs to writing the book was the nervous reluctance of southerners to move north, and the nonsensical images many still have of the region, which I have heard with my own ears.
There is to be debating, however. I've given quite a few talks since publication including - swoon - a Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch was was always regarded as the ultimate proof of an author making it when I was a boy. (It was always said, too, that the editor at the time, Sir Linton Andrews, insisted on publishing only gushing reviews, for the sound commercial reason that the name of the Post would then appear on all the book jacket blurbs, as it did). Anyway, here are some pending gigs: Friday, 19 February, at 8pm in Bollington Arts Centre, Wellington Road, Bollington (the fabled 'Happy Valley' of affluent Cheshire). Monday, 15 March, Huddersfield Civic Society agm at 9.45 in Kirklees College, New North Road (you may have to join the HCS for this, but wouldn't that be a good thing?). Saturday 20th March at 3pm in the Yorkshire College of Music, Shire Oak Lane, Leeds, as part of Headingley LitFest. And 16 April at Saltburn Community Arts Centre in Saltburnby the Sea, a lovely place not to be missed. Time to be arranged.
I've added pictures of Saltburn's pier and wondrous cliff lift, and of White Nancy above Happy Valley to further entice you to come.

Miles to go before we sleep

2010-01-24T04:54:00.000-08:00

Well here we are at post number 40, and there are many, many more books to go. I may be dead before we get there, and as for pamphlets... I'll probably have to bequeath the task of listing them all to my heirs. These micro-publications, booklets, church leaflets, parish magazines and all the vast and numberless legion of ephemera form my greatest treasure trove. It is rare to find one without at least one nugget within of fine, original information or a surprising fact. To give you a notion of the task ahead, here are some phone pics I've just taken of the part of my pamphletarium which is sort-of organised - ie in small boxes with vague names such as Merseyside Generally or Newcastle & Northumberland. Just dipping into the latter, I'd like to commend and acknowledge The Pennine Cycleway by Ted Liddle, Dalesman 2003, The Hartlepool Villages series of leaflets, published by Hartlepool borough council (undated but c.1995), the Northumberland National Park's Public Access Guide to the Otterburn Military Training Area (undated, c.2000), Hadrian's Wall, an illustrated guide by A R Birley (he of Vindolanda, about which anything is excellent),HMSO 1963 eighth impression 1981, and W W Tomlinson's Historical Notes of Cullercoats, Whitley Bay and Monkseaton 1893, of which North Tyneside council library service kindly sent me a photocopy (of parts, not the whole) in the mid-1990s. More, much, much more to come...

Sunshine mountain

2010-01-21T09:09:00.001-08:00

True North deliberately accentuates the positive - 'Climb, climb up Sunshine Mountain' as we sang in the Sunday School at Gipton Methodist - and is thus vulnerable to criticism that everything is too radiant. I try to fend this off in the book, partly by pointing out how so much writing about the North is the exact opposite, steeped in gloom; and partly by calling in aid the sort of stories about bad things which I have covered for the Guardian up here since 1987.
The latter process has been hugely helped by careful statistical work, particularly from Government departments but also from extremely painstaking groups such as the Coalfields Community Campaign, now retitled The Alliance. A consortium of local authorities in former - and still existing - coalfield areas, it has produced endless, excellent data. A couple of examples: The Other Half of Britain and It's a Matter of Life and Death, both published in 2008. Look for The Alliance as publisher after June 2007 and the CC prior to that.The Audit Commission is first-rate too. When I chaired the old National Lottery Charities Board in Yorkshire and the Humber, I soon discovered how important audit is as a means of checking on non-elected public bodies. The commission's A Mine of Opportunities - local authorities and the regeneration of the English Coalfields, published in November 2008, makes extremely interesting reading. A good example of an academic book which makes sensible and responsible use of highly detailed statistics is Corporate City - partnership, participation and partition in urban development in Leeds, edited by Graham Haughton and Colin C Williams, and published by Avebury in 1996. I will be adding other examples to this post as I plough on through my groaning shelves...

Two-timing Gertie?

2010-01-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

I should have included this handy book in the last post: Intercity 225 Leeds to London; a Traveller's Book, by Maureen Ellis and published by Hawksheath Press, Shadwell, Leeds in 1993. The trouble is, I always mean to take it with me on the train down South and I always forget. Even the combined brains of myself and Penny failed last week. Still, I enjoy reading it at home - loads of good stuff such as a reminder to look out for Potteric Carr nature reserve near Doncaster, and the revelation that the bitterns which formerly lived there were known locally as Butterbumps. Meanwhile, here's a coincidence. Two books of the type I greatly like and consider extremely virtuous because of the role models they present to today's young. Way back at the start of the blog, I commended James Thompson's Leeds Born and Bred. Well here's Bradford's equivalent and, sort-of, Sheffield's. But what is this? Isn't that the same attractive young woman on the covers of both Bradford's Own by Derek A J Lister, Sutton Publishing 2004, and The Unseen, the Unsightly and the Amusing in Sheffield by J Edward Vickers, Hallamshire Press 1997? It is. Music hall afficionados will recognise Gertie Millar, and the honour of producing her is very definitely Bradford's. I used to live in Southfield Square, Manningham, a stone's throw from the cul-de-sac where she was born. She is only in The Sheffield book because she played the theatres there. Tush. Still, a pretty face on the cover sells books (and newspapers).

SNAP!

These books are about famous people (and events, including the atomic experiment at Sheffield Uni in 1924 which prompted hundreds of letters in advance begging the scientists to desist, in case they destroyed the world - tee-hee, but maybe prescient). Here are two more I have used about those who left less of a memorial, but thanks to A Photographic Memory by Jack Hulme, Yorkshire Arts Circus 1986, and They Worked All Their Lives by Carl Chinn, Manchester University Press 1988, are not forgotten. The second of the two is particularly useful, as its first-hand data shows how urban grime and misery in the 19th century was every bit as grim in London, Brum and other such places as it was in the industrial North.

Excellent - this blog gets a helping hand

2010-01-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

Hello from the King's Cross train to Leeds - and we've just had that True Northern moment when the big blue loco pulls into the Throat tunnels and everyone on it seems to heave a great big sigh of happiness: we're off home. Romantic tosh. Probably. But Penny and I heaved our little sighs anyway.

And good news: an excellent reviewer, Paul Brassley, in this month's History Today draws attention to this blog in kindly terms, at least in its purpose as a bibliography. I've pasted it in below, plus the relevant weblink. My only reservation is over the way he says that the bibliography is 'inexplicably missing from the book.' Actually it's very explicable. As I say in TN, it would be a terrible waste of paper to print all this stuff out and add it to a book which already quite hefty, when we've got lovely free Blogspot and the broad acres of the internet.

One sentence which I specially like in the review is the one saying: He has the journalist’s love of a good story; there are many here and logical structure and sustained argument are never allowed to get in the way of telling them. Spot on, Mr Brassley. I can show you school reports from many years ago, saying very much the same thing.Anyway, here's the review (which as you'll see is mostly about my excellent colleague Madeline Bunting's great - and also Northern - book The Plot with a very much appreciated nod at the end to our efforts to continue the Manchester Guardian tradition).

What produces love of a single house, street, village, city, region or country? Is it something about the place itself, or is it more about our emotional connection to the group of people who happen to live there at a particular time, or have lived there in the past? Whichever it is, the attachment clearly exists and, as a result, people have celebrated, spent money, argued, voted and fought wars for thousands of years. In different ways, both of these books explore human relationships with places and how they are affected by historical change.

Madeleine Bunting’s Plot is a single acre of land on the edge of the North York Moors. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, John Bunting, her father, was a schoolboy at Ampleforth and was walking to the school’s annual picnic when he came upon the site of a ruined farmhouse at the southern end of the old drove road along the Hambleton Hills. The view was stupendous and the sense of isolation and peace especially precious on that day. In 1957, by then a sculptor and part-time art teacher, he returned, rented the land for 25 years at ten shillings per year and within 18 months had built a stone chapel there, complete with a life-size stone effigy of a soldier on the floor. It was his memorial to three former Ampleforth schoolboys who had been killed in the Second World War, as he might have been had he been a year or so older.

The meaning of this place, both to John Bunting, his family and the world in general, is what the book explores, mostly through accounts of specific land uses and their history. It produces a fascinating mixture of personal experience and historical context. Thus, one chapter is a hymn to sheep and their influence on history, another is about landscapes and the resultant development of tourism and so on through abbeys and escapism (the ruins of Rievaulx and Byland Abbeys are nearby), forestry, farming, wildlife and battlefields. The focus moves in and out, from the chapel itself to its locality, on to England and its place in Europe and back again. The whole is unified by Madeleine Bunting’s own memories of the Plot, its place in her childhood and her changing relationships with it as she leaves, moves abroad and then becomes a Guardian journalist living in London. In addition, each chapter reveals a little more about her father. Maintained by considerable ambition, religious faith and self-belief, he was an accomplished artist and an inspiring teacher. But he also appears as a domineering parent with a failed marriage whose sculpture was largely unrecognised. The Forestry Commission’s planting obscured the view from the chapel and increasing numbers of tourists ruined his sense of isolation. The angels he carved for its buttresses were stolen. We ruminate upon success, failure and the ways in which identity is shaped by history and locality as Bunting deftly draws us into his small domain. The only shortcoming is the poorly labelled maps, which do little to enhance the text.

Martin Wainwright’s ostensible focus in True North is much wider. He claims to cover the whole of the North of England (although the Leeds-Manchester area gets by far the most thorough treatment), with the avowed purpose of replacing the image of a grim, black, rain-soaked, economic desert of depressed manufacturing industries, populated by grumpy, racist, male chauvinists, with one that more accurately reflects the beauty, variety and economic, social and cultural progressiveness of the region and the changes that have occurred over his lifetime. Whether anyone seriously believes the clichés he seeks to destroy is debatable. So is his claim to explain how they arose. He is more concerned with exploding the myths than with tracing their origins. He has the journalist’s love of a good story; there are many here and logical structure and sustained argument are never allowed to get in the way of telling them. Much of the book is based on his experiences as a Guardian journalist working in the North since 1987 and illustrated by numerous superb photographs from the paper’s archives. He has also produced an excellent bibliography, which is, inexplicably, missing from the book and only available, here on its website.

It is now 50 years since the Guardian dropped the association with a particular place, Manchester, from its title, but these books by two of its writers reveal the power still retained by the imagined communities associated with localities and their history.

The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre
Madeleine Bunting
Granta
304pp £18.99
ISBN 978 184 708085 1

True North
Martin Wainwright
Guardian Books
300pp £18.99
ISBN 978 0 85265 113 1

Series in parallel

2010-01-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

Let's hear it for series now. I have already mentioned that I am a voracious reader of tomes such as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and his successors' famous Buildings of England (Penguin and/or Yale University Press, various dates). But I value even more the outstanding county Village Books produced by the Federation of Women's Institutes in Lancashire, Northumberland etc. These are real classics, a sort of highly unpredictable Domesday with the character of each village defined by the woman or women entrusted with the task of describing it. Pevsner has his moments, revealing intense dislike of some pastiche architectural feature, or ecstasy at a touch of 1960s modernism. But he has nothing on the Women's Institutes when it comes to characterful writing. I have gleaned so many curious facts and anecdotes from the Northern WIs - perhaps my favourite being the story of the Japanese chicken-sexers of Cowling (pronounced Coaling), the village above Airedale on the road to Nelson and Colne, where Viscount Snowden was born. I revel also in the Aspects of... series published by Pen and Sword books. These have excellently detailed and well-researched essays on such subjects as When Buffalo Bill Came to Barnsley. And look! There are seven volumes on Barnsley alone! Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Hull and other fine Northern cities also figure in the list. If you can get hold of copies of The Yorkshire Journal, published in the 1990s and early 2000s by Smith Settle, they have some very good original historical articles too.

Quite right too...

2010-01-09T10:18:00.000-08:00

Another mini-post: did you see that report in this week's snow mayhem white hell journalism, that Tweets in the North of England had a large share of words such as 'sledge' and 'snowman', while those in the South were more on the lines of 'stuck', 'frozen', 'gridlocked'?

This is germane to the thesis of True North, and I will try to get it in to the reprint. Although, as one of my sons suggested to me today before flying off to Mexico City (I wish...), books may become indefinite now that we have the internet. Via means such as this blog, they may just ramble on and on and on...

I don't like not having an illustration in a post, so here is one of girls from Harrogate Ladies College, my Mum's alma mater, at a time when it was producing the sort of Northerners who carried on cheerfully through the Depression, the Second World War and the winter of 1947, which makes our current cold snap look a picnic. I'm not a fan of modern independent schools because they are so seldom independent-minded; but HCL was then, and many women of that generation have a notable cast of mind. If you or your Mum or Gran are in the picture, do let me (and the world) know.

Talking of which, two daughters of retired dockers in one of the fantastic pictures by my former Guardian colleague Denis Thorpe in True North have been in touch, very pleased to see their Dads, who also look like redoubtable types. You'll have to buy or borrow the book to see that one.

URGENT!!!!

2010-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

The book is to be reprinted shortly, so any other corrections (additional to those five posts below (The Sprigge Gambit, or Sylvia's Curse) should be RUSHED this way NOW. Many thanks. More bibliography soon but now back to the snow.

Wonder women, part 2

2010-01-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

Snow interrupted me just now, both for work and for maintenance of two other outstanding women, my Mum and Penny's, who are both tucked up in snowholes, but need supplying.
Anyway, here are some more books on Fine Northern Women, which I have enjoyed and which also contributed to my assertion that the region is indeed, in the words of the subtitle, England's better half.
I don't think Daughter of the Dales needs much introduction, nor its author, (with TV producer Barry Cockcroft), Hannah Hauxwell. She is what people oddly call a 'natural.' I shared a platform with her once in Hawes and my children, who were there, have had a mantra ever since, imitating her soft North Yorkshire voice excellently as they say: "I love me house, and I love me farm, and I love me sheep, and I love me..." (Arrow 1991 - and there are assorted other titles including Seasons of My Life also 1991).
Anything by Winifred Holtby or Storm Jameson is good, and you can read some good introductory material on both, and a host of other Northern writers, in Marion Troughton's Pens, Profiles and Places (Smith Settle 1989). I specially like Holtby's epitaph in the church at Rudston: 'Give me work till my life shall end, And life till my work is done.' Rudston also has an extraordinary standing stone and a stained glass window to the romantic-sounding Lord of the Isles, who deserted Scotland for this pleasant part of the East Riding.
Not far up the coast is Whitby Abbey, famously ruled in the 7th century AD by St Hilda. My late aunt Anne Warin wrote an enjoyable account of her life, Hilda, an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Lamp Press 1989). She was a tough negotiator, and that talent was shared by the heroines of a whole stack of books about the struggles of women workers. Here's an instructive trio from Yorkshire Arts Circus, those marvellous micro-publishers from Castleford: Bad Reputation, Yorkshire Women, Politics and Power, Ed Tina Kendall 1994 (how women suffer when they step out of line, but how they boldly go on doing so); A Woman's Right to Cues by Sheila Capstick, 1988, in which the villasin, rightly are Yorkshire working men's clubs and their belief in men-only snooker; and Our Bitter Harvest, 1993, by the women mushroom-pickers of Whitley Bridge, who went on strike for almost a year to end a life which, as they saw it, resembled the old saying about mushrooms: live in the dark, fed on dung.
A final excellent analysis of the harsh conditions and strength-in-unity of a trade dominated by women - homeworking - is to be found in A Penny A Bag - Campaigning on Homework, published by the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group in 1990.

Women from winter wonderland, part 1

2010-01-05T01:56:00.001-08:00

Snowed-in just now, so I can finish another post which stalled last night because of the need to start sweeping the white stuff away so P could get back in. Her intrepid journey to choir rehearsal - which would be out of the question this morning - prompted me to look through some of the books I used when discussing women's role in True North - today often the same as men's pretty much, but very different in the past.
Anne Lister of Shibden Hall is an interesting example, and there's going to be a big BBC2 drama about her in the Spring, starring Maxine Peake. She was gay and kept secret diaries about her love life, which also cast light on the struggles of women trying to be independent in the early 19th century - a hard task even for a very wealthy Yorkshirewoman. Her former home of Shibden Hall near Halifax is now an excellent museum, although she would not have approved of that. She kept the public out. The growing literature on her includes No Priest but Love - Journals 1824-6 edited by Helena Whitbread (Smith Settle 1992) and I Know my Own Heart, diaries 1791 - 1840, (Virago 1988) edited by the same author who first transcribed the diaries and deserves much respect. Selected letters between 1800 and 1840 are in Miss Lister of Shibden Hall, ed by Muriel M Green (The Bookk Guild 1992). Two other interesting studies are Female Fortune - land, gender and authority (Rivers Oram 1998) based on Anne's writings 1833-6 and Nature's Domain, Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire (Pennine Pens 2003), both by Jill Liddington, whose books on the suffragettes are exceptionally interesting - how Lister would have flourished, and how her talents would have been recognised in that milieu. Liddington's Rebel Girls (Virago 2006) has oodles of fascinating new material about Northern suffragettes and their cat and mouse adventures. I grew up just along the road from the former home of one of the book's heroines Isabella Ford, which has just been acknowledged by a Leeds Civic Trust plaque. More shortly, must just turn attention to snow mayhem for the paper.

How others see it

2010-01-04T12:32:00.000-08:00

Penny’s out at choir tonight and all is quiet on the Guardian front. So I may get a little burst of posts done. There are certainly plenty of books left to acknowledge.
Having said that, this bit is about some of the reviews which True North has gathered so far, in case anyone would like to see them who hasn’t.
Leeds Student, for example, probably doesn’t have a huge circulation outside the two unis, although it deserves to. It was Newspaper of the Year in this year’s Guardian student newspaper awards. Important to say that the prize was awarded before Hannah Glick wrote these very nice pieces about the book. She nailed my fascination with chocolate sprinkle patterns on cappuccino very observantly. Hannah Glick. A name for editors to watch… Her interview is on:
www.leedsstudent.org/index.php/ls2/books/interview-martin-wainwright/901
and here's her review, scanned in because I can't find a link to it online (click on it to enlarge).My only slight sorrow here is that Hannah skipped the mining/strike/coal bits, but I'm down to talk to Leeds Student staff some time this term, so I shall try to tempt her, and any like-minded colleagues, to go back and have another go. On the other hand, her reaction accords to some extent with points I make about the 'new' North and its wish to break free of the 'old.'
Paul Whitehead also did a kindly piece in Leeds Guide, and in his Waterstone’s bookseller role promoted the book as a ‘staff favourite’. They have a competition to see which one on the ‘recommended’ shelves sells most by Christmas and back in early December, True North was in the lead. I fear it may have been overtaken since then, but will go down to Albion Street to check when I can. Anyway, here’s his take:
www.leedsguide.co.uk/review/interview/martin-wainwright/12747
I have to add the excellent pic they used of me pioneering the ‘Jedward’ hair style in 1953, the year of the Queen's Coronation. This appeared in the mag but sadly, not online. So here you are.
Just to round off my native Leeds’ interest, Rod McPhee was very generous with space in the Yorkshire Evening Post, and here’s what he had to say:
www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/features/Our-friend-of-the-north.5779846.jp?articlepage=1
Across the Pennines in Manchester, Paul Taylor did sterling work in the Evening News there:
www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/lifestyle/s/1186051_blowing_away_old_stereotypes
And if you got bunged a free Metro in the train across, via my old canvassing playground in the Colne Valley and Saddleworth, you could read this:
www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/758442-true-north-has-magentic-attraction
Very nice too, although I’m not sure where the Cheshire to Chiswick line came from, apart from an understandable pleasure in alliteration.
In the big time, there was an incredibly joyous review by Harry Pearson in the Daily Mail and a good, interesting one in the TLS. That last came closest to the discussion and debate I’d quite like to get going; it all seems fair comment to me – in the sense of arguments you don’t agree with but which have logic and evidence; except the quip about Northerners being interested in making money, especially. One of my points in True North is that the region likes making things. Money may come with that, but has not been the prime motive to anything like the extent that natural (I suppose) human cynicism likes to believe.
I haven’t been able to link to these last two reviews so far, but I think I can scan them in. Then if you double click on the pic, the text should be legible.
There are other reviews I'm trying to nail links to, and actually I've just found Yorkshire Life's, by Terry Fletcher, former editor of the noble Dalesman. Alas, the online version doesn't have the magazine's fab pics by Joan Russell, with whom I've often worked on Guardian stories. But here it is, with thanks to Terry, and YL's matchless editor, Esther Leach:
http://yorkshire.greatbritishlife.co.uk/arts/books/article/the-north-uncovered/15664/

Seeing things clearly

2010-01-04T10:23:00.000-08:00

Penny and I had a lovely New Year walk in the snow up the Washburn valley, between Blubberhouses and Thruscross dam and back - there up the lane and back via the old flax mill leet, the reservoir and the canoe course where people much braver than myself enjoy things such as grabby stoppers and boofs. It's the only dam-release canoe run in England, apparently, and that tells a story: how a landscape once loud with quarries and a big mill is now a haven for watersports and ramblers like us. The old valve house on the mill dam - a nice little Victorian folly with arrowslit windows, is now a birders' hide. Thus things change, and that's a point I return to repeatedly in True North.
A writer who recognised this, and therefore deserves honour for being different from those talented but tramlined Northerners who dwell in the past and damagingly maintain that it is still exists, is Keith Waterhouse. His City Lights (sceptre 1994) is an outstanding evocation of boyhood in Leeds in the 1930s and early '40s, all the more appealing for the fun and pleasure which he took from the city, fired by his vivid young imagination. Anyone who sets out to trace the course of the Wyke beck on a raft called Spirit of Leodis (the supposed Roman name for Leeds) has something vital of the Huck Finn an Tom Sawyer in them.
Just as good, the sequel Streets Ahead (Hodder & Stoughton 1995) rushes past Waterhouse's time on the Yorkshire Evening Post to the triumph of Billy Liar (also terrific reading) and moving to London. Here, the honour already accorded him needs to be redoubled. Unlike so many Northerners who have succumbed to cliche-mongering because that was what their metropolitan commissioners wanted, he said, in so many words: 'I'm not in the North now. There are writers there who know better than I how things are, and how they are changing. I want to write about other things.' Of course, he did write about his Northern past, both in these autobiographies and in his Mirror and Mail columns, but crucially he made it clear that That was Then. He never pretended that trams still clanked over cobbles in the smog. Indeed he satirically lambasted Leeds for going all modern and abandoning such icons of his youth.
I'll include with his books this much more modest, but excellent, account of the Gipton estate in Leeds, The Gipton Story (Gipton History Group 1991) because the place has suffered from an 'adhesive' image based on highly partial and selective reporting. Charles and Dulcie Yelland, who were tremendous Labour activists on the estate, knew it backwards and bring out its virtues and the idealism of Rev Charles Jenkinson, the Socialist councillor whose vision created Gipton, and other peripheral estates in Leeds such as Belle Isle and Middleton, as model communities to replace the central slums. I also know Gipton well, because my family attended Lady Lane Methodist chapel which served the slums' residents and moved with them to Gipton when they were rehoused. So, like the Yellands, I have always known of the ample good which goes with the problems which inevitably, and seldom with any contextual material, make the media's headlines about the place, and many like it across the North.

The Sprigge Gambit (or Sylvia's Curse)

2009-12-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

A change from bibliography now: as the standfirst in the title says, this blog is also for corrections, and I’m extremely grateful for the following which have come in. Thanks to all concerned, too, for putting me right me gently and kindly. I shall return to that, and the reason for this post’s heading, shortly.

So to the corrections, which I hope will be made in a reprint before long….sorry, first, that I spectacularly muddled James Herriot’s choice of hymn lines in the quotation which begins Chapter 8 (Page 261) by calling his most famous book All Things Bright and Beautiful. It is actually All Creatures Great and Small.

Thanks very much to my blog correspondent Lingard (see post Paved with - Huddersfield below) for pointing that out. Also see Richard Carter's comment on this post, putting right my geography of Port Sunlight and Phil Dawson's on the very first post, right at the bottom, correcting St James's Park to the proper St James' Park (on Page 11).

Thanks to all; and to to Steve Burkeman of the Rowntree Society for noticing that on Page 275, I rename York’s Quaker-founded psychiatric hospital, The Retreat, as The Mount, which is the city’s Quaker girls school (and alma mater of Margaret Drabble and Dame Judi Dench among others). I should know, because my sisters Hilary (editor of Red Pepper) and Tessa, wise teacher of English as a foreign language in Bradford, are alumni too.

Now, thanks to my wife Penny’s eminent cousin Prof Paul Cartledge (whose books, like Hilary’s, are all must-buys). He kindly puts me right on the following:

Page 54 The Latin version of Yellow Submarine sung to the House of Commons by Derek Enright MP should use ‘natali’ and not ‘natalis’. I am not going to argue with Cambridge University’s A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture about that.
Page 75 The Barnsley fashion business Pollyanna mysteriously loses it second ‘l’ in the two references to it on this page. Opposite, on Page 74, I get it right.
Page 137 The word ‘the’ has gone missing before ‘triumphs’
Page 156 ‘does’ should be ‘do’ in second para – not for the first time, I gave plural subjects a singular verb.
Page 163 The 's' of 'Guardian's' should be roman and not italic
Page 204 In a repeat of my Pollyanna eccentricities, I have mis-spelt the first name of Leeds’ great race relations pioneer Erroll James, using only one ‘l’, whereas I get it right on the page opposite. Something bout ‘l’s in my psyche…
Page 209 ‘premier’ should hve a concluding ‘e’
Page 234 I rechristened the writer Alan Sillitoe ‘David’. The wonderfully meticulous Paul asks: “Is this confusion with David Storey?” No. It’s confusion with Alan’s son David, one of the best photographers working for the Guardian and an ace companion on jobs.
Page 238 I should have given Richard Hoggart his first name, as this is the first mention of him (surprisingly; maybe I cut something earlier out). He also isn’t in the index.
Page 285 The word enthusiastic mysteriously appears as two: enthus and iastic. We will get that gap closed.
Page 289 ‘makes’ should be ‘make’ in the reference to tales of Northern pluck transferring to film.
And lastly, Page 291 I twice deprive Jean Giraudoux of his first ‘u’.

Phew! Paul, you are a reader in a million. To spot all those is beyond praise – specially that ‘s which got engulfed by the Guardian’s italic.

Finally (for now…), similar warm thanks to Salfordian Eddy Rhead who refers to himself in an email, entirely wrongly, as ‘a miserable northern pedant’ and makes these points:

On page 67 you refer to the architect of Atlas Bar in Manchester as Alan Simpson - it was in fact Ian Simpson.
At one point you rightly state that the Imperial War Museum North is in Trafford (p77) but then contradict this by later claiming it is in Salford (p230). As a Salfordian i would very much like to claim the IWMN as one of ours but must concede to our posh Trafford neighbours on this one.
Finally on page 294 you add 'restaurateur' to Thomas Heatherwick's long list of talents. A talented designer, sculptor and architect he may be (and a southerner - he studied in Manchester though) but as far as i know hasn't branched out into food yet. Are you thinking of Paul Heathcote maybe?

I am, and I grovel. (re. The Simpsons, my mind must have been full of the actual Alan, who is a wonderful academic tree wizard and pal based at Leeds Met university - although his surname has no 'p').

Sorry to list these blunders so comprehensively, but this post is partly a memo to myself to make sure that they get corrected.

BUT WHO WAS SYLVIA SPRIGGE? She was a very distinguished Guardian foreign correspondent who worked in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. And this extract from David Ayerst’s brilliant Guardian – the biography of a newspaper (Collins 1971) shows why she is also my patron saint:

Heaven on Earth

2009-12-14T09:29:00.001-08:00

Three books on the Lake District which I have much enjoyed, as well as finding useful. Alan Hankinson's retracing of Coleridge's famous journey is great, including the all-but-suicidal descent of Broad Stand between Scafell and Scafell Pike which the poet managed (at least, by his own account) but Hankinson prudently detoured. John Wyatt's The Bliss of Solitude joins his other books, compiled when he had the lovely job of Chief Ranger of the Lake District national park, in describing the area thoughtfully and well. That and Coleridge Walks the Fells were published, very handsomely, by Ellenbank Press in Maryport in 1991. Finally, And Nobody Woke Up Dead (Ernest Press 2006) is a jolly romp through the life of Mabel Barker, a woman among the dotty, corduroy-breached rock climbers of the early 20th century. It is a landscape populated by the best sort of Northerners - Quakers, idealists, members of Kibbo Kift and the Morris Dance Revival Society. As they say in the US after serving you gigantic platters of food; Enjoy! (including a wealth of pictures which set the tone, such as this one below with its delightful caption, on the back cover of the book's jacket). There's also excellent material on Millican Dalton, the famed 'Professor of Adventure', a City dropout who lived in a cave which can still be explored at the foot of Castle Crag near the Jaws of Borrowdale.

And here's Millican, having a picnic tea with Mabel (right) and a buddy. Click on any pic to enlarge.

Goodbye world...

2009-12-04T05:04:00.000-08:00

That - the title of this post - is what these naval signal flags said on the roof of Leeds' famous (or notorious to some) Quarry Hill flats in 1978 when the huge complex was doomed. Disgruntled tenants, who wanted to stay, nearly chose a different message, also only two words, the first beginning with F and the second with O. But in the end, polite melancholy won more votes than outraged defiance. The story of the flats is told marvellously in Memento Mori by Peter Mitchell, published by Smith Settle in 1990 with a foreword by Bernard Crick. It has a particularly good selection of photographs and although the story doesn't really run in an organised way from A to Z, the anecdotes and facts are real treasures.
I met Peter at the launch of a book I did earlier this year for the RIBA (Leeds - Shaping the City, RIBA Publications 2009) and he said that he was considering something similar to the Quarry Hill book on Spencer Place, where he lives. I really, really hope he does, as both my paternal grandparents were born in Spencer Place, and its history, along with that of the surrounding Chapeltown area, is rich indeed - all the way through from the bourgeois 'New Leeds' of mid-Victorian times to today's cosmopolitan community. Here are a couple of pictures of my granny with her parents and brother outside their house (now part of Leeds Islamic Centre and well looked-after) and at her wedding reception in the front garden, where the mosque now stands. Wasn't Leeds dark in those days? Or is it my scanner...?

Benny and Boots

2009-12-04T04:50:00.000-08:00

Two books without a link, now, except that they both begin with B, they're both about the North and more particularly the Pennines, and they're both good. Sorry, two books with at least three links. And there's another...but, no, I am not going to turn this post into Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch.
Owt and Nowt by Tony Bell, published by Burnley Miners' Publishing 2002, is a homemade history of Burnley's famous working men's club, which sells more Benedictine than anywhere else in the world. The WORLD? Yes, and you can find out why in True North, or indeed in Tony Bell's excellent book. Why not get both? Owt and Nowt is not just about Benny & Hot, the town's famous drink, but tells you a lot else about the club, mining and Burnley in general. Note the maroon cover; since Burnley FC started doing so well in the Premier League, everything in the town has been painted maroon.
Secondly, Boots and Books by Trevor Croucher, published by Smith Settle in 1995, is both a delightful sketch of the life and work of this Albert Einstein-like character in the photo (left), the immortal Arthur Raistrick, and an invaluable bibliography of AR's work. It has another very nice picture in it of Raistrick with G M Trevelyan and the Dower family at Malham - John Dower played the key role in getting us all our National Parks. The Countryside Commission's fine HQ in Cheltenham is named after him.

Three sides of the coin

2009-12-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a little collection of grass roots experiences of Yorkshire grittiness. Can you have grass roots and grittiness? Yes, say I. Indeed I say so at some length in the chapter of True North called The Green and the Grey. These books are perhaps better described, though, as 'from the streets', and they all come from authors whose work I much enjoy. Bill Mitchell, emeritus editor of the Dalesman, ranges all over the landscape, not of his beloved Dales, but of the towns which lie among them, in By gum, life were sparse! Warner Books 1991, introduction by another excellent Northerner, Mike Harding. OK, it's cliche-shudder time with that title, but it isn't appropriate to the era in which Mitchell immerses himself. Jim Greenhalf brings things up to date with his sardonic It's a Mean Old Scene, Redbeck Press 2003, whose title is based on a famous piece of graffiti in Bradford which I remember passing frequently when I worked for the local Telegraph & Argus in 1975. As I say in True North, Bradford is a great glass-half-empty place (Leeds always considering the glass to be half full), and this book is a good (and enjoyable) example.
Phyllis Bentley, finally, turns the subject into her usual fine fiction in More Tales of the West Riding, Garden City Press 1974. She will be rediscovered shortly (again), I bet you. Virago Press, where are you? There must be a preceding volume Tales of the West Riding, I guess, but I haven't read it yet.

Aduunyadu way qiiro badan tahay

2009-12-04T04:16:00.000-08:00

I think the title to this post means 'The world is a wondrous place' in Somali. So far as I can tell that's the case, anyway, from the only Somali-language book I own: Shells on a woven cord, published by MAMA East African Women's Group and Yorkshire Arts Circus, 1995. It is an insight into the often inaccessible world of Somali immigrants, especially the women. Inaccessible, I should say, for a white male in particular. One of my sisters, who teaches English as a foreign language in Bradford, has made many good friends from an extraordinarily wide range of communities. The book describes life in both Somalia and Sheffield in a clear-eyed but ultimately optimistic way. Meanwhile, the latest edition of the Thoresby Society's Miscellany has arrived, with an interesting article on Italian immigration in Leeds. The society is an invaluable source of detailed information about the history of Leeds and always welcomes new members or purchasers of its books - 23 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9NZ. 0113 247 0704.
An excellent new feature they've introduced this year is the first of a proposed series called Notes from the Library, highlighting items in the society's impressive archive. They kick off with a piece about the exceptionally generous gift of Kirkstall Abbey to Leeds by Colonel North, the 'Chile Nitrate King', who bought it from the seedy descendants of the Cardigan family and just handed it over to the city. Business entrepreneurs get a lot of flack - witness the current banking furore - but in my experience they are much more generous benefactors than, for example, the arts or sports world. When will Alan Bennett premier a play at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which would be a huge fillip for his native city? When will Damien Hirst curate an exhibition at the fabulous little museum in Horsforth where he grew up?

On that score, here's another good book: How it all began in Yorkshire by Maurice Baren, pubished by the Dalesman in 1997 - one of a host of similar books covering various parts of the country and an object lesson in the trials of starting great business, as well as the rewards which can follow.

Please pass the salt...

2009-11-14T02:33:00.000-08:00

One of the advantages of an internet bibliography is that you can include books which you didn't use, but wish you had. Here is one such: The Hedon Silver (Hedon Town Council, 2000, Highgate Publications, 4 Newbegin, Beverley HU17 8EG). Hedon Town Council only has parish status, since the re-organisation (and further-distancing) of 'local' government in 1973/4, but it is an admirably gutsy body with great civic pride. This stems in part from the days when Hedon was the equal of Hull - indeed even more prosperous initially. Just look what today's little council has inherited in the way of civic plate! I mean, when can they possibly throw a dinner where you would need ten silver salt cellars? (But wait: see below...)
I didn't include Hedon in the book, through ignorance of these details which I only discovered when Penny went to do a feature on the place for next month's Yorkshire Life. But I have got a big section on exactly the same sturdy, Northern localism in Morley near Leeds and Richmond (North Yorks). I'm going to be meeting one of the book's characters, Judith Elliott, the Mayor of Morley, next week when I have to preside over Leeds Civic Trust's agm, cos this year she's Lord Mayor of Leeds, on whose council she sits as one of five Morley Independents. I will suggest a grand Dinner of Independent Places at Hedon where they can get out all the fantastic cruets and maces shown in this book, and have a feast of local activism and (soundly-based) pride.

Golden Ages, then and now

2009-11-10T14:39:00.000-08:00

This book means a lot to me. I was given it by Grigor McLelland, a stalwart of the North East, who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit with my father and, many years later, chaired the National Lottery Charities Board in the North region while I had the same job in Yorkshire and the Humber. It is a marvellous, scholarly compendium of articles about the era which we know and love from Bede: Oswy and Eanfled celebrating their different Easters at Bamburgh, the great Celtic saints, the astonishing jewellery and carved stones found across the region (and, most recently, in the 'Staffordshire Hoard'). This is such a big and expensive book (£35) that I imagine most people will borrow it from the library. It would be well worth doing so. I'm particularly grateful to Christopher Grocock's chapter on Bede and the Golden Age of Latin Prose in Northumbria, which compares the range of languages spoken in Bede's Jarrow with the author's contemporary experience of Geordie and Urdu spoken in turn by women working in his local newsagent's in the town.

Small but perfectly done

2009-11-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I've been hopeless about continuing the bibliography lately, but I'm going to have a bit of a sesh this week, all other things remaining equal. I came across this outstanding booklet, Bradford Peace Trail, in our loo where it had got hidden under the usual pile of National Geographics and Private Eyes. It's a succinct and well-written guide to the city - one of the most interesting in the North - which uses the 'peace' theme very loosely to bring in all manner of famous sons and daughters of the place and modern events, such as street violence over extreme right-wing demos etc - as well. It illuminates some of my own feelings which I've tried to express in True North - eg the Quaker millowner Liberal W E Forster as pioneer of state education, and the importance of 'urban countryside' to the big cities such as Bradford. It's online at www.cityforpeace.org.uk/htdocs/peace_trail.html or you can get a copy from Bradford City for Peace c/o 37 Heights Lane, Heaton, Bradford, West Yorkshire BD9 6JA 01274 542672 info@cityforpeace.org.uk
On the book front, True North is getting more reviews than I expected, which is great. I'm not usually very keen on the Daily Mail, but it can surprise - for example with its sturdy support of Stephen Lawrence's family - and Harry Pearson did a piece on the book which makes some really good points. In particular, he writes about the value of praising one area without denigrating others, using the parallel of loving your partner without having to be rude about other women/men. Mike MckNay's invaluable editing of True North made this point to me eloquently, and once again, I'm very grateful for that. There is a problem, though, in that it is impossible not to mourn and criticise the effect on all the regions of London's excessive power. But this is not the same thing as disliking London as a city, or the 'South' in general. I like them both.

Welcome if you've linked from Comment is Free...

2009-10-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

I got a Comment piece in the Guardian today, which takes some doing I can tell you, but Hooray anyway, cos it's stimulated a very interesting and largely good-natured thread. It's on

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/26/north-south-divide-relocation

and I've brazenly posted on it myself, advertising this blog, so as to encourage discussion and, maybe more important, corrections which I can list to get in when the opportunity arises (which will come the sooner, if everyone buys lots of books...)

I think and hope that a slideshow with some of Chris Thomond's brilliant pics will go up on the G's site shortly too (another struggle there, but still; we Northerners win in the end). I very much like working with Chris and we have endless chitchat about how to move illustration of the North forward from the powerful and lovely, but increasingly outdated, images of the past. Colour is a start. The 'old' North only seemed to have two colours. Black and white. Oh, and grey.

Not so nice

2009-10-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

Interviews are coming thick and fast at the mo, which is great from the point of view of debate and developing ideas. It's alarming how many things hadn't occurred to me. This week I did one of the local radio seshes which are superbly organised by a man called Peter Bestwick at Western House, round the back of Broadcasting House on the corner of Great Portland Street. It's the home of Music Radio 6, where I did an interview with the excellent, if Lancastrian, Shaun Keaveny, and got a free postcard of Jools Holland to send to my 90-year-old mother-in-law back in Leeds, who is one of his superfans. I learned a lot from Radio Kent, who did a whole lot of vox pops during the morning, prior to our chat. They had Northerners down there and Southerners up here, and one listener described how friends of hers had moved North and initially been shunned because they were Southern and therefore preconceived to be stand-offish and posh. By chance, I was chatting to a Guardian colleague later in the day at the paper's mammoth London HQ (why can't they relocate some of them up here like the BBC?), and she said: "My daughter went to Manchester University and..." I chipped in, starting to say: "Yes isn't it great? All the Southern kids love it." But she said instead: "She hated it and now she's left." The reason was that she shared accommodation with exclusively Northern girls who apparently took the same, gut, anti-South attitude, or seemed to. So all this is ammunition for my plea in True North for Northerners to lose the chip (except the edible kind), and consign the cobbles to Beamish and similar museums.

Paved with.... Huddersfield

2009-10-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

The book is out now. We had a very enjoyable launch at the Ilkley Literature Festival, which is gradually catching up with Hay-on-Wye. I keep working at The Guardian to transfer, or at least share, its sponsorship. Ian Jack and Lucy Mangan were great debaters, along with Helen Cross, whose novel My Summer of Love gets a mention in True North as an example of modern fiction which recognises the presence of the Northern middle class and does not present it in cliched terms. She is keeping busy in a properly Northern way: two more novels since My Summer of Love, which was also filmed successfully. I bought the latest, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee, and am much enjoying its portrayal of white and Muslim Yorkshire communities. No cliches, again.
Sorry not to have added to the bibliography lately. Publication means a busy search for publicity and I probably won't have time to update for a day or two. I had a fun outing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, debating the North-South issue with Arthur Smith. It was the last item, which seems to stick in the mind, judging by subsequent comments from all sorts of bods. Mind you, it wasn't as good as the next day's, which featured Jeffrey Archer on his rewriting of one of his novels. Talk about Arnold Bennett's The Card... Still, when Arthur talked about London's streets being paved with gold, I managed to counter that they - or at least Regent Street from Broadcasting House to Oxford Circus - are actually paved with Huddersfield's finest stone. I did a piece some years ago on the quarry from which it came. I met a producer the following day at the new BBC North in Media City at Salford Quays and she said that she and her colleagues were all examining the paving stones, as I urged people to do. They are beautiful - swirls of brown, grey and caramel. Part of the South which is for ever North, because West Yorkshire sandstone lasts for a very long time.

Comers-in

2009-09-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

My family is Northern way back, but we didn't spring out of the soil here. Within traceable records, there are comer-in from Kent and Birmingham, and lost in the more distant past, various bits of Northern Germany. Probably. Who cares? The point robustly made in True North is that we have always benefited from welcoming immigrants, and there is a wealth of books and pamphlets to prove that. I ,ade good use of Roisin Ban (White Rose), Corinne Silva's lovely photographic essay on the Irish in Leeds, with thoughtful essays by Brendan McGowan (Leeds Irish Health and Homes 2006). With Walt Whitman in Bolton by Paul Salveson (Little Northern Books 2008) opens a wistful American connection (lots of Northerners went to the States, including many Mormons and Mr Wrigley of saddleworth, immortalised (appropriately for a Northerner) by gum. In that context, Aspects of Barnsley vol 3 Wharncliffe Publishing 1995) has a great article by Brian Elliott called When Buffalo Bill Came to Barnsley (which he did, in 1904. Homeworkers UK provided me with a gentle and encouraging account of Indian-origin citizens of Leeds, Stitching Stories from Bihar to Beeston (Homeworkers Worldwide 2005) and Religion in Leeds edited by Alan Mason (Sutton 1994) added very useful material on other Asian groups as well as the city's famous Jewish community. Religion and Place in Leeds by John Minnis and Tevor Mitchell took the story on (English Heritage 2007) and City of Peace edited by Carol Rank (Bradford Libraries 1997) did the same for Bradford. Stass Paraskos by Norbert Lynton (Orage Press 2003) is a lively account of a very lively Cypriot painter and his time at Leeds College of Art which he much enriched. An Artist's Odyssey by Robert Waterhouse (Jean-Georges Simon Foundation 2005) tells the equally interesting story of the Hungarian artist Jean-George Simon who moved in exile to Ramsgill in Nidderdale.A Pedlar's Legacy by Patrick Beaver (Henry Melland 1981) tells the story of the Fattorini family from Italy and their creation, Empire Stores. Aspects of Leeds vol 1 (Wharncliffe Publishing 1998) has another good article on the Jewish community's history by Murray Freedman, a great expert on the topic. In Excited Times by Nigel Todd (Bewick Press 1995) tells the story of 'the people against the Blackshirts' during Sir Oswald Mosley's forays North in the turbulent 1930s. To Live it is to Know it by Alfred Williams and Ray Brown (Yorkshire Arts Circus 1987) leaves you in no doubt about the challenges facing new arrivals (and long-standing ones, too often) from the Caribbean. Far Headingley by David Hall (Far Headingley Village Society 2000) has an excellent microcosm of unusual newcomers to a well-off and intellectual Leeds suburb, including Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia who stayed with Arthur Ransome's family (see picture). J.B.Priestley's Yorkshire edited by W R Mitchell (Dalesman 1987) has some excellent passages by the sturdy old warrior on the benefit of German and Jewish immigrants to Bradford (among them the family of Michael Wharton, the Daily Telegraph's erstwhile Peter Simpson, who betrayed his origins with some nasty (however witty) comments about Asian immigration to the city. Finally Ebor: the Archbishops of York by A Tindal Hart (William Sessions 1986) unexpectedly showed the international richness of past occupants of that job. And now, Hooray!, we have John Sentamu.

Language

2009-09-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Northern dialect and, equally interesting, patterns of speech (even when using standard English), have been hardy perennials for me during my time reporting from the region. I have a host of mentors from the great Joseph Wright, who rose from mill work aged six in the Bradford suburb of Idle (never so wrongly named as in his case) to become Professor of Comparitive Philology at Oxford University. His tradition lives on in the Yorkshire Dialect Society whose website www.ydsociety.org.uk is full of good things. Rather like him, Rev Joseph Hunter did a very good job with his The Hallamshire Glossary, republished by the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at Sheffield University in 1983. Assorted copies of the centre's journal Lore and Language have added to my store of theories and facts. Another venerable authority is John H Wilkinson who published his Leeds Dialect, Glossary and Lore in 1924. Blatherskyte, gallehbawk, topful'a-throng...it's like a pudding full of plums.
In recent times, Dr Arnold Kellett of Knaresborough has been a marvellous source; among many others, he inspired Ross Raisin, the young Keighley writer whose novel God's Own Country (Viking 2008) plays excellent games with language. Dr Kellett's many books include Basic Broad Yorkshire (Smith Settle 1991), a fine summary, The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore (Smith Settle 1994), Ee by gum, Lord - the Gospels in Broad Yorkshire (Smith Settle 1996) and, if you want a very rapid skim, The Little Book of Yorkshire Dialect (Dalesman 2008). It really is little, but concise.

Poetry often gives a guide to language, and apart from Permanently Bard (Bloodaxe 1995) and anything else by Tony Harrison, I have made good use of Ian Duhig's Nominies (Bloodaxe 1998) and The Lammas Hireling (Picador 2003). I've already mentioned Lucy Newlyn below; another good poetess is Joan Ingilby (of Marie Hartley fame), for example her simply-named Poems (Smith Settle 1994).
Sir Herbert Read's famous memoir An Innocent Eye (Faber & Faber 1933, reprinted with an introduction by one of his sons, Piers Paul Read, Smith Settle 1996) stands re-reading again and again. So does a singular novel which raised my interest in speech is Sam Small, the Flying Yorkshireman by Eric Knight (Neville Spearman 1957). It's a cracking story too. I got my copy in Kit Calvert's shop in Hawes and it has a column on Knight by Willis Hall from the Yorkshire Evening Post tucked inside.

Buildings

2009-09-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Buildings follow naturally from geology, and there is a heap more written about them. So far as my own part of the world is concerned, George Sheeran is an outstanding guide, both on the actual buildings and their history. I had only recently finished his Brass Castles, Ryburn 1993, when I saw a group of bearded gents rambling round our neighbourhood taking an interest in the buildings (which are mostly the work of Bradford woolmen, although nicked by Leeds since the end of the West Riding as an actual, rather than historical, entity). An enthusiastic younger man was leading them and to my great delight he turned out to be George Sheeran. His Good Houses Built of Stone, Allanwood Books 1986, is another marvellous account of buildngs in Leeds and Bradford, 1600-1800. The Buildings of Bradford, Tempus 2005, takes the story on for that city.
Over the other side of the Pennines, I learned a great deal from Charles Reilly and the Liverpool School of Architecture 1904-1933 by joseph Sharples, Liverpool University Press 1996. This was published to mark an exhibition about Reilly at the Walker Gallery. My younger son Olly was beginning to take an interest in architecture at the time, and books like this led to lively family discussions. The one thing we all agreed about was approving the striking cover. My copy has a leaflet about the exhibition inside, and thios slipped out before scanning just enough to look as though Reilly's fedora has somehow expanded out of the book. He did have a big head.
There are a lot of engrossing series about buildings, among which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England, Penguin, various dates, contributors and in recent years updaters, stands supreme. The volumes on the Northern Counties are all good, as of course are the Victoria County Histories, again many dates, if you really want to delve and have lots of time and a big shovel. More accessible are the volumes in the paperback Lost Houses series, published by Jill Raines at various dates in the late 20th century. I've got the ones for the three Yorkshire ridings, Newcastle and Northumberald. Aah, for what has gone! The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England has also produced some Roll Royce books on the North, among which I treasure Rural Houses of West Yorkshire 1400-1830 HMSO 1986 (very very good on yeomen houses and low halls) and Houses of the North York Moors, HMSO 1987. Smith Settle's 3 volumes on Building the West Riding (plus North and East separately, all by Lynn Pearson, are all comprehensive, well-illustrated and readable. Published 1994-5.

Geology

2009-09-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

There's nothing more fundamental than the ground we tread on, and its different forms in the North have done much to create the region's image - dark sandstone, or the evocatively named 'millstone grit', or the crumbling cliffs of the North Sea coast where stone gives way to what is little more than mud. True North makes a point of the way that other geologies have had less of a look-in historically: the shining white limestone of the scarp which runs through Yorkshire, taking in places such as Doncaster and Conisbrough as well as York; or the lovely warm red stone of Cumbria's Eden Valley. I love reading about stone. especially when the writers' are fellow-enthusiasts, which applies in all these books. The Building Stone Heritage of Leeds is another of my top titles: two academics potter round the city, discovering where McDonald's marble fascia comes from (down to the exact quarry in Italy) and the like. It's by Francis G Dimes and Murray Mitchell, published by Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 1996, reprinted 2008. The Phil & Lit, incidentally, are a doughty crew who organise descents down Gaping Ghyll. I wouldn't dare go but my wife, a Phil & Lit council member, has - and she got a glass of champagne at the bottom.
Talking of caves, I enjoy curling up with caving guides such as this one: Northern Caves 1: Wharfedale and the North-East, by D.Brook, G.M.Davies, M.H.Long and P.F.Ryder, Dalesman Books 1988. The text is technical but exciting for all that, (I've illustrated the back of the book jacket here to add to that sense of potential drama) and some colourful historical references inch in, much as the potholers themselves do, underground. Anything by published by the Dalesman is to be recommended, Another short but fascinating potholing book is Yorkshire's Hollow Mountains by the former editor of the Dalesman, Bill Mitchell, Castleberg 1989. Again, anything by him is worth getting hold of. Like most visitors to the mountains, I also much enjoy watching the human flies on places such as Dow Crag above Coniston or the overhanging, Neanderthal brow of Kilnsey Crag in Wharfedale. Like the cave literature, a volume such as Yorkshire Limestone, edited by Graham Destroy and published by the Yorkshire Mountaineering Club. A final piece of fascinating erudition, combining geology with archaeology, is Prehistoric Habitation Sites on the Limestone Uplands of Eastern Cumbria by J and P J Cherry; a race to check stuff in advance of a British Gas pipeline. Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society 1987. I bought this after doing the Coast to Coast Walk for my guide to that matchless path The Coast to Coast Walk, Aurum, 2006 & 2009. Cherry & Cherry illuminate the often bafflingly modest remains on this eerie plateau. Another walk-related book, more of a booklet really but a great little guide by an expert geologist is Geology, Scenery and History; a walk in Yewdale by Murray Mitchell (he of the Leeds building stone), Cumbria RIGS 2004.

Making it up

2009-09-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

Fiction is mentioned many times in the book, and most of the significant works I've read are listed in the text. Here are some others. I've always like W.Riley's Laycock of Lonedale, Herbert Jenkins 1924, since my mother read me the opening sentence of its foreword: 'Laycock, Wainwright and Binns - these are common names in the industrial parts of the West Riding...' Riley was recently treated to that occasional honour of being rediscovered by an academic who called him 'a forgotten author.' Not by me, and not by many others who particularly remember his best-known book Windyridge, 1912.
Speeding up to current times, Climbers by M.John Harrison gives a great and not entirely traditionally dour and gritty view of the North, especially the climbers' cliffs scattered in odd places such as above laybys in the Pennines and Peak. Phoenix 1989. Lucy Newlyn's book of poetry, Ginnel, Carcanet 2005, has a distinctive and accurate feel for that great Leeds suburb, Headingley. She is a Northerner who has done well - now professor of English language and literature at Oxford University.

T'other side

2009-09-07T09:33:00.001-07:00

I'd better not flaunt my bias, but it's entirely true to say that there's more Yorkshire in True North than the other parts of the North. Sorry. That reflects my time here, when the Guardian has been very well served west of the Pennines by David Ward and Helen Carter and the North East and Cumbria by Peter Hetherington. There is plenty on their patches in the book though, and this post concentrates on Lancashire sources. Paul Salveson has done a terrific job digging up the story of Lancashire's Romantic Radical, Allen Clarke - pen-name Teddy Ashton - of Bolton and Blackpool, in the book of that name, published by Little Northern Books 2009. Rather more conventionally, I lap up small books such as Explore Lancashire by Car by Jane Sterling, The Dalesman 1976.
Liverpool has a great literature, and also a small one. I've much enjoyed In the Footsteps of the Beatles by Mike Evans and Ron Jones, Merseyside county council 1981. Much more to come in this section, and cover pictures. I'm just Hoovering through a pile of book stuff in my office which doesn't have a scanner.

Mysterious Mr Myers

2009-09-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

There's a section in True North about the initially veiled correspondent to the Guardian from Hemel Hempstead who turned out to be Alan Myers, an exiled Geordie who is a fount of learning about the cultural history of the North East. My most prized work by him is the self-published North and SOUTH, which will involve you in quite a search I suspect. Let me know if you'd really like a copy and fail to get one, and I will see what I can do.

More accessible is Myers' Literary Guide to the North East, Carcanet Press 1995 which is an absolute mine of joyous detail on its subject, and one in which I have industriously burrowed, and from which, enthusiastically borrowed. Thanks very much Alan, and for all the postcards and emails, keeping me on the right, pro-north track. Check out Alan's additional bibliography; he has also written excellent articles for journals such as the late Northern Review.

Top quality

2009-08-31T23:51:00.000-07:00

The name John K Walton brings joy to all. Now a professor of social history at Leeds Metropolitan University, he has published some marvellous books about northern institutions. My two favourites are Blackpool and Fish & chips and the British working class, especially the latter. It is packed with wonderful regional detail, like the scraps, bits (or in Dewsbury, shoddy) which top off fish & chips even more finely than mushy peas do. The fish and chips book, published by Leicester University Press in 1992, is a rival for Phil Sidey's Hello, Mrs Butterfield (see below) in my most-thumbed category. Blackpool is published by Edinburgh University Press, 1998. John's Riding on Rainbows is another must, a history of Blackpool's Pleasure Beach and its rusty and somewhat peeling-painty, but perennial, place in British popular culture, Skelter Publishing 2007.Check out anything else by John; to inspire you to do so, I append a picture of his rosy and hirsute northern face.

Making things virtuously

2009-08-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

This is going to be quite a long section of the bibliography because one of the themes of True North is the lasting tradition of enterprise. With it, in many more cases than is generally recognised, went (and still goes) high principles. Businesses were not just set up to build brass castles for their owners; they provided work, opportunity for advancement for all involved and self-respect.
Enough moralising. But here's a very high moral tome to start with; A Quaker Business Man by Anne Vernon, William Sessions 1982. This is a life of Joseph Rowntree, whose modest grave at The Retreat is indistinguishable from those of all the other York Quakers whose remains lie beside his. If you visit, note how long these virtuous people generally lived! my copy has an interesting press release from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (another of the three great Rowntree trusts) tucked inside, all about New Earswick model village which the great man funded. The Joseph Rowntree Inheritance published by the three great trusts in 2004 is also the sort of thing to cheer you up in glum times.

Completely different is Talking Spanish, a Yorkshire Arts Circus study (1992) of one of the north's most interesting ways of making a living. Like most Arts Circus books, it has the serious flaw of not attributing the quotes and reminiscences about working in the liquorice industry in Pontefract. But it's full of marvellous detail, social as well as commercial, and I like this girl in a liquorice outfit so much that I've made her bigger than any photograph in the blog so far. Another good book, by mates of the Arts Circus Richard Van Riel and Briony Hudson, is Liquorice, published by Wakefield district council to go with an exhibition in the early 200s. (It's undated, alas).
Two good books on the canal trade which was very important to the growth of the industrial North are Victor Waddington, Giant of the South Yorkshire Waterways, by Mike Taylor, Yorkshire Waterways Publications 1999, and Pennine Pioneer by Keith Gibson, Tempus 2004. The first tells a story which is still very much alive in business terms; the canals leading in from the Humber and Trent continue to be of great economic significance. So is the revived Rochdale canal, the subject of the second book, although its role today is tourism rather than commerce.
The Hainsworth Story by Ruth Strong, Jeremy Mills Publishing 2006, describes how a traditional textile company has managed to survive, nay flourish, into the 21st century. I make use of this as an exemplar of the type, in the book. Billingham in Times Past by Paul Menzies, Countryside, two vols 1985 and 1986, has some invaluable material on the early days of ICI and the trouble the company took to provide model housing for its workforce. The History of North East Shipbuilding by David Dougan, Allen & Unwin, 1968, describes a magnificent tradition dating back to Daniel Defoe's time. In 1727 he observed, accurately, of Newcastle upon Tyne: "...they build ships here to perfection." Tyne and Tide by David Archer, Daryan Press 2003, has plenty more. H W Schneider of Barrow and Bowness by A G Banks, Titus Wilson (Kendal) 1984, is enjoyable on both Barrow shipyards and Windermere steam yachts I'll be adding plenty more to this section of the blog, too, over the next few weeks.
And here they come: Made in Huddersfield by Jack Ramsay, North of Watford Publishing 1989, is an eloquent lament for what was, albeit with too many grainy and gloomy pics. The magnificent story of the Fielden manufacturing dynasty of Todmorden, classic Northern industrialists who were also very radical and religious (the latter in the best, social conscience, sense), is told in Fieldens of Todmorden by Brian Law, George Kelsall 1995, and A History of Todmorden by Malcolm and Freda Heywood and Bernard Jennings, Smith Settle 1996. Both are socking great tomes. The noble pair of Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby have famously covered many Northern subjects; but the general association of them with the Yorkshire Dales is too narrow. Books such as Life and Tradition in West Yorkshire, Dent 1976, Smith Settle 1990, are full of firsthand accounts from the factories and mills, which give a much broader picture than the usual cliche. Scotswood Road by Jimmy Forsyth, Bloodaxe Books 1986, is engaging on Newcastle upon Tyne's industry and those who worked in it. Marshalls of Leeds, flax-spinners by M M Postan (Cambridge University Press) is an excellent study of a fascinating firm - the one which gave us the Egyptian Temple Mills in Holbeck, Leeds.To Prove I'm not Forgot by Sylvia Barnard, Manchester University Press 1990, is a great look at manufacturing from the unusual angle of the dead. It's a cracking history of the huge graveyard opposite St James's hospital in Leeds where both mighty manufacturers, such as Sir John Barran, and their workers at last rest.

Coasts

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Another favourite here. The lost towns of the Yorkshire coast by Thomas Shepherd 1912, republished 1986 Mr Pye Books, is both a classic and a salutary reminder that things don't stay the same.
Even things as solid as northern England. look - by clicking on it - at the map in my second illustration (complete with instructions to Paddy Allen, once of Graphics at the Guardian, in which I have warbled on about North Sea coastal erosion many times). Amazing! More than 40 towns taken by the sea.

The Floating Egg by Roger Osborne, Jonathan Cape 1998, is a deservedly acclaimed series of studies all connected with the 'dinosaur coast' between the Humber and the Tees. It covers science, industry and everyday life. For me, the important lesson to draw from it is how extraordinarily varied just this one slice of the north is. Like all the other slices.

Media

2009-08-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

Here are two very good books about that rare thing, a regional media success story. Phil Sidey's account of the early days of BBC Radio Leeds, which I vividly remember from my teens, is one of the favourites of all my northern books. I can read it again and again, always sharing his relish (he was the first station head and without reservation a Good, nay Wonderful, Thing). It's a success story, but against enormous and often eccentric metropolitan odds. Hello, Mrs Butterfield, Kestrel Press 1994.

The Dream that Died, Matador 2008, by the award-winning journalist Ray Fitzwalter, who incredibly first exposed the crooked architect John Poulson and his crew of corrupt politicians from the humble berth of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus is about a success story which went dismally wrong. Like Phil's book, it's an indictment of London control. But unlike his, it's also a textbook description of how not to fight that, if you want to win rather than make a point.
It's a shame that mainstream publishers didn't take up either of these books.

Regionalism

2009-08-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Michael Heseltine deserves acknowledgements and thanks for his role in promoting regionalism. The regional offices of Government are his legacy, and he also had a revitalising effect on Liverpool and Merseyside at their lowest ebb. He behaved with much more conviction than the supposed archetype of conviction politics, Margaret Thatcher, who did not offer him the support she could have done, in spite of coming from Lincolnshire, one of the most forgotten sub-regions of all. Like Tarzan himself, the book, Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, is a bit of a beast, 560 pages long and weighing a ton, but it's a good read (and has plenty of other material about his enthusiastic life). Hodder & Stoughton 2000.
Another lively book which I've pillaged over the years is The Fight for Yorkshire by Michael Bradford, Hutton Press 1988, which is very good on Yorkshire's ambitions to conquer the world (or at least capture the final eight miles between the North Riding and the Irish Sea). Closer to the ground, Whose Town Is It Anyway? by Stuart Wilks-Heeg and Steve Clayton, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust 2006, is a very thorough analysis of voting and governance in Burnley and Harrogate which comes to a welcome, anti-centrist conclusion. The New Governance of the English Regions by Mark Sandford (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) is very thorough and brings things up to date.

Miners and Mining (1)

2009-08-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

There's quite a lot about miners and mining in True North, and I have found the following books very illuminating. The Bus to Barnsley Market, edited by Brian Lewis, Mel Dyke and Ian Clayton, Yorkshire Arts Circus 1989 (anything by Yorkshire Arts Circus is excellent, except for the serious flaw in most of their collections of memories of not attributing them to the speaker/writer. The firsthand accounts are otherwise gold dust, and in thenfine tradition of Marie Hartley, Joan Ingilby and Ella Pontefract. All books by that trio are lastingly excellent. Shafted. The media, the miners' strike and the aftermath, edited by Granville Williams (a hero of Huddersfield University and the wider North), Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom 1989, is illuminating, both on injustice and self-pity. If you like contrasts, read this jointly with West Yorkshire Within Living Memory, Countryside Books and the West Yorks Federation of WIs 1996; like the Arts Circus, very good on firsthand accounts. Another Arts Circus book helped too: Why Waste it on a girl? Growing up in Methley and Castleford by Jean Pearson 1989. I also benefited from Barnsley - Seams of Gold, various editors, the Coalfield Regeneration Trust 2001 and The Kinsley Evictions 1905 by Pat and Rennie Pickles, Wakefield Museums, undated by I think 1991 when there was an exhibition in the city. The Politics of the Yorkshire Miners by Andrew Taylor, Croom Helm 1984, is an extremely detailed analysis of the tooing and froing within this once-mighty body between 1945 and 1974. A lot has happened since then...
And a lot happened before the pits. I've much enjoyed a many local histories, revelling in their painstaking detail and, in the case of the north's mining areas, the way that they describe life before the shafts were sunk. One such is The History of Brierly and Grimethorpe by W.Bretton, who died in 1959. His manuscript was finally published in 1999 by Grimethorpe's regenerational Community Partnership and the WEA. A History of South Kirkby is equally painstaking, by Aaron Wilkinson, published by South Kirkby and Moorthorpe's enterprising town (parish) council in 1979. Two Lives by Winifred Hodgkiss (Yorkshire Arts Circus 1983) is a charming account of how a BBC producer and a miner from Wigan ended up living happily ever after in Littondale.

A classic of mining literature which I much recommend is Out of the Old Earth by Harold Heslop. My edition was published by Bloodaxe in 1994. It describes growing up in the Durham coalfield and much else, including Heslop's extraordinary literary success in the young Soviet Union where his first novel sold half a million copies. Another fascinating memoir is Them and Us Souvenir Press 1972, by Jim Bullock, a lad from a pit village who became an extremely feisty colliery manager. Five more, on different sorts of mines. Swaledale by David Leather, Smith Settle 1992, is a good introduction with walks to an area with a remarkable lead-mining history. A portent for today's former coalfields, in the way its once wrecked landscape is now a national park. I've also gained much from A History of Richmond and Swaledale by R.Fieldhouse and B.Jennings, Phillimore 1978 rpt 2005. Ian Tyler tells a very specific and absorbing mining story in Seathwaite Wad, about the famous graphite industry in the Lake District, Blue Rock Publications 1995. And Inside the North Moors David and Charles 1978, is a marvellous compendium of information by the renowned local journalist Harry Mead, including lots on the old ironstone and alum workings. Oh, and add in anything by Arthur Raistrick.

A visit to Kilhope lead mine at the head of Weardale, to test it with a family for the Guardian's family-friendly museum award (which it won, yo!) great;y interested me. This is the landscape of Auden, which is discussed in True North. Good books/booklets which I picked up at Kilhope included three by the mine's enthusiastic manager Ian Forbes: Lead Mining Landscapes, Durham County Council 2003, Lead and Life at Kilhope, essentially the extended guide to the Museum, Durham County Council, undated, and Whar a candel will not burn..., the story of Park Level mine, also at Kilhope. Durham county council again, 1996.

Manchester and Tyneside

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A couple of excellent books on these two subjects: each has given me lots of material over the years, as well as prompting me to follow up subjects which they raise. Manchester in the Victorian Age by Gary S Messinger, Manchester University Press 1985, is particularly good on the city's cultural achievements in Victorian times and on the myths about its grimness and how they grew. It quotes Disraeli's Coningsby on the title page: "Rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens." I've also learned a lot from The Diaries of Absalom Watkin, A Manchester Man, most recently edited by Magdalen Goffin, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993., Manchester by Alan Kidd, Ryburn Publishing, Keele University Press 1993 and The Manchester Man by Mrs G.Linnaeus Banks 1896, republished by Printwise Publications 1991, The Manchester Outrage by Jack Doughty, Jade Publishing 2001, which describes 19th century community tensions well, and After the 1996 Bomb by John Myles and Ian Taylor, Institute of Social Research, Salford University 1999, which deals with the results of those tensions in more recent times. Scouses vs Mancs by Ian Black, Black and White Publishing 2006, takes a humorous look at Manchester and Liverpool's rivalry. And, of course, everything by Elizabeth Gaskell is instructive as well as a good read .

Geordies, edited by Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster, Edinburgh University Press 1992, is crammed with riches. I am particularly grateful to the chapter on Black Geordies by Barry Carr, which gives an excellent account of the Yemeni community in South Shields. Tucked inside my copy is an article from the Newcastle Journal of 22 November 1997, sent to me by Alan Myers (see the book) and all about Wittgenstein's curious stay in Newcastle. The North East Engineers' Strikes of 1871 by Allen, Clarke, McCord and Rowe, Frank Graham (Newcastle) 1971 is a fascinating and detailed study of industry and industrial relations. I warmly recommend anything by the late Bill Griffiths, linguistic and historical expert in the North East, and just got his last book in time, Fishing and Folk Northumbria University Press 2008. Even better is his Pitmatic, a study of North East miners' fascinating argot, also published by Northumbria University Press, 2007.

The North-South Divide

2009-08-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

Two books I've used a lot, with the same title Their sub-titles explain the difference. Helen Jewell's is a fascinating historical study of the development of a 'Northern' idea. Her own bibliography gives lots of guides to further exploration. The North-South Divide Manchester University Press 1994.

The second The North-South Divide Paul Chapman Publishing 1989, has loads of statistics which show both the divide and some (but not all) of the divisions on either 'side', which ultimately make the picture much more complicated than a simple Us and Them.
Three other sources which I have found very useful in this debate are: The Woollen Manufacture of England by Edward Baines, with a new introduction by K.G.Ponting David & Charles 1970; The Origins of Civic Universities by David R Jones Routledge 1988 and the Northern Economic Review, Autumn 1999, No.29.

Off we go...

2009-08-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

Right, well this is the letter which made me feel I ought to set something down at length about the North. Written on the back of a photocopied page from Yellow Pages (jewellers to juke boxes) it arrived in the Manchester office about five years ago. It started 'Dear Mr Wainwright' which I'm afraid I can't fit in, through scanning incompetence, but that was the only polite thing about it. I did go off to the Town Hall but searched for the correspondent in vain. Perhaps he or she is reading this.

Now for some books, starting with a shameless plug. This is my own first effort. I was already a self-publicist back in 1971 when Ireland not Socialism - A Leeds election came out. It's my mini-thesis for my history degree. After writing something like 50,000 words, I couldn't bear to see them simply stashed away in a university cupboard. I wouldn't say it's a riveting read but there is masses of information compiled to impress the examiners. eg the fact that at the time of the book's oublication, more than 25 tons of soot was still falling on every square mile of Hunslet. It also had some curious illustrations inside and I append one of them.

It's quite hard to get hold of, though copies occasionally surface on Amazon. If you want one, I can send you one, probably rather dog-eared, for the price of postage. Can I recommend with it, a very old stand-by of mine which has helped with countless Guardian articles: Leeds Born and Bred by James Thompson, Dalesman Books 1982. It has an excellent choice of the city's worthies from Joshua Tetley to Hedley Verity and the big industrial cheese of Unilever, Sir Ernest Woodroofe. There's also James Barr, founder of Wallace Arnold, and my copy has tucked inside the agenda for the EGM which wound up that grand old firm in 1994

Hello World!

2009-08-26T05:00:00.001-07:00

This blog is about my book True North, published in October 2009, and will serve - I hope - as a bibliography which saves paper, trees etc, and a forum for discussion, criticism, correction of errors (I am a journalist...) and the like.

I'm just setting it up now, but will return shortly with the first batch of books which have helped me to define my view of the North of England and to write - as the book's subtitle puts it - In praise of England's better half. So, more soon.