Matt Woodhead and Richard Norton-Taylor (ed. and compiled): Chilcot

In a deeply unpopular decision on 20 March 2003, Tony Blair declared that Great Britain was at war with Iraq. The majority of the public of Great Britain was against it, realising that this was a decision that Blair had made with George Bush long before, realising that it was a disastrous move, and realising that Tony Blair was a hypocrite, a serial liar, and a stupid clown. How could so many politicians have been hoodwinked into voting to destroy a country, to kill countless innocent people there, and to create Daesh, making the world a much more dangerous place to live in? How could such a calamitous international action, the closest in terms of importance to the (far less calamitous) Suez crisis of 1956, have taken place?

Well, this is of course what the Chilcot Inquiry (or the Iraq Inquiry) was about, and its findings will at last be published on 6 July 2016. It is of course well known that the results will come down heavily on Blair and his supporters in government, although probably everyone also realises that Blair will never end his life where he belongs: behind bars.

The Chilcot report of the inquiry is a 2.6 million word document: not exactly a work that can be summed up in a few words, although Matt Woodhead and Richard Norton-Taylor's dramatization of some of the key words used during the inquiry (premiered at The Lowry in Salford) goes some way towards understanding the gist. Here we have actors using the words of such people as Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, Alastair Campbell, and of course the main offender, Tony Blair, talking a great deal, but none of them actually saying anything: this is the language of spin, designed to impress by its rhetoric but these days only fooling a certain number of fools (largely the remaining Blairites in the Labour party who think Jeremy Corbyn is a menace).

The main piece of real sense in the play (apart from the words of the Iraqi victims detailing violence on the part of anti-Iraqi forces during the invasion, and the violence that followed after Iraq had been, er, liberated) is when Clare Short speaks. She was Secretary of State for International Development before resigning in 2006. She felt that she had been 'conned' into accepting the 'weapons of mass destruction' nonsense. Surprise, surprise, but what took her so long to realise this?

Tony Blair's legacy is in tatters, like Iraq itself. The world is far more dangerous. Oh, and he inevitably managed to more or less destroy the Labour party, which will also probably never recover from his destructive policies, meaning the country will not be able to fight back against the privatisation lust of the EU-supporting fat cats.

Great play though.

John Harding: Sweetly Sings Delaney: A Study of Shelagh Delaney's Work 1958–68 (2014)

Not a large number of women writers from working-class backgrounds are associated with this kind of literature, although three who are have roots in the Manchester area: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Ellen Wilkinson, and Shelagh Delaney (1938–2011), from Salford.

Delaney would no doubt be more obscure than she is now if it weren't for Morrissey's inclusion of a photo of her on the Smiths's Louder than Bombs compilation, and Morrissey, whose song 'This Night has Opened My Eyes' includes a number of quotations from Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), admitted that he 'overdid it with [her]. It took me a long, long time to shed that particular one.'

John Harding's Sweetly Sings Delaney includes the above quotation (from a Mojo interview of April 2006), and the short title refers to Delaney's fictionalised autobiographical work Sweetly Sings the Donkey. The subtitle A Study of Shelagh Delaney's Work 1958–68 (printed on the front cover but not on the title-page) is indicative of the time limitation set to this book, but is nevertheless somewhat misleading: it suggests a critical work although it isn't – it's more a description of the author's writings and theatrical and filmic representations of them, along with details of the reactions to them.

A Taste of Honey is a kind of 'kitchen sink' drama – the kind that consciously or unconsciously reacted against the drawing-room comedies and middle-class dramas of Rattigan and Coward – that would inevitably invite comparison with the work of playwrights the papers liked to dub 'Angry Young Men', more so as they now thought they had an 'Angry Young Woman.' The play, set in Salford, hardly flattered the city, and its content – concerning a teenager pregnant by an absent black sailor, her friendship with a homosexual man, etc, also invited strong criticism at the time.

Interestingly, the naturalistic content of the play wasn't dissimilar to Delaney's reading: the likes of Zola and the Goncourt brothers. And there was a different French connection that the press played with: at nineteen, Delaney was the same age as Françoise Sagan had been when her Bonjour Tristesse (1954) had exploded on the reading public, so inevitably Delaney was hailed 'the English Sagan'.

John Harding gave a talk on Delaney at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford on 28 May 2014, in which he concentrated on the negative response to A Taste of Honey. His main contention was that Delaney's work was probably regarded in the negative light that it was – by Salford Council, for instance – because of her perceived political orientation: although Delaney wasn't a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, she was associated with such far left stalwarts as Vanessa Redgrave, Wolf Mankowitz, and Joan Littlewood. What reason other than political fear can there have been when Delaney and Clive Barker – seeking a venue for a new theatre and thinking of the possibilities for restoring Salford Hippodrome (a.k.a. the Windsor Theatre) – were thwarted by Salford Council's buying the place and then knocking it down.

This book has many interesting and well researched facts. With the self-imposed time frame there is inevitably a concentration on A Taste of Honey, although the (deeply?) flawed The Lion in Love, The White Bus, and Charlie Bubbles are also given good coverage here.

There's a glaring error though: several 'kitchen sink' movies by brilliant young directors are mentioned, but Harding states that 'none apart from A Taste of Honey would be associated so closely with a particular place'. And one of those films is Karel Reisz's cinematic adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – a novel and film with 'NOTTINGHAM' written right through it like Blackpool rock, in spite of the Salford-born Albert Finney playing the lead role in the film.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that – in a seriously delayed volte-face – Salford announced last month that November 25 (Delaney's birthday) will be Shelagh Delaney Day!

A brief interview clip:

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Shelagh Delaney in 1959

Joseph Evans, Botanist, in Worsley

St Marks churchyard, Worsley, Salford.

 

'JOSEPH EVANS,
BOTANIST,
BOOTHSTOWN,
BORN JULY 5th 1803,
DIED JUNE 23rd 1874.'

Joseph Evans began work as a handloom weaver but became known as a herbal doctor, people often coming to him from many miles away for treatment, although he too would frequently walk a number of miles to see a patient. He believed absolutely in natural cures. Well over a thousand people attended his funeral, including many botanists.

 

'THIS MEMORIAL WAS ERECTED
BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION
AS A TRIBUTE OF RESPECT
AND ESTEEM.'

 

 'PLANTS I LOVE AND CHERISH. IN
THEM THE WISDOM AND GOODNESS
OF THE CREATOR ARE MANIFEST.'

A quotation from Evans.

St Vincent Beechey in Worsley

 

'IN MEMORIAM
ST. VINCENT BEECHEY, M.A.
SCHOLAR OF CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
BORN AUGUST 7TH 1806, DIED AUGUST 14th 189[9]'

St Vincent Beechey was the vicar of Fleetwood and Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire and later the vicar of Worsley, then also in Lancashire but now in Salford. He is the founder of Rossall School, Fleetwood, about which he wrote the 100-page book The Rise and Progress of Rossall School: A Jubilee Sketch (1894). Perhaps surprisingly, the book isn't at all turgid but endeavours to be amusing, although there are far too many exclamation marks. The following sentence, which uses a well-known expression of the time from Uncle Tom's Cabin to describe the school, is fairly typical:

'Under [the Council's] fostering care my child seemed to grow of itself, like Topsy!'

Link to Beechey's book:
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St Vincent Beechey: The Rise and Progress of Rossall School

Harold Brighouse and Charles Forrest: The Novel of Hobson's Choice (formerly titled Hobson's) (1992)

Harold Brighouse, of Eccles, Salford, wrote the play Hobson's Choice, which was published in 1916 with a dedication to Charles Forrest, who the following year published this novel based on the play. Since 1917, the novel – originally just called Hobson's – hadn't been republished until 1992, when Cliff Hayes published it for Printwise under their Northern Classic Reprints imprint.

The British Library records a Charles E. Forrest, who wrote a number of plays – such as The Shepherd (1922), The Stolen Horse (1925) and Roadside Farm (1927) – which may be the same man.

The book is almost entirely set in Salford town and impresses me as a kind of New Woman novel. It is set in a very patriarchal environment where the widower Henry Horatio Hobson (the heroic-sounding middle name being heavily ironic) successfully runs a shoe shop where underpaid workers slave to make shoes below and his three unpaid daughters ensure things run smoothly on the sales floor while Hobson disappears to the pub to talk with his cronies about – among other things – the inadequacies of the female sex.

It is Maggie – Henry's eldest daughter and already dismissed by her father as an unmarriageable spinster – who is not only the instigator of much of the action, but someone who reverses the gender roles and manipulates men (and sometimes women) to conform to her wishes.

There is also a rather skewed version of the fin de siècle New Man here: in novels such as Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1898 [1897]) and Mary Cholmondelay's Red Pottage (1899) the emphasis is on re-educating the Old Man (i.e. a young but old-fashioned adherer to the conventional social structure) into a truly equal partnerhship. Maggie's task is similar but with a difference.

The main difference between Hobson's Choice and the more conventional New Woman/New Man sub-genre is that there is intitially a difference in social classes between the two main characters. Maggie comes from a relatively comfortable background, whereas thirty-one-year-old Will – her choice of partner – not only earns a pittance in her father's workshop but he is the son of a man from a workhouse and he is not only illiterate but painfully gauche socially with no experience of women.

On the surface he seems totally unsuited to Maggie's world, although Maggie – a very spunky young woman with a sound sense of business acumen – knows that she can achieve great things with Will because he (completely unaware though he is) is a wonderful shoemaker.

Defying the wrath of Hobson, the couple run away to another part of Salford to marry and to set up a business which, thanks to Maggie's abilities, becomes very successful. At same time, she educates Will and transforms him into a self-assured businessman who also sees his wife as an equal companion.

Will soon takes Hobson's trade from him, although Maggie pulls her father from the brink of terminal alcoholism and secures herself and Will in Hobson's house with Will as a business partner, although Hobson is in fact deduced to being a sleeping partner.

The Sydney Morning Herald of 23 June 1917 said 'Rarely has one read a first novel of such promise; one must look forward to its successors with interest.' Forrest perhaps continued with plays only, but thankful we must be for this republication, although it is to be regretted that Sylvia Hayes retyped the original edition making an enormous number of typos that obviously weren't picked up on by Cliff Hayes's editing. Most of the time these typos merely omit a letter or include a superfluous one, or inverted commas are left out, but occasionally meaning gets lost, as in: 'The woman examined Maggie, and then got up to to' (p. 188). Such a pity, as it spoils the book.

Joseph Brotherton in Salford

 

 

'Joseph Brotherton

 1783–1857

"My riches consist not in

the extent of my possessions but

in the fewness of my wants."'

 

Close to this plaque is a much larger and much more informative one mentioning the Salford MP's concern for the abolition of child labour, better education, health and nutrition. He established the first vegetarian soup kitchens and was the founder of the Vegetarian Society in 1847. Some of these things (and a few others) I mention in my blog post on Brotherton's memorial in Weaste Cemetery linked below.

The statue, appropriately, is on the Salford side of the River Irwell. Directly opposite it on the Manchester side is its former site in Albert Bridge Gardens. Originally it was in Peel Park in Salford, by was taken down in the 1950s to make way for a college, then bought by the owner of Gawthorn Hall in Cheshire in the late 1960s and then bought back by Manchester City Council. Perhaps the Brotherton statue has now found a permanent home.

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Joseph Brotherton in Weaste Cemetery

Joseph Brotherton in Weaste Cemetery, Salford

 

Today, the phrase 'decent politician' has for many years seemed almost automatically an oxymoron  – on the other hand Joseph Brotherton (1783–1857), the first MP for Salford, was a very good man indeed. He was a staunch opponent of slavery, a pacifist, and one of the founders of the Vegetarian Society.* He became an MP in 1832, one of his principle concerns being the employment of young children in factories, and was instrumental in pushing through an act in 1848 that made it illegal for women and children to work for more than ten hours a day in mills or factories. He was also teetotal and a strong advocate of education: Salford was the first municipal authority with a free library, a museum and an art gallery.

Brotherton was the first person to be buried in Weaste Cemetery. The people of Salford raised the money for this thirty foot monument, which is the tallest in the cemetery. His funeral procession had 120 carriages and crowds took to the streets.

I've not yet exactly located the itinerant statue of Brotherton, which has a vexed history, but when I do so I shall add it to this post.

* Joseph's wife Martha published Vegetable Cookery (1812), the first vegetarian cookery book. Today the Vegetarian Society still has its head office in Greater Manchester, in Altrincham.

John Parry in Weaste Cemetery, Salford

'IN MEMORY OF

JOHN PARRY,

MEMBER OF THE

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

OF MANCHESTER,

AN EARLY DIRECTOR OF THE

MECHANICS INSTITUTE IN THE CITY,

AN ARDENT STUDENT AND WORKER

IN THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE.

HE DIED 27^TH JANUARY 1866, AGED 62.'

Parry had a common name, which makes it difficult to pinpoint references to him, but all the same he doesn't appear to have published anything.

Kersal Moor and Chartism

 

'Kersal Moor

 

This Moor was the site of
the first Manchester Racecourse
(c 1687–1846) and the great
Chartist rallies of 1838 and 1839,
when over 30,000 workers met to
demand the right to vote and
the reform of Parliament.'

 

The wooden sculptures are attractive too.

James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

'In Loving Memory

of

JAMES CROSSLEY,

PRESIDENT OF THE CHETHAM SOCIETY,

F.S.A.

BORN AT THE MOUNT, HALIFAX;

MARCH 31^ST 1800

DIED AT STOCKS HOUSE, CHEETHAM;

AUGUST 1^ST 1883.'

 

James Crossley (who has been called 'Manchester's Dr Johnson') was an author and bibliophile, and also a solicitor and a business partner of Thomas Ainsworth, the son of the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth who was a lifelong friend.

 

Crossley established the Chetham Society in 1843 to edit and publish works of local history, and many titles were published. He was responsible for the publication of a very successful hoax: Fragment on Mummies, which was said to be by Sir Thomas Browne.

 

I learned about the existence of this grave (and the other below that I've made posts on) from an online publication on St Paul's Churchyard, which I link here. This publication also mentions that he asked to be buried as closely as possible to Eleanora Atherton, and his wish was granted.

Eleanora Atherton (1782–1870) was a philanthropist who lived in Manchester and is thought to have given about £100,000 to charity between 1838 and 1870. She supported the work of the Chetham Society, including the donation of the library of one of her ancestors, the philosopher and poet John Byrom.

Below are links to other posts in the series:
 

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Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3
William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4

William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4

The dates of William Edward Armytage Axon (1846–1913) are only just visible on his gravestone, although he is also mentioned here in relation to his wife Jane (née Woods) (1843–89) and his granddaughter Helen Josephine. Here too his third daughter Katharine is buried.

Axon was born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, the son of the soon-to-be bankrupt clothing manufacturer Edward Armytage and his fifteen-year-old servant Lydia Whitehead. He was brought up in poverty by the Axon family. Although his education was very limited, William Axon had a great aptitude for education, he spent some years at Manchester Free Library, and in the mid-seventies started working for the Manchester Guardian, where he remained until retiring in 1905.

His many published works include Exotica [poems], 1876; Illustrating Lancashire Dialect (1876); Life of Oliver Cromwell (1877); The Good and Evil of Tobacco (1877); The Annals of Manchester (1886); The Ancoats Skylark, and other verses, original and translated (1894); Echoes of Old Lancashire (1897); and William Harrison Ainsworth: A Memoir (1902).

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Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3

A very impressive polished granite gravestone. Scottish-born applied chemist and environmental scientist Robert Angus Smith (1817–1884) has been dubbed 'The Father of Acid Rain'. In 1843 he became the chemist Lyon Playfair's assistant at the Manchester Royal Institution, and later stayed in Manchester as a consulting analytical chemist. His most noted publications are Disinfectants and Disinfection (1869) and Air and Rain: the Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology (1872).

Below are links to other posts in the series:

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Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

Edwin Waugh: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #1

Saint Paul's churchyard, Moor Lane, Kersal Moor, Salford.

 

The grave of Edwin Waugh (1817–1890) – pronounced 'Woff' – the dialect poet who was born in Rochdale and was the son of a maker of shoes. His poem "Come Whoam to Thi Childer an' Me" (1856) greatly impressed Andrea Burdett-Coutts with its emphasis on temperance and marital fidelity, although the alcoholic wife-deserter Waugh was obviously no exemplar of the ideals of the poem.

 

EDWIN WAUGH

'BORN 29^TH JANUARY 1817

DIED 30^TH APRIL 1890'

 

The following paragraphs are included in the Wikipedia entry for Kersal Moor:

 

'In 1876 the Lancashire dialect poet and songwriter Edwin Waugh moved from his Manchester home to Kersal Moor for the "fresher air". Waugh's early life was spent in Rochdale and although he worked in Manchester he yearned for the moors he remembered from his youth. He wrote the following poem about Kersal Moor:

Kersal Moor

Sweet falls the blackbird's evening song,
in Kersal's poised dell;
But the skylarks trill makes the dewdrops thrill,
In the bonny heather;
Wild and free
Wild and free
Where the moorland breezes blow.

Oft have I roved you craggy steeps,
Where the tinkling moorland rills,
Sing all day long their low sweet song,
To the lonely listening hills;
And croon at night
In the pale moonlight

While mountain breezes blow.

As his health declined, Waugh moved to the seaside town of New Brighton. On his death in 1890, his body was brought back to be buried in the graveyard of St. Paul's Church, on the edge of the moorland he loved so well.

...Oh lay me down in moorland ground,

And make it my last bed,
With the heathery wilderness around,
And the bonny lark o'erhead:
Let fern and ling around me cling,
And green moss o'er me creep;
And the sweet wild mountain breezes sing,

 

Above my slumbers deep. – from The Moorland Breeze, Edwin Waugh (1889)'

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Samuel Oldham Lees: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #2
Robert Angus Smith: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #3

William Edward Armytage Axon: St Paul's, Kersal Moor #4
James Crossley and Eleanora Atherton: St Luke's, Kersal Moor #5

L. S. Lowry in Nottingham, England

The exhibition of L. S. Lowry's work at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside, the University of Nottingham's Public Arts Centre & Museum (which ends 5 February 2012) provides an excellent antidote to anyone's notion (many years' ago trumpeted by a fatuous pop song) that Lowry was a painter of whimsical scenes in the Manchester area.

In fact the cover above adverting the event, although perhaps slightly disturbing in itself as the subject (quite possibly a self-portrait), is nothing like as disturbing as some of the paintings. An excellent counterpoint to this portait is Head of a Man (1938), which depicts a very similar although older man in a very different way: the neat jacket, tie and pinned collar are replaced by a rather untidy looking coat and scarf, the neat hair has become a little dishevelled, and the cleanshaven appearance by a moustache and stubble.

Much more importantly, the mélange of wide-eyed innocence and a face staring into a possible future void becomes not just a world-weary stare into presentday nothingness, the pronounced red of the eyes and the nose and the lines and the frown and tauter lips are not just an expression of the ravages of time and a knowledge that our lot in life has to be accepted: this is a detailed depiction of existential anguish. Lowry had for some years looked after his difficult hypochondriacal mother, and the portrait was made the year before she died in 1939, when Lowry reached a crisis point.

But, as the interprepretation notes make clear at the sides of many of the paintings (and pencil sketches in another room in the exhibition), a great number of his paintings from the 1920s through the 1950s express mental anguish. When we look at Lowry's works, we are very often looking at works of alienation, made by an outsider representing the world of the outsider. Here we have itimations of death, seen with the cemetery in the foreground or background, his mother's empty bed, or more metaphorically as a black ship moving toward the viewer. Here we have a tableau of people crippled in many ways, Breughel-like figures, the unemployed, houses isolated by water, landscapes with no sign of life, almost surreal shapes, paintings of horizon and sea or the countryside with no suggestion of human life.

And the human life Lowry shows, those smoky factory scenes with active figures in the foreground, his famous 'matchstickmen'? How much human warmth and companionship do we see? Like everyone, Lowry said many contradictory things, but he spoke of automatons, people rushing with intent, purpose, but that no one is free.

No. Throughout this exhibition ­— again and again — I saw the main subject of L. S. Lowry's canvases as not so much external to himself as repesentational of the prison of his mind. Thoroughly recommended. And admission is free.