George Galloway and the British Labour Party

It isn't often that I publish a blog post about politics, but occasionally I feel that there's a need to. Last night, nearly 40 virtually continuous years of Labour party dominance ended in Bradford West. George Galloway, representing his Respect party, was elected to Parliament by a majority of over 10,000 votes. No matter what anyone's opinion of Galloway may be, this is a colossal, historic victory. Such a victory doesn't happen for no reason, and cannot be written off as a glitch: Galloway also won Bethnal Green and Bow (also a traditional, staunch Labour party seat) in 2005. Galloway is perfectly correct when he speaks about the betrayal by the Labour party of its own voters. Although it was nine years ago, people will not forget that the Labour party wholeheartedly supported and collaborated in the destruction of Iraq.

But monstrous as this act was, it is but one of many very big errors leading to the self-destruction of the Labour party.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love (2004)

My Summer of Love is directed by Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski, and was filmed in and around Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, and Brighouse, all in West Yorkshire. It is loosely based on Helen Cross's novel of the same name, which was published in 2001.

The plot involves two alienated teenaged girls, Mona (Nathalie Press) and Tamsin (Emily Blunt), during one summer. Mona is working-class without parents and lives with her brother Phil (Paddy Considine), whereas Tamsin is upper-middle-class but feels like an orphan as her mother is with a theater company, and her father with his secretary lover.

The attraction between the two is instant, right from the moment that Tamsin looks down from her horse at the sleeping Mona, who has tired of pushing her motorless moped.  For Mona, the attraction seems to be the exotic, as she is whirled into a merry-go-round of increasingly intense sexual passion, drink and psychedelic mushrooms, and retributive actions to Tamsin's father (a garden gnome thrown through his car window) and to Mona's former boyfriend (telling his wife about their sordid affair). For Tamsin, the relationship is a relief from the boredom of being alone, but probably far more importantly a chance to show off her cultural knowledge to Mona, as she recommends that she reads Nietzsche, plays Saint-Saëns's 'The Swan' on the cello, and rattles off a few sensationalized details of Edith Piaf's biography.

The mention of the words 'The Swan' is Mona's cue to tel Tamsin that she lives at The Swan pub, which has been turned into a religious house by Phil, an ex-con who is now a born-again Christian who shortly after - with a number of his acolytes - walks up Pendle Hill, Lancashire, to erect a huge wooden cross for the purpose of cleansing the people below.  His sexual lust gets the better of him, though, and Tamsin exposes him as a religious hypocrite.

Several times in  the background, strains of Piaf's 'La Foule' play, emphasizing constant movement, joy, intoxication...

Sadly, this is as yet Pawlikowski's latest movie, and his adaptation of Magnus Mills's The Restraint of Beasts was canceled owing to unfortunate family circumstances.

Jez Lewis's Shed Your Tears and Walk Away (2010) and Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England: 'A Drug Town with a Tourist Problem'

While out of the country this year, I evidently missed an important documentary movie on the plight of one of England's most beautiful spots, and one I visited briefly in 2009, when I also visited Ted Hughes's town of birth 1.5 miles away: Mytholmroyd. Shed your tears and Walk Away is about the present state of former mill town Hebden Bridge, which was severely affected by Thatcher's cuts in the 1980s, and which has continued to be affected by similar - indeed probably in many ways worse - abuse by succeeding governments. It has serious unemployment, drug, and alcohol problems. Jez Lewis took 18 months to make the film, during which 11 young people died in the small town.

We are talking about a beautiful tourist town, but one which one of the young residents in the documentary calls 'a drug town with a tourist problem'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lewis had many problems while attempting to make the film: the M.P. for the area and the mayor (although co-operative) refused to acknowledge that the situation existed, as did people in the street, while others, such as the local school, refused to talk to him, the police pestered him, and people threatened to call a public meeting if he began filming: it appears that many people were (and no doubt still are) just in denial.

Suicide figures in Hebden Bridge, according to Jez Lewis, are included in Halifax suicide figures - that is, of a much larger area, so the high rate of suicide in Hebden Bridge gets lost.

I can't yet comment on the film itself, as I have to wait for the release of the DVD on 17 January 2011. I wonder if I'm correct in thinking that the Hebden Bridge Visitor and Canal Centre won't be selling it, though?

Clio Barnard's The Arbor, and Andrea Dunbar, from the Buttershaw Estate, Bradford, West Yorkshire

The Arbor (2010) is a documentary about the life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, with the state of Thatcherite northern England in the 1980s as a backcloth. Or is it more about the aftermath, the heritage of Dunbar, both artistic and personal? Certainly it's one of the best films of the year, although don't expect it to win any Oscars: this is definitely arthouse only.

Andrea Dunbar was born in Bradford in 1961, and died there in 1990 at the age of 29. She wrote just three plays: The Arbor (1980), Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), and Shirley (1985), the first being performed at the Royal Court Theatre when she was 19, and had never even been to a theatre before. She initially sent director Max Stafford-Clark her first manuscript, written in green biro in a school exercise book, and the theatre commissioned the second play, on which a film of the same name was based and released to great success in 1986. Rita, Sue and Bob Too concerns a married man who has simultaneous relationships with babysitters Rita and Sue from the (then) sink estate Buttershaw, Bradford, Yorkshire, who are half his age, and who take turns to have sex with him in his car. His wife finds out and leaves him, Rita moves in with him and gets pregnant, Sue unsuccessfully moves in with a Pakistani, but in the end they become a threesome again.

The problem is that this is not the play that Dunbar wrote, and she was unhappy with the scriptwriters who were brought in to make this a much more upbeat version of her original play. Another problem is that some members of the Buttershaw estate were unhappy about how it had been depicted, although Dunbar herself claimed that only a few locals had complained to her.

If Dunbar had been aware of many of the locals' hatred of the depiction of some of the people in D. H. Lawrence's Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, or of Thomas Wolfe's depiction of the people in his home in Asheville, North Carolina, she'd perhaps have known that, in Wolfe's words: You Can't Go Home Again. But Dunbar didn't move from home, she stayed in Buttershaw, and, more or less enslaved to drink, collapsed in the Beacon pub on the Buttershaw estate.

Clio Barnard's film is experimental, taking the words of survivors - above all Dunbar's two daughters Lorraine and Lisa - with actors lip-synching them. One of the things that slightly disappoints me about this film is the absence of what Max Stafford-Clark said about a conversation he had with Dunbar, asking him about the limits of drama - and Stafford-Clark specifically stating that she clearly wasn't talking about Brecht (of whom she'd almost certainly never heard) - of how far she could go with sex in the theatre. But it's Brecht who is at the forefront of The Arbor: the lip-synching creates a distancing effect, a disjuncture between the real and the artificial, which of course is the effect that Clio Barnard wants to create anyway. So why avoid mentioning Brecht? He's definitely there.

What is the Arbor to which The Arbor refers? It's Brafferton Arbor, which is the council area where Dunbar lived, and where she played out most of her life. It's prominent in the film, which is a mélange of the lip-synched episodes, documentary television footage, and scenes from The Arbor performed on the grassy area of Brafferton Arbor.

Most of all, it's Lorraine's story that counts. Lisa doesn't have any real problems with her mother, but Lorraine is the product of her mother's relationship with a Pakistani, and at a time when the estate was racist, that was important.

Lorraine was raped at 14, became a prostitute to support her drug habit, and was imprisoned for the manslaughter (by gross negligence) of her two-year-old baby Harris. It seems to be a cycle of deprivation, and as Lorraine graduated from crack to heroin, her baby (born addicted, according to Lorraine), died of an overdose of Lorraine's methodone.

But this is a wonderful movie that I don't recommend to anyone expecting thrills galore. The lip-synching, and the various stories told in hindsight, tell us how impossible the truth is to find, or rather, perhaps, that truth is plural. Brilliant is a word that comes to mind for this engrossing film.

J. B. Priestley and Bradford, West Yorkshire

The writer J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and his imposing statue, with coat tails flying in the wind, is on the outskirts of the city's West End, by the National Media Museum on Princes Way.

On the plinth is a plaque which states 'This statue of J. B. Priestley[,] O. M.[,] honorary freeman of the city[,] was commissioned by the City of Bradford Metropolitan Council and unveiled on Friday 31 October 1986[,] by his wife Jacquetta'.

The sculptor was Ian Judd, and the plaque continues with a quotation from Priestley's Bright Day (1946). He used to fictionalize Bradford as 'Bruddersford':

'Lost in its smoky valley among the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddersford is generally held to be an ugly city; and so I suppose it is; but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated but often enjoyed; it was grim but not mean, and the moors were always there, and the horizon never without its promise. No Bruddersford man could be exiled from the uplands and blue air; he always had one foot on the heather; he had only to pay his tuppence [two old pence, equivalent to 0.66p] on the tram and then climb for half an hour, to hear the larks and curlews, to feel the old rocks warming in the sun, to see the harebells trembling in the shade.'

In 1958, Priestley very publicly re-visited Bradford for the filming of 'Lost City' to record his impressions of how it had changed since he lived there in his youth. His guide, journalist Mavis Dean, joined him at Forster Street Square train station.

The documentary showed 5 Saltburn Place – in Manningham in the north-west of Bradford – where Priestley had lived and where he began writing. A plaque remembers his time here, although he never wrote about 'Bruddersford' here. He remembered making bookcases out of orange boxes and writing a poem about Atlantis.



Priestley remembered going to nearby Lister Park every Wednesday and Saturday in the summer months to listen to the brass band. The bandstand was much as it was in Priestley's youth, and is probably so today.

They passed by the imposing Listers Mill, a former silk warehouse now turned into flats.

But the textile Bradford was renowned for was wool. Priestley was hardly cut out for office tasks, although he worked as a clerk for a wool firm in Swan Arcade, Broadway, from 1910–14, and commented that he must have been one of the worst wool clerks ever. He detested the demolition of Swan Arcade.

Lister Park displays several cameos of various stages of the wool industry around the statue of the inventor and industrialist Samuel Cunliffe Lister (1815-1906) at the main entrance to Lister Park.





Priestley also saw the Bradford Playhouse in Little Germany, which he said had not changed a great deal since his youth, although today it is also a film theatre, has jazz nights, and is known as The Priestley:

During the making of the documentary, Priestley stayed at the Midland Hotel in Cheapside, where his attempts to make contact with the friends of his youth by telephone were unsuccessful. He remarked that many of them were killed in World War I.

Haworth and the Brontës

The most famous representation of the Brontë sisters – from left to right Anne (1820–49), Emily (1818–48), and Charlotte (1816–55) – and also the only one to show the sisters together. Brother Branwell, who painted the picture, was depicted between Emily and Charlotte, but decided to erase himself.

The museum is the parsonage where the family lived,

and the parish church is where their father The Reverend Patrick Brontë was incumbent.

Patrick built the school between the parsonage in 1832, and all four siblings are known to have taught there.


The Black Bull in the village was frequented by black sheep Branwell Brontë, and is proud to exhibit 'his' chair in a private area of the pub.


And the museum exploits a few rather more sensational aspects of Branwell's lifestyle:


My other Brontë posts:
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Anne and Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray in Cornhill
Charlotte Brontë in Manchester

Ted Hughes and Mytholmroyd

Ted Hughes (1930–98) was the British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. He was born in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire, a village just a mile away from the town of Hebden Bridge. He lived there for seven years before moving to Mexborough in South Yorkshire, and these early years were to prove a formative influence on his poetry. At the train station, five large panels show extracts from Hughes's children's story The Iron Man, and have been illustrated by local schoolchildren.

A plaque on the wall of 1 Aspinall Street informs us that Ted Hughes was born here. Aspinall is one of a small cluster of streets immediately north of the Rochdale Canal. Hughes's uncle on his mother Edith's side – Albert Farrar – lived at number 19, and is mentioned in the poem 'The Sacrifice'.

On Midgely Road, the surname is still present on Mount Pleasant Hill:
A two-minute walk along the south-east side of the towpath reveals a tunnel, described in Hughes's poem 'The Long Tunnel Ceiling'. This is where the A646 goes over the canal.
A very informative booklet, which contains the above information and much more about Hughes's early life around Mytholmroyd, often linking features mentioned with particular poems, is John Billingsley's A Laureate's Landscape: Walks around Ted Hughes' Mytholmroyd (Mytholmroyd: Northern Earth, 2007).