History of England 1-6

The assumption that grammar schools catered for the working class is one Moorhouse challenges. The grammar schools were intended primarily for the industrious working class, but they somehow abandoned an ethos of intellectual endeavour for one of material advantage. He went on to add, ‘I would suggest that one of our Englands today is a circle whose perimeter is approximately one hour’s travel by fast peak-hour train from the main London termini; the other England is the whole of the country outside that circle.’ In short, the Home Counties represented a hallowed pale of wealth and opportunity.

An anonymous article written in the early Sixties by a resolutely southern author for a national newspaper, and quoted by Moorhouse, sums up best what was wrong with the metropolitan mind: ‘I was eating a moussaka in Bolton the other day which (though nice) was made of potato, and it suddenly made me realise how little you can take aubergines for granted out of town.’ The inadvertent comedy is of course twofold: the sneer is ostensibly directed at the north, but it also reveals how little the author knows of what most Londoners ate. For Moorhouse, the real divide is between the Home Counties and everywhere else. Yet for all his affection for the regions he knew, Moorhouse was ready to cheer on the wrecking ball and the bulldozer; in this he was typical of the cognoscenti. ‘I, too, should hate to see these [customs] go because they mark a people still in touch with their roots. But if they represent the price to be paid for making Lancashire cleaner, less dilapidated, and generally more wholesome, then I’m afraid I should be on the side of those who are prepared to pay it.’ It may be suggested that this approach has fallen foul of history.

It was no longer true that ‘Britain’s bread hangs by Lancashire’s thread’, as the slogan put it in the Fifties. Most of the cotton mills still remained at the beginning of the Sixties, but they were scarcely the source of the nation’s prosperity. Nonetheless, the looms rattled on; in the third quarter of 1963, they numbered 123,400. As a cultural or political force, however, Manchester was in hibernation. In 1963, the United States closed its consulate there, and the Manchester Guardian was the Guardian by the early Fifties.

Manchester Grammar remained the leading light in preuniversity scholarship, however, putting the public schools to shame. The city even had its own answer to the ‘London Peculiar’ – the phenomenon known as ‘Darkness at Noon’, the great canopy of soot that occluded the city.

39

Elvis on a budget

Religious differences could still linger. In the early Sixties, the Scottish community, anxious to preserve Liverpool as a bastion of the Reformed faith and the Tory party, cried out in a pamphlet: ‘Romanism is the greatest enemy of our civil and religious liberty and if we lose these inestimable privileges for a mess of Socialist pottage we shall indeed be unworthy of the heritage won for us by our grand Protestant sires.’ However, such conflict began to ease when the slums were cleared and new houses built; the communities were no longer sequestered. Those of different confessions were obliged to cooperate.

Then there were the football fans who were, as Moorhouse observed, Liverpool’s most controversial export. ‘A strange, alien people they were, too,’ he wrote, ‘who swore more fluently and often than we did and who openly relieved themselves on the Bolton terraces, which didn’t go down at all well in that continent town.’ The Cavern Club on Mathew Street also had little to recommend it to the non-specialist. Yet it was to acquire a certain cachet and even piety of a kind.

The bouncer on the door disapproves of unexpected visitors. ‘This place,’ he observes gently, ‘is becoming a bloody shrine.’ And so it is. There are CND symbols and other daubs of paint crudely applied around the entrance. Half-way down the steep wooden staircase you find yourself stumbling into an atmosphere which is thick, sweet, almost tasty. In the Cavern something like a couple of hundred youngsters are compressed together under three low barrel-vaulted ceilings separated by stubby, arched walls … The walls are running with condensation. No one seems to notice the acute discomfort of being there.

This ‘foetid ill-ventilated hole’, as Moorhouse puts it, was an unlikely ‘shrine’ to what was soon known as ‘the Mersey Sound’.