RIP Salford

In September 2007, the last time Salford rugby league club was relegated, I stood in the Shed at the Willows for the final home game of the season, a loss against Warrington. They were already down before kickoff but there was still a decent crowd in the ground and hope for the future, justifiably as they came straight back up after a season in the second division.

In September 2011, I stood on the same terrace for Salford's last ever game at the ground, a loss against French side Catalans, before they moved to a new 12,000 capacity stadium in Barton-on-Irwell, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal between the high level bridge and Barton aerodrome. At the time, Salford were getting attendances of around 5,000 and it was hoped that this could be doubled to nearer 10,000. In fact, they dropped to about 3,000, many of those away fans arriving on coaches off the nearby junction of the M60 motorway. 

For home fans. the ground was in the wrong place, far from Salford's traditional areas of support and difficult to get to, and especially away from, by car, let alone on foot or public transport. Only a hardcore remained and new and casual fans were put off going, if they even knew where the stadium was. Despite that, Salford made it to a Grand Final at Old Trafford in 2019, Wembley for a first Challenge Cup Final since the late sixties in 2020, and last season finished fourth.

This season has been a disaster on and off the pitch. The new owner, a Swiss based businessman, seemingly only bought the club so he could acquire the stadium and land around it for development, and then lost interest when the council withdrew from negotiations over those plans. Wages have gone unpaid and there has been an exodus of players, coaches and other staff, fixtures were unfulfilled and points deducted before the inevitable relegation.

Yesterday in the High Court in London, a winding up petition was granted to HM Revenue and Customs over unpaid taxes, bringing to an end a club which traced its history back to 1873, when it formed in Hulme, Manchester, before moving across the Irwell to Salford.

No doubt a phoenix club will be formed, and Salford council will be keen for it to move into the stadium that they still own, but the real question is whether they can field thirteen players for the start of the Championship season just six weeks from now.

Best of the Fest

Oktoberfest starts in Munich today with the tapping of the first barrel of beer by the city's mayor. Breweries, specialist beer shops, online retailers and supermarkets here have all been promoting Bavarian-style lagers in the run-up to it so I picked up some from RedWillow in Macclesfield.

Festbier Märzen (5.6%)

Named after the month of March when it was originally brewed, malty, medium strong Märzen is the beer traditionally served at Oktoberfest, with Festbier being the pale version of it.

Sweetish, with an almost amber, fuller colour than I expected. Quite a bitter aftertaste.

Kellerbier (4.3%)

Kellerbier ("cellar beer") is an unfiltered lager, normally served on draught and particularly associated with Franconia in northern Bavaria. It is probably the nearest German equivalent to cask beer, especially when dispensed by gravity from wooden barrels.

Large, tight head. Very clean malt taste, balanced by a dry hoppiness. Golden colour, slightly cloudy with low carbonation.

I enjoyed both these beers and would drink them again. I'm also hoping to return one day to the beer gardens of Munich, which I lasted visited with a, sadly now late, mate back in 2010.

Crown Inn glory

The Crown in Stockport reopened yesterday after a lengthy, and much needed, refurbishment by its new owners, the father and son who also run the Petersgate Tap between the station and marketplace, so I popped down last night to have a look.

Fifteen or so years ago, the Crown was Stockport's premier pub for cask beer, a multi handpump Victorian boozer beneath the town's famous railway viaduct which, despite not being the closest to the ground, often attracted away fans when their teams played at Edgeley Park (I was in there once on a Saturday dinnertime when a coachload of Southampton fans, whose side were briefly in the third tier, turned up having heard about its reputation for well kept real ale). But then the longtime landlord retired and the place began to drift a bit, a slow side into general shabbiness and average beer that in the last few years has seen a dizzying succession of short term licensees and sudden, unexplained closures.

Thankfully the pub is now in good hands again, with a smartened up look and cask range that I'm sure will get it back into the Good Beer Guide. It also now has Draught Bass as a permanent beer on the bar, which was flying out last night (they were already on their third cask of it!).

Roll Out the Barrel

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark. 

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

For the last few months on a Sunday night, Talking Pictures TV has been showing episodes of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a seventies variety show supposedly coming live from a Manchester working men's club, but actually filmed at the studios of Granada TV on a midweek afternoon (the audience seems to consist largely of pensioners, no doubt drawn by the trays with pints of keg bitter on them being constantly filled at the bar and carried round the room by the waitresses).

The first thing to say is that most of the turns aren't very good. Bernard Manning as compere confirms that not only wasn't he very funny but he couldn't sing either, crooning in a strange cod Las Vegas lounge style. The two things that make it watchable are the comedian Colin Crompton, as the stereotypical committee chairman who makes humorous announcements between the acts, and the stars from beyond the Northern club circuit whom the legendary Granada producer Johnnie Hamp somehow managed to attract, like Howard Keel and Karl Denver. There is also occasionally some jazz from the traditional end of the genre (Kenny Ball, George Melly).

Some ITV regions, especially those in the South, apparently refused to show the programme until the early hours, deeming it too broad for their allegedly more sophisticated audiences, and you can sort of see their point. If you want to know why variety died, here is your answer.

Beer and blues in the new Berlin

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

A river runs through it

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Mild about Manchester

I went into Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon and completed my sticker card for Mild Magic, an annual event organised by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to promote mild ale.

I usually get off to a decent start by going on the pub crawl held to launch it, but this year my attempt to join it was, er, derailed by a freight train which caught fire and shut the Manchester Airport line for several hours.

In the end, I managed to get to sixteen pubs, about half of them tied houses of local breweries Holt's and Hydes (who sponsor the event) and the others a mixture of micropubs and Wetherspoons. Seven were in the city centre, five in the SK8 postcode area, and four in south Manchester (along the Metrolink line of that name from East Didsbury to Withington).

The beer quality was generally good, with just one poor and another returned as undrinkable. I voted for the Bank Top Dark Mild I had at the Wobbly Stamp in Cheadle as the best mild, and the City Arms in Manchester as the best pub.

Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location. 

Supping in the seventies

I've just finished reading Keg, an overview of British brewing in the seventies by Ron Pattinson.

I was born at the start of the decade so only have fragmentary memories of the mid to late seventies, but certain things continued into and up to the end of the eighties, when I began drinking in pubs.

The consolidation of British brewing in the sixties into the Big Six national groups (Allied, Bass, Courage, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys and Whitbread) with their large tied estates only began to break up after the introduction of the Beer Orders in 1989 - the first pub I drank in as a teenager was a Whitbread house, originally built by Manchester brewery Chester's and acquired by them when they bought Threlfalls in 1967, which finally shut last summer. The lack of choice and imposition of overpriced keg and bland national cask brands by them was a major factor in the formation of the Campaign for Real Ale in 1971 and the Big Six became their primary target throughout the seventies and eighties, although the fight against them ultimately backfired as they all subsequently sold up to global brewers with even less interest in cask beer or transformed themselves into non-brewing hotel, leisure and pub companies.

The seventies also saw lager's rise to dominance in the draught beer market, with the section on it here a snapshot of the longer, and fascinating, version in another of Ron's books, Lager.

Things which Ron mentions that I recall from the late eighties and early nineties, and which have either now disappeared or become far less common, include outside toilets, afternoon closing, drink driving, bottle-conditoned Guinness, milk stout, bottled beer mixed with draught, and not having a problem being served under the legal drinking age of 18 (the first place I drank draught beer as a 16 year old was a Labour club, after joining the Young Socialists in the 1987 General Election campaign, and which somewhat ironically is now a children's nursery. Around the same time, a couple of mates and myself sipped halves of Boddies bitter at dinnertime in a rather rough Salford estate pub, on a break from a Sixth Form thing across the road at the university, in our school uniforms). 

Smoking was of course ubiquitous and unremarked upon in pubs - the idea that it would become illegal within a couple of decades would have seemed incredible to most drinkers had it crossed our minds (I had an old coat that I only wore to my very smoky local and which stank of tobacco until I hung it out to air the next day). Other things in pubs that seemed immovable back then included men selling seafood on a Friday night and the football newspaper (pink in Manchester) on a Saturday evening, football pools coupon collectors and darts boards. You still occasionally saw older women having bottles and jugs filled with draught beer to take home. I'm not sure what the reaction to that request would be now, or to heavy drinking during working hours (Friday afternoons at Stockport social security office, where I worked in my late twenties and early thirties, were never the most productive after our extended dinnertime session at the Robbies pub round the corner).

I also recall as a kid in the seventies seeing lots of home brewing kits for sale in high street shops, the popularity of which was no doubt linked to the rising cost of draught beer in pubs, illustrated in the book by a handy table showing the average price of a pint of bitter increasing from 10p at the start of the decade to 34p at the end of it (Holt's cask bitter cost 79p a pint when I first drank it in 1989, and is now between £3 and £4.50 depending on the area the pub is in and how much the brewery has spent refurbishing it).

Trump Towers Over America

Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States in Washington tomorrow, having previously served as the 45th in that office. American socialists came under massive pressure from the wider liberal left to vote for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in last November's presidential election, with most understandably succumbing to it, something I still think was neither necessary nor helpful to their long-term goals for a number of reasons.

1. The Democratic party is the major obstacle to the US labour movement establishing some kind of pole, even initially a small one, around which it could organise independent political representation for itself. Within the party's ranks, the unions inevitably play second fiddle to the lobbying of the corporate interests which fund it, and are either sidelined in policy terms or become enmeshed in unprincipled deal making, much as the British labour movement was for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Liberal party.

2. Harris is not particularly radical for a Democrat. It would be a different case if someone like Bernie Sanders, standing on an overtly pro-working class programme, had won the nomination.

3. The election was only really a contest in the seven swing states, all of which Trump won relatively easily in the end. Outside of them, socialists voting for Harris were either unnecessarily adding their ballot papers to an already decisive pile for her in blue states, or wasting them in red ones.

4. Trump is undoubtedly an authoritarian right-wing nationalist whose rule will lead to numerous reactionary decisions, especially in foreign affairs, immigration and tackling climate change, but his inauguration does not signal a fascist takeover in which future elections are cancelled, political parties banned, unions suppressed, meetings and demos violently broken up by stormtroopers and basic civil liberties curtailed, not least because of the federal system which grants US states considerable rights, and if it did voting for a Democratic candidate and advocating that others do likewise would not be an adequate response to stop that threat.