Pubs and pandemics

In 1918, my four year old grandmother and her older sister, who were born and grew up in Wigan, lost both their parents within a week. They were killed by the so-called "Spanish flu" pandemic which spread across the globe towards the end of the First World War, taking the lives of up to fifty million people.

My great grandfather was a colliery blacksmith (I've got the badge he wore in WWI with the words "On War Service" on it, to avoid being beaten up in the street by people who would otherwise think that he should be in the Army), so wasn't in the trenches or military camps where the outbreak seems to have first taken hold, but no doubt would still have been weakened by long hours at work and food shortages.

My grandmother and her sister were taken in by their uncle and auntie who ran a pub in the town, the Colliers Arms on Frog Lane (now Mr Wang's Chinese restaurant). None of my Wigan relatives could ever work out how Uncle Jack, who started out as a cotton worker, managed to get the money together to acquire the tenancy of a large, and apparently very profitable, pub from Threlfall's Brewery (family legend has it that in the twenties he was the first man in Wigan to own a radio). When he died in the the early thirties, he left a couple of thousand pounds in his will, then a pretty large sum, especially in a Lancashire mill and mining town in the midst of a worldwide economic depression, and his widow bought a small sweet shop near Central Park rugby league ground, where my grandmother worked as an assistant. After her auntie died in the mid thirties, she got in touch with the brewery to ask about a job as a barmaid, and was sent to the Gorse Hill Hotel in Stretford, where she met my grandfather, who was a toolmaker at the Metropolitan Vickers engineering factory in Trafford Park and used to pop in there for a drink after work.

I've drunk in both pubs, the former in the early nineties on a trip back to her home town with my grandmother, who told the then landlady about the original layout of the pub and how the back room we were sitting in had been the family's kitchen when she lived there in the twenties. The Gorse Hill, where she worked until 1938, when she got married and moved with my grandfather to a council house on the Wythenshawe estate in south Manchester, has had a bumpy few years, but reopened in 2019 and was a popular stopping off place before and after matches at the nearby Old Trafford football and cricket grounds.

I last went to my local a fortnight ago, to watch the Manchester Derby, and have been social distancing since. I don't know when I'll next be able to go to a pub, or how many of them will survive being shut for the next few months because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Not to Bury Them

One of England's oldest clubs, Bury FC, was expelled from the Football League yesterday for failing to meet their financial requirements, and Bolton Wanderers given a fortnight's stay of execution as they continue to search for a buyer to save the club.

I've been to watch Bury a few times over the years, often when the Premier League was on an international break, and until the late 90s paid on the turnstile to stand in the appropriately named Cemetery End at their home ground, Gigg Lane (still homeless Swinton rugby league club and fan-owned breakaway FC United have also played there in the past). I always found it charming that, as well as their 1900 and 1903 FA Cup wins, the honours list printed in the matchday programme also included their highest League position, a fourth place finish in the First Division in 1926.

Of course, Bury's location just a few miles north of Manchester, which makes it a shortish bus or tram journey for a casual fan like me, is also one of its problems, given the proximity of the two big Manchester clubs, and, as in other nearby towns such as Oldham and Stockport, there are probably as many City and United fans there as there are those of the hometown team (Stockport, like Tranmere Rovers on Merseyside, got round that for a while by playing on Friday nights).

The other problem facing small clubs like Bury is the huge inequality of income within the football pyramid (you could argue that the start of that was the abolition of the maximum wage for players in the early 60s which saw the decline of other Lancashire mill and seaside town clubs Bolton, Burnley and Blackpool). A fan outside Gigg Lane on TV last night said that Premier League clubs would come to rue letting small town lower league clubs like Bury go to the wall as they produce young players for them, but I think the former can probably now rely on their own academy systems and scouting networks to identify and attract both local and international prospects.

For Bury fans wondering how to spend their Saturday afternoons after the club's liquidation - and for those of Bolton who seem set to follow them - the answer is surely to do what supporters of other "lost clubs" like Accrington and Wimbledon have done and re-form as a non-league side and begin the ascent up the divisions again.

In my first phone call to the club's ticket office twenty-odd years ago, I learnt as soon as the woman there picked up the phone that while to outsiders the town and club is "Berry", to locals it is definitely "Burry".

Lancashire League

The Rugby Football League, the governing body of rugby league in England, has announced that it is relocating its headquarters from Leeds to Manchester.

By the start of the 2021 World Cup, the RFL will base itself at the Etihad Campus in east Manchester, the sporting complex which already includes national cycling and squash venues, an athletics track and the two stadia where Manchester City's first, youth and women's teams play their home matches, where the England rugby league team will also train ahead of international fixtures.

Manchester being pretty much equidistant between the sport's two main heartlands, southwest Lancashire and west Yorkshire, with road and rail links between them going through the city, was the reason why the Magic Weekend, the annual event where a round of Super League matches is played across two days at the same stadium, was held here from 2012 to 2014, before moving up to Newcastle's St. James' Park when Manchester City began expanding their ground, towards a projected final capacity of 61,000. I can now see that event taking place here permanently, as well as perhaps the Super League Grand Final now played at Old Trafford (although the showpiece Challenge Cup Final is unlikely to head North again from Wembley, its home since the late 1920's), and international and World Club Challenge matches too.

Although they are unlikely to relocate permanently outside the boundaries of their city, I'd also like to see Salford rugby league club play a few matches at the 7,000 capacity Academy Stadium there (pre-season friendlies to start with, say), both because of the much better public transport services to it compared to those to their home ground at Barton-upon-Irwell (itself outside the historic boundaries of Salford) and as part of the wider missionaty effort to extend the appeal of the game beyond its traditional heartlands.

Way out west

I went to Warrington yesterday afternoon for Salford's rugby league match there.

Warrington has a bit of a mixed character: halfway between Manchester and Liverpool (I think it's the furthest east I've ever heard opposing fans called Scousers), with most of its big industries, such as wire-making which gave the rugby league team its nickname, long gone, although there are still a few cement plants and factories around the town centre, north of the River Mersey, the historic boundary between Lancashire and Cheshire, but inexplicably transferred by local government reforms to the latter county, at least administratively, in 1974.

There are some quite imposing redbrick Edwardian building as you come out of the station, including a couple of pubs still in the liveries of the town's two defunct breweries, Greenall Whitley, whose former offices now house parts of the civil service department for whom I pushed a pen for a decade or so, and Tetley Walker, demolished to make way for the Halliwell Jones Stadium where yesterday's match was played.

I hadn't been to Warrington's new ground since it opened in 2004, the club moving there from its former home at Wilderspool, a name I always associate with the office of the North West regional Labour Party in the district of the same name, and was unexpectedly impressed by it. Some of the new rugby league grounds have a bit of a characterless, "identikit" feel to them, but Warrington's has a pretty decent atmosphere: the stands are much closer to the pitch than they appear on TV, the home fans stand on a large terrace along the touch-line opposite the seated main stand, as they once did in The Shed at Salford's old ground, The Willows, the roofs are low enough to trap sound and the filled in far corners help with that too. And unlike Salford's new ground at Barton-upon-Irwell, it's easy to get to, being right in the town centre, only a five minute walk from Warrington Central station.

Back in time

In the last decade or so, microbreweries and home brewers have recreated historic beers using recipes found in brewery archives, as have some bigger brewers.

I'm a fan of Fuller's cask and bottle-conditioned beers, especially ESB and 1845, and have enjoyed XX, Double Stout and Old Burton Extra from the Past Masters range brewed in collaboration with Ron Pattinson of Shut Up About Barclay Perkins. Some historic beers are now being revived in the North West.

Boak and Bailey report on the reappearance after forty-six years of beers from the Bolton brewery Magee and Marshall, whose brand names someone has bought the rights to, and next month, as part of Manchester Beer Week, the Smithfield Market Tavern will host the launch of four historic beers, including a 1903 XXX, a 1951 "C" Ale and a 1952 Stout from the brewing records of Middleton brewery J.W. Lees, an event at which Ron will be speaking. I'll be going and am looking forward to trying beers my (great-)grandfathers might have drunk.

Remembering Burnden Park

Today is the seventieth anniversary of a disaster at Bolton Wanderers' home ground Burnden Park which claimed the lives of thirty-three football fans.

When you read what happened at that FA Cup quarter-final in 1946, it's hard not to think of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989: policing and communication failures, a build up of pressure outside the turnstiles, an exit gate opened to relieve the crush leading to a sudden influx onto an already overcrowded, and badly designed, terrace, people at the front unable to escape being asphyxiated and the press subsequently blaming the fans' behaviour for their deaths. But whereas Hillsborough has rightly been remembered every year for the last quarter of a century, the disaster at Burnden Park has been all but forgotten.

A number of theories have been put forward for that: the death toll not seeming particularly high at the time given the military and civilian losses of the Second World War which had just ended, the fact that unlike the football disasters of the 80's (Bradford, Heysel, Hillsborough) the game wasn't seen live on TV by millions of people at home, and the lack of a campaign to hold people to account for what happened, Whatever the reason, we should remember its victims today.

The Pub and the People

Among the presents I got for my birthday last week was The Pub and the People. It's a study of pubs in a Lancashire town called "Worktown", actually Bolton, carried out in the late 1930's as part of the Mass Observation project.

Boak and Bailey and Ron at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins have both blogged about what a mine of information the book is: having read it, you feel as though you could recreate a 1930's Bolton pub.

Nearly all the draught beer drunk in "Worktown" is mild ale, either dark ordinary or light best (my local brewery Robinson's of Stockport had a light and dark version of their mild until they stopped brewing it earlier this year, and Hydes in Salford still do), and most of it comes from large regional breweries, Magees, Walkers and Threlfalls (my grandmother grew up in a Threlfalls pub in Wigan in the 1920's and in the 1930's worked as a barmaid at another in Stretford, where she met my grandfather, a toolmaker at the Metrovicks engineering factory in nearby Trafford Park).

A couple of surprising things: almost all the men in "Worktown" drink half-pints (women tend to drink bottled beer, mainly Guinness but also pale and brown ale), although both sexes switch to spirits, cider or bottled beer for the highlight of the "Worktown" calendar, the annual, booze-filled trip to the Lancashire seaside resort of Blackpool (where my grandparents spent their honeymoon). One lucky local is hired by the researchers to do an early evening crawl of the pubs in the town centre, getting through eight and half pints in, presumably, seventeen of them by half past nine.

The vault and the taproom are also separate rooms in the pub when I've always thought of them as being the same thing: the main difference seems to be that there's a bar in the first and you can play games in the second.

The pub is the centre of social life, hosting sporting and other clubs, trade union meetings and societies such as the Buffs (the Wigan branch of which met above the pub where my grandmother spent her childhood: she always referred to them, like the book does, as "the poor man's Masons"), as well as illegal, but officially overlooked, activities including gambling and prostitution.

The book also gives an interesting overview of the influence of religion and politics on "Worktown"'s drinking scene, from the fiercely teetotal Nonconformist sects and non-pub going middle-class councillors to the boozy working-class Irish Catholics who run the local Labour Party.

Lancashire Dark Mild

I've got Ron Pattinson at Shut Up About Barclay Perkins to thank for alerting me to the fact that Marks and Spencer is now selling a bottle-conditioned mild.

Lancashire Dark Mild, a 3.7 % abv beer brewed by Thwaites Brewery in Blackburn, is I'd assume a slightly tweaked and rebadged version of their draught mild Nutty Black.

Although dark milds are traditionally associated with the Black Country and the West Midlands, the first two milds I ever drank were dark ones from Manchester brewers, Holt's and the long-gone and much missed Wilson's, and Robinson's Brewery in Stockport still brew a pale and a dark version of their mild.

Home from Baum

I finally made it to CAMRA's National Pub of the Year, The Baum in Rochdale, yesterday.

The pub is a bit different to how I'd imagined it – smaller and more open plan than it looks in photos. It's a pretty good mix of modern and Victorian features that reminded me of the buffet bar at Dewsbury station for some reason.  As you'd expect, all the beer is in tip-top condition and the food is decent as well.

You can combine a trip to The Baum with a look round the Pioneers Museum next door which has lots of interesting stuff about the birth of the Co-operative movement in the town.

The next train to Batley

I've just watched the second episode of the BBC series The Railway: Keeping Britain on Track.

This week's programme looked at the Transpennine Real Ale Trail, the pub crawl by train from Manchester to Batley, stopping off at Huddersfield, Mirfield, Slaithwaite ("Slawit" to locals), Dewsbury, the unofficial pub at Mossley and my own favourite, the Railway at Greenfield where the excellence of the beer is matched by that of the pork pies.

The BBC made the trail look like a hazardous, vomit spattered stagger across Lancashire and Yorkshire with people falling onto the track and abusing other rail passengers and train staff. I've done it a few times for birthdays and stag nights and while some people drink a bit more than they should, the number who cause trouble is tiny compared to the thousands who enjoy a beery day out.

If I lived in one of the small towns on the route, I might think differently about the weekly invasion of inebriated travellers but surely a bit of litter and public urination is a small price to pay for keeping your pubs open and regular train services running?

Baum romps home

CAMRA yesterday gave its Pub of the Year award to The Baum in Rochdale.

I haven't been to The Baum but I've heard lots of good things about it from other CAMRA members and it's definitely on my "pubs I really must go to" list.

BBC North West sent a film crew along to the pub last night with the reporter mentioning the number of handpumps, as does the CAMRA press release. I'm sure The Baum has more than enough trade to have seven or eight handpumps dispensing beer in top condition but it got me thinking: how few beers could a pub have on and still pick up the Pub of the Year award? I can think of a couple of Holt's houses in Eccles that serve cracking pints of bitter and mild and also have the atmosphere, decor, welcome, service, value for money and customer mix that CAMRA looks for when making the award.

The art of spin

I've just started reading a book someone bought me for my birthday the other week, Twirlymen by Amol Rajan about spin bowling in cricket.

Like Rajan, I think spin bowling is the most fascinating and impressive aspect of cricket. In the summer of 2007, I went to a county game between Lancashire and Hampshire at Old Trafford and sat at the top of the pavilion, watching a masterclass in the spinner's art with Muttiah Muralitharan bowling off-spin for the home team and Shane Warne leg-spin for the visitors.  The performances of left-arm spinner Monty Panesar and off-spinner Graeme Swann in England's last Test match against India in Mumbai, taking nineteen wickets between them, suggest that spin has a fabled future ahead of it.

Mild life

An item on the local news caught my eye this morning.

Ninety-four year old Fred Dell from Fleetwood has been popping into the Strawberry Gardens pub for a "swift half of mild" since he was 18 in 1936. The landlord has now said he can drink there for free.

Dell's comment that when he started drinking there "You could get half a mild, five Woodbines and a box of matches and a penny change for half a sixpence." reminded me of what an old man in a pub says to Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop, we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course."

Free beer for the rest of your life when you're 94 is a small reward for seventy-six years drinking. The pub itself has seen some changes in that time if these reviews are to be believed, seemingly for the better. And contrary to what successive health ministers and Chancellors have told us, Dell's longevity proves that BEER IS GOOD FOR YOU.

Titanic tastelessness

A hundred years ago today, seven hundred surviviors of the Titanic disaster arrived in New York on board the SS Carpathia.

I've watched quite a few documentaries about the sinking in the last few weeks, as well as the still watchable 1958 film A Night to Remember starring Kenneth More as the ship's Second Officer Charles Lightoller. BBC North West's coverage has focussed on Lancashire's connections with the Titanic: the White Star Line had its headquarters in Liverpool, Lightholler was from Chorley, Carpathia captain Arthur Rostron from Bolton and Wallace Hartley, the leader of the band that famously played until the end, from Colne.

I'm always bemused when Liverpool and Belfast - where the Titanic was built - express their civic pride in a ship that sank on its maiden voyage with the loss of 1,500 lives. I suppose it's to attract tourists. Even more tasteless are the Titanic hampers and teddy bears and the £6,000 centenary cruise across the Atlantic.

A much larger proportion of third class passengers, many of them Irish emigrants, drowned on the Titanic compared to first class.  The idea that this reflects a class-divided society that disappeared in the First World War seems especially wide of the mark now when inequality - in income, education and life expectancy - continues to increase.

Apparently, there were fifteen thousand bottles of beer on board the Titanic. I wonder what it was and what condition it's in now.

Football from the North

I've just been reading a review of a new book about the 1879 FA Cup Quarter-Final between Darwen and Old Etonians.

The tie went to a second replay but all the matches were played in London as the Old Etonians refused to travel to Lancashire and the FA declined to intervene (no change there). Like other Northern teams, Darwen's players were working men and as amateurs had to find the money to travel to away matches from their meagre wages, unlike the sides made up of ex-public school boys who dominated the FA Cup in the first decade of the competition.

By the 1880's, Northern working-class teams had begun to compensate their players for expenses and lost wages and some also surreptiously employed professionals, many of them from Scotland where the "passing game" had been invented in the early 1870's. This led to the FA threatening to throw the Northern teams out of what was still officially an amateur game (there was also a proposal to ban Scottish players from English football in order to stem the tide of professionalism). Thirty-seven Northern teams responded by meeting in Manchester in 1884 and forming the openly professional British Football Association.

All this is of course an almost exact parallel with what happened in rugby football in the 1890's: the threat by the amateur Rugby Football Union to expel Northern working-class teams for paying players and the meeting in Huddersfield in 1895 that led to the separate game of rugby league. The FA headed off a permanent split in football by legalising professionalism in 1885 and in 1888 the Northern clubs met in Manchester to form the Football League as a league competition alongside the FA Cup. But what if the FA hadn't sanctioned professional football? Would amateur football in the South and professional football in the North have continued to be played under the same rules or would they have grown apart like rugby league and union? Would professional clubs like Arsenal and West Ham still have emerged in London and the South to challenge the amateur FA? Would they have eventually linked up with the professional Football League clubs in Lancashire and the Midlands as they did in the early twentieth century?

I think football would be broadly similar if the split between amateurs and professionals had continued and the Football League would still have expanded from its Lancashire birthplace to the Midlands and then the South in a way that rugby league didn't (apart from to Australia, and you can't get much more Southern than that). 

Crossing the river

Coming off the motorway at Sale the other day, I spotted this sign showing the River Mersey as the historic boundary between the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire.

I know people who argue for the restoration of the historic English counties are often Tories but even so I think they have a point.  The objection to the post-1974 metropolitan county of Greater Manchester is not just that it is artificial and has arbitrary boundaries but also that it ignores the Lancashire identity of towns like Bury and Wigan which continue to have their own distinctive accents, cuisine and culture.

I still feel I'm crossing a natural boundary when going over the Mersey.  It's not an accident that many borders around the world are marked by rivers. 

I was born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, support Lancashire County Cricket Club who still play at Old Trafford and look forward to the day when Whitehall comes round to what locals have known all along.

Fight night in Preston

Earlier this month, a Labour club in Preston, Lancashire held a "fight night" in which an eight year old and a nine year old boy battled each other in a ten minute bout.

I'm opposed to boxing but would not ban it. I would ban this.

For adults to be paid to beat each other up, for fans to pay for and enjoy the spectacle and for promoters to rake in the profits is both objectionable and depressing as a measure of the kind of society we live in.  Hopefully in the future when it has disappeared, along with the social conditions on which it thrives, people will look back on boxing as we do now at the Roman games. For parents to allow their children to fight in front of paying customers is far worse.  They should be prosecuted and the club shut down.

In interviews, the parents have defended their actions by saying that children have to work off energy and it is better than them joining gangs and getting involved in crime, as if there were no other, healthier ways to keep fit and fighting for money was the only alternative to joining a criminal gang.

The parents and the promoters share responsibilty for this event with those who attended it and - even more creepily - those who paid to watch it streamed live on the internet as their evening's entertainment.

The event was apparently licensed by the local council to ensure that doctors were present, the fight was stopped in the case of injury etc. but it seems to me it was only by them licensing it that the event was able to go ahead at all. In any other circumstances, the organisers would have been prosecuted.

Lancs champs

The news that Lancashire are cricket's county champions for the first time since 1934 set me thinking about my trips to their home gound Old Trafford over the years.

My first trip was my grandad who grew up in Old Trafford and went with his mates as an engineering apprentice at the nearby Metropolitan Vickers factory in the 1930's.  It was the last day of the Fifth Ashes Test against Australia in 1981 and the thing that sticks in my memory is fast bowler Bob Willis pounding in from the boundary on an incredibly long run-up with the noise from the stands building with every step.

I've been to county matches and Tests at Old Trafford since then, including being lucky enough to get into the ground when twenty thousand were locked outside for the thrilling last day of the Third Ashes Test in 2005, but that first trip still ranks as the best.