Palimpsests of Place
The brief coincidences of a coalminer's son, Brian Epstein, me and my dad.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
T S Eliot, East Coker
i
When I moved into central Manchester a few years ago my eighth-floor apartment in Islington Wharf looked directly out over a rectangular stretch of grassy land which had come to be known as Islington Green. It has been something of an island in amongst the recent furious building projects in this part of the city. At the time, I wrote in my journal:
There’s a tram stop, bands of tracks emerging from a tunnel and wide strips of grass on either side. The grass has uneven patches of daisies and buttercups sectioned by desire paths. A brick wall and a canal with a lock and a lock-keepers cottage bound one strip of grass; bollards and the busy Pollard road edge the other strip. All of these parallel features: tram tracks, grass strips, the wall, lines of bollards, the canal and the road create a broad geometric linear design cutting through the redevelopment of old Ancoats industrial mills into new apartments and urban homes. The colour scheme is grass green, tree-leaf green and shades of brick from tan to buff and brown. But there are two intrusions in the picture. Two orange polyester tents with lime green guy lines. They have been there a few weeks now: homeless, two men, two dogs and a single armchair. There is very little rubbish. The dogs seem well fed. As a campsite goes it’s well tended and tidy.
Islington Green, inevitably, is going to be built on, or over. There is local outrage. It's a popular sunbathing hang out in the summer, a space from which to see the sky, handy for dog-walkers, a feature on the Ashton Canal, some air between bricks, a desire path to the tram. Despite a sense of powerlessness, petitions and online campaigns abound. Maybe they will have some effect, if not in halting the developers, but in voicing a sense of urgency towards preserving some sort of sensitivity to local needs. Perhaps a few more feet of grass, decent footpaths, a child-friendly concession, one floor less to an apartment block, and some trees will be added?
Like it or not, landscapes have always morphed and been modified by human invention and intervention. Most of the Islington Green area was fenced off recently. I checked it out and saw that the diggers were opening up the ground, not for foundations, but to access the underlayers for archaeological excavations. Beneath the green is a whole pre-existing strata of industrial activity. Before Islington Green, from the mid eighteen hundreds onwards, there was a tight array of buildings: Lowe Street Cotton Mill, Pollard Street Cotton Mill, Pollard Street Fire Station, Soho Iron Works, chemical works, various Wharfs, Corporation Yards and tucked in amongst it, the Touchettes Arms (for a while renamed the Auld Lang Syne pub). There was no green; mostly grime, grit and grey water.
I walked over to the site again recently. The excavation holes were filled in. A single shopping trolley was abandoned in a spew of churned up mud. Yet, before the industrial revolution - green fields, meadows and probably commonland. Cycles: wild land uninhabited; open land for common grazing, fenced in for farms; smallholdings flattened for building sites; industrial decay razed back to green space; parks developed into offices and urban apartments. Palimpsests of place. Stand on a given spot and you are the latest piece of meat on the sharp end of the skewer of history. All the seemingly chaotic layers are actually profoundly connected and arise in dependence upon prior clear, yet complex, conditions. It's good to take an ear to the ground and an eye to the horizon. As I stood by the lonely shopping trolley, I remembered looking out from my Islington Wharf flat. It was high enough to see the horseshoe of hills to the east of Manchester. With binoculars it would be possible to see Hartshead Pike, a small hill above Mossley, where I lived for around ten years prior to moving into central Manchester. I had occasionally walked up to the hill only half a mile from our house. I have only just discovered that a working class son of a poor mining family, born just below Hartshead Pike, would go on to create something that would have overlapping significance for me, my father and the manager of the Beatles.
ii
Despite being close to the core of the birth of the Industrial revolution at Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge, the land beyond the east edge of the market town of Wellington, in Shropshire, has, as far as I am aware, never been particularly industrial. Over the years most of the older farmland has been developed outwards in housing stock and estates. The largest plots of remaining grass and trees consist of the extensive school playing fields of Wrekin College. Those open patchworks of green space are relatively safe from diggers, apartment-blocks or retail parks, compared to Islington Green. But they might not have still been there, had it not been for the foresight of the founder of Wrekin College, or Wellington College, as it was initially called from its founding in 1880, until 1921 when it was renamed.
John Bayley, was born in 1852 at Windy Bank, Hartshead Pike, near Ashton-under-Lyne, just twenty minutes up the Ashton Road, from where I'm writing this, and half a mile from Mossley. Around that year the number of cotton mills in Manchester was peaking at one hundred and eight. Just down the road from the Bayley family there would have been no Islington Green or Islington Wharf. As a coal miner William Bailey would likely have been aware of the Ancoats tight cluster of Mills. They probably knew of Murrays' Mills, the world's oldest steam powered cotton mill, built between 1797 and 1842. In 1806 the mill complex was the largest in the world, employing about 1,000 people at its peak. In 2018 its conversion to modern apartments was completed and it became the home in which I now live. I'm aware of the ironic twist whereby my privilege of the present is bound up with the poverty and disadvantages of the past.
Above Windy Bank, Hartshead Pike, is a well known local landmark - a small hill with a circular round tower near its summit. The tower, built in 1863 to commemorate the marriage of Albert Edward (the future King Edward VII) to Princess Alexandra of Denmark, replaced another that had been there since 1751 which was said to be split apart by lightning in 1794. Prior to the towers, the hill was a Roman lookout point during the time of Emperor Hadrian. For me the Hartshead Tower was always a relief to see, popping into view, driving along the Top Mossley road, marking the more open countryside beyond the relentlessly uninspiring post-industrial road from Manchester, via Stalybridge and Ashton-under-Lyne, to Mossley.
The Bayley family moved from Hartshead to Newton Moor five miles south and John began his training as a teacher aged thirteen at Flowery Field School, near Hyde Park. I remember the time when I was teaching three nights a week from seven to nine and I had to walk to Ashton, about three miles, when the work was done, he once said. The family was not wealthy, his father William worked in the local coal mines, so during that time John was also working as an assistant, in George Brownson's shop, a well established tailor and draper, selling buttons and laces in Hyde, where his sister Hannah was a tailoress. Following his teacher training he quickly became a Headmaster of the elementary school at Hamstreet and Warehome, near Ashford in Kent. In 1877 he moved back up north to Wellington, Shropshire as Headmaster of the 200 pupil Constitution Hill Boys' School. Probably as a result of educational disagreements with Shropshire County Council, Bayley resigned from his position in 1880. He then set out alone, starting his own independent school with five pupils in a house at 33 Albert Road, just round the corner from Constitution Hill. From here he was able to gradually build a new college. To the east of Albert Road were acres of fields, mostly wheatfields. He could envision how his school could grow and set about acquiring land for school buildings, accommodation, a chapel and playing fields. Over several years, he acquired over 120 acres, created the playing fields and built new school rooms, accommodation and necessary educational facilities. After retiring from the school, now well established, in 1920, Bayley continued as a governor, was a Shropshire county councillor and in honour of his home town, built Bayley Hall, a recreation hall in Hyde Park, Hyde. At the time of writing, Bayley Hall is home to Banana Moon Day Nursery. That might have made him smile: five minutes walk away is Flowery Field School which he attended and began his training as a teacher aged thirteen. He was knighted in 1928 for his services to education.
iii
One small area of the Wrekin school land John Bayley developed is of special interest to me. To the side of Sutherland Road, at the top edge of what was to become the Bigside cricket pitch, a gymnasium was built. When he was a boarder at Wrekin in the 1950s, my dad spent time in there - I used to climb up and down ropes to the top; not so good at leaping over the horses, he told me. He also told me he was at Wrekin the same time as future Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein. He didn't know him well, didn't hang out with him. But, it's still a thing to be able to say, and I do often say - my dad went to school with Brian Epstein. He remembers him coming down the path, with a friend, blurring around. I thought he was a bit odd, a bit up and down, he told me. Blurring around: such an evocative phrase. Not yet formed, unfocussed. I too was to attend Wrekin College in the 1970s. I probably blurred around quite a bit too. But, I was quite good at leaping horses and opted for gymnastics rather than rugby.
The school is divided into houses, separate buildings spread out around the school grounds, for boarding, recreation and study. My dad was in Norman House, I was in Tudor House, Brian Epstein was in Bayley House. Epstein’s house being named after founder Sir John Bayley who, had he lived to witness them, might not have approved of The Beatles. Though, having briefly worked at Brownson's tailors in Hyde, and having a seamstress sister, maybe he would have had a fleeting twinge of sympathy for Brian Epstein, who wrote to his father from Wrekin that he longed to become a dress designer. Epstein's dad certainly wasn't encouraging: it just isn't the sort of thing young men do, he firmly told him. [1] Wrekin was Brian Epstein's ninth school to date, including his nursery school at Prestatyn; he was lonely and frustrated with the frippery of sports as a distraction from painting and acting. Fortunately for Epstein the school gymnasium doubled up as a theatre space and he had his chance to come into some sort of focus in the annual school play following good roles in his house plays. The house plays were occasionally produced and presented, exclusively, by the boys of each given house to the rest of the school. They were an opportunity to show off and no doubt there was an element of inter-house competition involved, to see who could come up with the best production. For the Bayley House play The Will, by J. M. Barrie, Brian Epstein contributed artworks, (portraits of Queen Victoria, King Edward VIII, and King George V, to be changed through the action as an indicator of the passing of time), and played the role of Robert Devizes, the son of a lawyer. For his final house play Brian Epstein played the character of The American in John Galsworthy's 1915 farce The Little Man. He impressed the staff enough to earn him a role in the forthcoming school play Christopher Columbus in the summer term of 1950. Adapted by drama teacher J Douglas Hamilton, from a radio play by Louis MacNeice, the production was a full scale presentation with a large cast, twenty boys covering forty parts, original composed incidental music and well developed set designs.
Epstein played a key role as Mendoza (Grand Cardinal of Spain), much to the amusement of those who knew his Jewish background[2], and a brief secondary role as Vincente Pinzon (Captain of the Nina). I asked my dad if he remembered seeing that school play. He was vague and said he might have been involved. It wasn't until I read the Summer 1950 edition of the Wrekinian Magazine that I found out my dad was actually in that play handling two minor parts. He was amused to be reminded of this, and then remembered that he forgot one of his few lines. He had more important things to be thinking about, like gaining his scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford and the pre-requisite National Service stint to come. Memory, forgetfulness, the relative significance of events. I'm struck again how someone else's past can hold more meaning to me that to them. My dad could have eaten out for the rest of his life on the fact that he was onstage with Brian Epstein, when the Beatles were not even a string on Paul McCartney's guitar. In 1950 John Lennon and Ringo Starr were ten; Paul McCartney was eight and George Harrison was seven. Those four boys were yet to set out on uncharted seas of pop stardom, and to land on the fortunate island of eternal youth. At the beginning of the play my dad is Carlos, a rough sailor, he's debating with another sailor whether there really are lands where Columbus is headed:
BARTOLOMÉ: To hell with all these stories. I suppose
You'll be telling me next you believe in Atlantis
And all them other places - Zipangu and Antilla!
CARLOS: I believe in 'em surely. Why, man, don't you find 'em
Marked on our sheepskin charts?
BARTOLOMÉ: That's right. Antilla and Zipangu...
Aye, and Vineland and Hy Brazil...
And the Isle of the Seven Cities.
CARLOS: And the Fortunate Islands where no one grows old[3].
Epstein's mother and father drove down from Liverpool to see the play. His mother said, we sat through it all and the headmaster came up and asked us afterwards if we'd liked Brian. We hadn't realised which one he was. He was just so good we hadn't recognized him.[4]
Brian Epstein left Wrekin in 1950, when he was sixteen, without taking further exams, his prizes yet to come. He went back to Liverpool, to become a furniture salesman and, following study at RADA, had an unsuccessful on-stage career. The UK music charts had not yet been proposed - that was to come in 1952. Popular music was judged by its sheet music sales, but in the air that summer was Goodnight Irene by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers, Mona Lisa by Nat King Cole and The Third Man Theme by Anton Karas. 1952 was also the year Sir John Bayley died, just short of 100 years old. That means he was still alive when my dad and Brian Epstein were performing in the gymnasium he had created. Appropriately, that same year, the gymnasium was expanded and developed into the Memorial Hall, a more functional building. It still remained a gym, on the same site, but had new toilets, and a proper stage with proscenium arch. Queen Elizabeth II, visited the Memorial Hall in 1967.
So it was that in 1979 my school rock band, Bastille, rehearsed at weekends on the same site that Brian Epstein and my father had once acted on, as schoolboys, thirty years earlier. What Sir John Bayley would have made of even the notion of a school rock band, let alone The Beatles, I'm not sure. Nevertheless, I feel unexpectedly and strangely connected to the coalminer's son from Windy Bank, under Hartshead Pike.
[1] The Beatles; the authorized biography, Hunter Davies, 1968, New York McGraw-Hill Book Co.
[2] The Man Who Made the Beatles, Ray Coleman, 1989, McGraw-Hill
[3] Christopher Columbus: A radio play, by Louis MacNeice. Faber & Faber, 1944
[4] The Beatles - Updated Edition - by Hunter Davies (2009). Though note Hunter Davies mis-attributes Christopher Columbus to Eugene O'Neill. He's maybe thinking of O'Neill's The Fountain of 1923, which tells the story of Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon’s search for the fountain of youth and his travels to the New World with Christopher Columbus’s second voyage.