Child of the North
Memories of a Northern Childhood
Piers Dudgeon with Josephine Cox

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

FOREWORD by Josephine Cox

Maps

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE The Web of Life

CHAPTER TWO The Hungry Poor

CHAPTER THREE Stratagem and Strife

CHAPTER FOUR Betrayed

CHAPTER FIVE The Full, Vicious Circle

CHAPTER SIX Broken Hearts

CHAPTER SEVEN Leaving Home

CHAPTER EIGHT New Landscapes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the same author:

Novels by Josephine Cox

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD by Josephine Cox

I thought I knew all there was to know about the land of my birth. I now realise that I was wrong.

This wonderful, in-depth book, meticulously researched and written by Piers Dudgeon, has opened my eyes to a world I never really knew, with many places and events that were inevitably beyond my experience. My own private, precious little world was the backstreets of Blackburn town, and the magical Corporation Park, where I played out many childish dramas in my imagination.

Deprived and confined though my world was, it was never quiet or uneventful, and for all its inherent difficulties I would not want to change it. I could never deny my upbringing, because it is who I am; my roots are firmly embedded in those difficult, frustrating, wonderful days, when food was short and ‘nice’ clothes were what someone else wore.

It has been said that your childhood moulds and makes you the person you are, and I believe this is true. It’s why today, and for the rest of my life, I will never take things for granted. Each and every value and principle I nurture has sprung directly from my background. Added to that, it gave me the stories I write: stories of human beings, and emotions, and the knowledge that when life knocks you down, the only way back is to stand tall and straight and look it in the eye.

The whole of my childhood is like a moving picture in my mind. I loved every inch of the narrow cobbled streets. With their many pubs and churches, pawn shops and little houses, they throbbed with life. The square-headed, black-coated lamps quietly guarded the pavements by day and lit the way home for lovers and drunks of a night-time. The back-to-back houses with their tiny Coronation Street yards and outside cold, damp lavvies (situated in a discreet corner beside the midden hole) held many a naughty or dangerous secret behind the twitching net curtains. Secrets I carried into my adult life and which I now retell in my stories.

The people were warm and friendly, and every mother was mother to every child in the street, regardless of which house a child might live in. The men worked hard and the women bore the children, and life was hectic and noisy, and often violent.

Our own house bustled with children, but, thinking back, I was never really a child. That would have been far too easy. But children should be innocent, and as my Grandma Harrison would say, ‘be seen and not heard.’ That was not me. I watched and listened and learned.

My Blackburn was a wonderful place, with smoking chimneys that darkened the skies and mill whistles piercing the air, calling the folk to work. These ‘folk’ were ‘real’ flesh-and-blood people. A great number of the same kind of people remain to this day, though many of the familiar landmarks I knew have long since gone. There was a loud, colourful market where the men shouted their wares, and the women from the seaside would sell their shrimps and other shellfish from the depths of a wicker basket. The market was large and sprawling, with a splendid, sturdy clock that stood tall and proud in the centre and could be seen from one corner of the marketplace to the other. On a weekend evening, its large, smiling face looked down on the meeting of friends and sweethearts. No doubt it could have told many a tale, which we will never know because, sadly, some years later, the planners in their infinite ‘wisdom’ saw fit to demolish this wonderful landmark.

There were other memorable ‘landmarks’ in my young life. The Ragged School, ‘Founded in the Cause of Christian Love and Fellowship’ and ‘Opened by Mayor John Truman, July 15th, 1942’, where Christian people offered practical help and comfort to the children from poorer backgrounds than their own. There was the Cicely Bridge Mill, where I would go to meet our mam after school; and Nazareth House, where she would take us when things were not going so well financially. The nuns there were kind and generous, something I have never forgotten. There was the slaughter-house, near where, for some time, we lived – and the awful smell permeated the air day and night. This is one particular memory I would prefer to erase, but which, like the others, is stored in my soul for all time.

One other unforgettable incident happened on a chilly morning in February 1952. I was playing in the street, when suddenly everybody rushed out of their houses, some in tears and others eager to spread the shocking news that King George had died. The street went into mourning, as did the whole country, but to me and every other child it was something that affected only the adults. We looked and wondered, and cried when our parents cried, but being children we did not seem directly touched by this sad, historic event. And yet it is a day I will never forget, because of the emotion that swept through my little world and, for a time, carried me along.

Many years later, circumstances beyond my control carried me away from my beloved Blackburn, and in so doing brought me together with Ken, my sweetheart and subsequently my husband and friend.

It is well-known that my family means a great deal to me. In spite of my mam and dad going their different ways, I remain ever close to my sisters and the brothers it broke my heart to leave behind. I love them all now as I did then: without reservation.

I give my heartfelt thanks to Piers Dudgeon for his hard work and memorable account of the North of England in this book. I know he spent many hours driving about and walking the streets of Blackburn, researching wherever he could and chatting to anyone who had things to tell him. At the end of it, he has written a very special account of the way it was and some incidents of childhood. And though this is not my life story, it shows a glimpse of my early days, and I am proud to be part of it all.

Maps

INTRODUCTION

Images from Blackburn in the 1940s and ‘50s propel us into a microcosmic world of Josephine Cox’s childhood: a red Oxo tin; a mangle roller; a long, narrow glass of sarsaparilla; an old wireless resting on a lace doily in the corner of the front room; the ubiquitous gas-lamp. People relate to Jo’s fictional world because it is ground out of a reality that she knew only too well in the first fourteen years of her life, and she clings to symbolic elements of it, such as sarsaparilla, a forerunner to Coca Cola, which is drunk by her characters relentlessly whether they are living in the 1950s or much later.

Jo was born in 1941, in an old cotton-mill house on a cobbled street long gone to progress. ‘It was a slum and life was a struggle,’ she has said. There were seven boys and three girls in the family; two more children were lost in infancy. Jo was number four.

Her childhood was characterful, seamless, and independent of the wider world. This is reflected in her novels, as Queenie’s amazement shows when Biddy suggests a trip to nearby Blackpool in Her Father’s Sins: ‘Outside Blackburn, Auntie Biddy? Are we going outside Blackburn?’ For the town’s occupants, until Nosey-Parker Hindle purchased the first TV in Blackburn in 1952, the world beyond Blackburn didn’t exist.

Her Father’s Sins, Jo’s first novel, is a masterly, child’s-eye view of her upbringing in the 1940s and ‘50s, but her work is not simply an extension of her own childhood past for reminiscence’s sake. She is working things out, mythologising, and also sorting through her own feelings about what has passed. Angels Cry Sometimes, her fourth novel, is based on her mother’s struggle. Her father, Barney Brindle, was employed by Blackburn Council on the roads, and, like others frustrated by life at the tailend of the Industrial Revolution, he drank away his wages in the pub on a Friday night and sometimes vented his frustration in rages that terrified his children. At home, Jo’s mother, Mary Jane Harrison, survivor of the cotton mills, somehow kept the family together until Jo was fourteen, when she walked out, taking some of her children with her. These events, and in particular Jo’s loss of her father at such a crucial moment in her development, are as important to her fiction as the environment in which her childhood took place and of which, as we will see, they are an integral part. Her novels also take us farther back in time, so that we can see how that environment came into being. These were exciting, innovative times, as Jo observed in her novel, Outcast:

Cotton mills were going up at an unprecedented rate all over Lancashire, but here in Blackburn the programme of mill construction was staggering. Emma had inherited her papa’s own pride in these great towering monstrosities, and she knew all their names – Bank Top Mill, Victoria Mill, Infirmary Mill – and, oh, so many more! Cotton was big business, keeping the town a hive of bustling activity. No hard-working mill-hand ever grew rich by it as his wages were too meagre; but, for the man with money to invest, the opportunities grew day by day…

The series of inventions that triggered the Industrial Revolution speeded up first the spinning, then the weaving processes. They included the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, the steam engine and the power loom. Then new transport systems – the railway and the canal – to and from ports at Liverpool, London and eventually Manchester vastly improved the supply and distribution network.

The earliest mills in Blackburn, such as Wensley Fold Mill (1775), King Street Mill (1817) and Whalley Banks Mill (1818), were opened to house the new spinning machines.

These mills represented a whole different way of life. Workers no longer owned their own wheels; instead of working in their own homes at their own pace, spinners would now have to work in their employers’ factories at the machines’ pace for new entrepreneurial masters. Many were drawn in from outlying villages, as livelihoods were threatened by the factory operations.

By 1800 there were seven thousand such operatives in Blackburn, representing around sixty per cent of the population. Twenty years later the number had more than doubled – a body of workers nearly 15,000 strong represented almost seventy per cent of the town’s burgeoning population.

The coming of the power loom greatly accelerated this shift from country to town. Power looms were first installed in Blackburn at Dandy Mill in 1825, from which time the writing was on the wall for hand-loomers. In the town’s most authoritative history, Blackburn: The Development of a Lancashire Cotton Town, Derek Beattie charts the transition as follows. In 1780, Blackburn’s population was five thousand. In 1801, it amounted to 11,980, with seven thousand hand looms in use. In 1841 there were some six thousand power looms in use and possibly as few as one thousand hand looms. In 1907, Blackburn was the cotton-weaving capital of the world; there were around 130,000 people, no hand looms, but 79,403 power looms in use.

Aiding and abetting production improvements was the new transport system. In 1770, building work began on the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

The Leeds to Liverpool Canal was a main artery from the Liverpool Docks to the various mills. Along this route the fuel and raw cotton which kept the mills alive was brought, thus affording a living to the many bargees who, with their families, dwelt in their colourful floating homes and spent most of their lives travelling to and from with their cargoes. This consisted mainly of raw cotton, unloaded from ships which carried it across the ocean from America.

Jo’s novel, Outcast, quoted above, tells us much about the workings of industry in the nineteenth century. The canal, which would run commercial traffic until 1972, reached Blackburn in 1810, easing transportation not only of raw cotton and cloth, but of coal, lime and building materials mined in the neighbourhood – goods for powering the cotton industry and enabling the building programme that would be so closely bound up with it. In the more recent Bad Boy Jack we get a time-honoured picture of a barge ‘moved along, pulled by a massive horse, loaded down with cargo and painted colourfully from stem to stern.’ But it is Emma Grady in Outcast, who takes us inside one of these great boats:

It was the first time Emma had ever been inside a barge, and it had been a great surprise. Not for a moment had she expected to see such a cosy and exceptionally pretty home as this. All the walls and ceiling were made of highly polished panels. In the living-quarters the walls were decorated with lovely brass artefacts – plates, old bellows and the like; from the ceiling hung three oil-lamps of brass and wood, each sparkling and meticulously kept; there were two tiny dressers, both made of walnut and displaying small china ornaments – which, according to Sal, were ‘put away when we’re on the move’; as were the china plates which were propped up on shelves beneath each porthole; the horsehair chairs were free-standing, but the dressers were securely fixed to the floorboards. There was also a small cast-iron fire, and the narrow galley which was well-stocked and spotless. In one of the two bedrooms there was a tiny dresser with a tall cupboard beside it, and a deep narrow bunk beneath a porthole. Emma had been astonished that everything a person might need could be provided in such a limited space.

The railway was the next fillip to industry, the Preston–Blackburn line opening in 1846. However, it was never the dominant force that the canal turned out to be, as Mike Clarke notes in Alan Duckworth’s Aspects of Blackburn. In 1851 the canal’s cargo business was leased to a group of local railway companies, including the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, which gave it a virtual monopoly on transport in East Lancashire. Mill owners, increasingly illserved by this monopoly, pressured the canal company to revoke the lease. By 1880 the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway was laying off staff at Burnley because the canal had taken over much of their traffic. As a result, new boatyards sprang up and business boomed in those that were already servicing the canal.

In Vagabonds, Marlow Tanner builds up a canal cargo business – Tanner’s Transporters – and is part of this new boatyard boom:

He had worked his way up from being a bargee who struggled for a living, going cap-in-hand to such men as Caleb Crowther who once owned most of the mills along the wharf – property that, by rights, had belonged to Emma…You’ll never find a better gaffer than Marlow Tanner.

The new inventions in the cotton industry increased the speed of production and made it more economical. The improved transport enhanced supply of raw cotton and distribution of finished cloth. In 1913, Lancashire as a whole could boast exports of seven billion yards of cloth.

The first mill-worker housing in Blackburn sprang up around Wensley Fold, Blackburn’s first spinning mill, close to where Josephine Cox was born. Seven cottages appeared in 1809, numbers rapidly increasing so that by 1832 the mill master had built eighty-four houses around and about. The mill owned your house, many of the shops in the area and the pub at the end of the road. The master paid your wages and then mopped them up again in any way he could.

Three main mill colonies shaped the burgeoning town from the 1820s: Brookhouse to the northeast, Nova Scotia to the south, and Grimshaw Park to the southeast. By 1847 these colonies had grown so large that they accounted for a third of employment in the cotton industry. These worker colonies comprised endless, closed-in rows of terraced housing, two rooms upstairs, two rooms down, no bathroom, no hot water except that which was boiled in the kettle, no front garden, a backyard scarcely big enough to turn round in and an outside lavatory backing onto a narrow passage. Some of the earliest terraces were back-to-backs with no alleyway between, but it soon became apparent that these posed appalling sanitation and health risks.

Over the following decades, the character of the Blackburn spinners and weavers was challenged by harsh discipline, by regular depressions in the industry, by general poverty and the often appalling conditions in which they had to live and work. The town would become a centre of manufacture for the world, but it would also become a cesspit of human misery, before it began its painful and terminal wind-down, which saw up to fifty per cent of the workforce unemployed in 1930, and by 1957 a two-thirds reduction of its cotton mills, right down to one working mill – Witton Mill in Stancliffe Street – all that is left today.

In Her Father’s Sins, class or poverty levels are measured by the number of gas-lamps in a street, each inscribed with a carving of the Lancaster Rose. We will see that class differentiation and interplay in Blackburn was subtly and strategically staged, so that the mill masters were able to count on the support of the workers, on whose labours they became rich, by engineering a code of loyalty or team spirit akin to that of a modern-day football fan to football club, as if the masters shared the same purpose and values as their workers – which, of course, they did, didn’t they? Only a perceptive few saw the nature of the fraud at the time.

In the mid-twentieth century when Jo Cox was growing up in Blackburn, a quarter of the working population were still engaged in textiles, especially weaving. But it was a much reduced industry, the routine of life giving the appearance of continuity, the daily shape that linked 1950s Blackburn to an age-old tradition of cotton and ale – from the five a.m. rat-a-tat of the knocker-up’s stick to the end of a back-breaking day, laughing and singing in the pubs, which held pride of place in every lamp-lined cobbled street.

There had in fact been change in every generation since the Industrial Revolution took hold. The cold, relentless march of progress occurred in every era, and in the 1950s, change was once again round the corner. With it would come the slum-clearance and rebuilding programme in which Mr Marsden has a hand in Her Father’s Sins, and new inhabitants too: ‘If somebody ‘ad offered me the bloody Crown Jewels some five years back, against a body swappin’ the land o’ sunshine to come to Blackburn, I’d never have taken the bet!’ Today the ethnic Asian population accounts for more than a fifth of the town’s inhabitants.

In the meantime, for many more indigenous families in the 1940s and early 1950s (Jo’s included), poverty was the harsh reality, and the coming of the Welfare State brought no miracle cure. ‘Poverty, real degrading poverty, had crept up on them,’ Jo writes in Her Fathers Sin’s, and was symbolised by the Cob o’ Coal: ‘Nine feet tall with a skirt dimension of twenty feet or more, it was raw and shiny black, hard as the day it was wrestled out by the miners from its long resting place beneath the ground.’ Raw rock-coal, unsuitable for burning, it had been given a shiny brass plaque and transported to its place at the corner of Pump Street and Waterfall Mill to the accompaniment of the town band. However, the need of the poor folk was such that within six years it had been reduced to a hump-backed deformity of which no one could be proud.

With money short and up to twelve at table, life at home for Jo’s family was hard, and the indignities hurtful (she was teased at school for her pawnshop clothes). Hand in hand with poverty (‘when optimism was a luxury’) came drunkenness. Jo has declared that the fictional George Kenny’s appalling drunken rages (Her Father’s Sins) are based on her experience of her own father. Her parents brought out the worst in each other, and Kelly’s feelings in Somewhere, Someday about her father ruining her mother’s life were Jo’s.

Poverty is also linked to ill-health – Biddy dies of consumption in Her Father’s Sins. It brings us, too, to the role of religion in the community: to Father Riley, to the Blackburn Ragged School, to the Salvation Army and to the Convent of Nazareth House, which played such a part in Jo’s life even after ‘the Welfare’ had taken hold in the town. The levels of poverty point, too, to other elements in the cultural stew: to manipulation, exploitation, abuse, rape, illegitimacy and incest. All are recurring themes in Jo’s novels. Incest was a particular problem in such very crowded living conditions even in the last century.

Love within the family is a preoccupation of the novels. In Jinnie, the mother figure, Louise Hunter, adopts a child who is the product of a one-time union between her late husband Ben and her own sister, Susan. In Cradle of Thorns, Lilian has an unrequited incestuous desire for her brother, Don Reece. In Jessica’s Girl, Noreen suspects Edward of making his sister Jessica pregnant. In Her Father’s Sins, the word is that Sheila Thorogood’s baby is her twin brother Raymond’s, and Queenie (in many ways a dead ringer for Jo) falls in love with Richard Marsden, not knowing that they share the same father in George Kenney: ‘I love Rick with all my heart. I want no other; and so it seems I’m determined to be forever lonely. I can’t pretend to understand your ways, God, but I hope You can understand me; and find it in Your heart to forgive me my sin tonight.’

In Let Loose the Tigers, Sheila, with her heart of gold, advises Queenie to go to Rick, brother or not – ‘yer love each other, wrong or right…’ While in Born to Serve it is the father’s incest with the daughter that is examined. Claudia threatens her mother that she will tell the world, ‘Your husband bedded me…his own daughter. I’m carrying his child!’ In Her Father’s Sins, drink is the expediter of similar shocking invasion on the part of George Kenney:

Gasping for breath, Queenie fought with every ounce of strength she could summon. But the powerful brutality of her attacker rendered her helpless and the horror which smothered her screaming became unbearable.

Tearing aside her flimsy nightwear and shattering the golden-heart chain about her delicate throat, George Kenney in his brutality took his own child’s virgin innocence, with no thought of consequence or compassion, his own lust uppermost in his mind.

In Lovers and Liars there is the incestuous abuse of Emily Ramsden by her uncle, Clem Jackson, out of which a girl, Cathleen, is born. But Clem is not the only wicked uncle in Jo’s books. Caleb Crowther of the Emma Grady trilogy – Outcast, Alley Urchin and Vagabonds – is another. Both are based on a real-life uncle, described by Jo as ‘the most evil man on earth: I hated him with a passion. He is the one Emma is terrified of. He is very cruel in that story, but it’s just a reflection of how he was in real life. He was an uncle on my father’s side, really a cousin but way older than us children and a nasty, devious, sly piece of work. We were quite frightened of him. When he turned up we would run and hide. He was very weird. I have always had this picture in my mind of him. I remember years later, twenty years ago, my husband Ken and I went to Blackburn, mainly to see family. We were driving along and I saw this uncle walking down the street and I went cold all over; that’s how frightened I was of him. He had these searching eyes that looked right through you, rarely smiled, spooky.’

For Jo, family relationships are her priority. The loss of her own father and brothers after her family split becomes a driving force in her novels, perhaps explaining why abuse of the most blessed of relationships – family relationships – possesses her still.

It seems incredible that almost all the relationships in Jo’s thirty-four novels are based on her own experience or the experience of someone close to her. ‘Incest is to do with the fact that people did live so close together,’ she agrees. ‘I never had any experience of it, but somehow you knew things like that were going on…There was a man who used to sell newspapers on Blackburn Boulevard and he had a daughter who was a little bit mentally retarded, and she had a baby and soon after that his wife left him and took the daughter and her baby with her, and there was talk. I heard the women talk.’

The women who figured in Jo’s childhood were generally confined by unwritten laws to unrewarding domesticity in ‘the old narrow houses with their steep unhygienic backyards, pot-sinks and outside lavvies. They experienced few luxuries, accepting hard work and domineering husbands as part of their unenviable lot,’ she wrote in Her Father’s Sins. Few even allowed themselves the luxury of self-pity or ‘foolish dreams of what could never be’.

Into this forbidding picture the author introduces light brush-strokes of character that humanise and transform the community into one where Beth Ward (in Don’t Cry Alone) finds ‘another kind of love, a deep sense of belonging’. All-embracing mother figures abound. In Somewhere, Someday we have the warm, ebullient Lancashire landlady, Fran Docherty – ‘a big, bustling mound of a woman, she had a soft, squashy smile that reminded Kelly of a newly stuffed eiderdown,’ and in Her Father’s Sins, besides Auntie Biddy, who is based on the author’s own mother, Jo gives us Katy, who ‘became the mother Queenie had never known but always craved.’

Jo was an unusually imaginative child. She has described herself as ‘a people watcher’ from the age of four. She needed the sanctuary of her imagination simply to survive, and always loved sharing her stories, even copping the odd pennies for the gas meter by telling made-up stories to friends amidst the rubble of bombed-out Blackburn town. The novels are littered with examples of imaginative observation – like Mr Eddie’s long-johns ‘squirming half in half out’ of Biddy’s mangle, or like Mrs Aspen’s box, used to stand on so that she can gossip with Biddy across the backyard wall.

The working-class community in Blackburn comes to us as a woven tapestry of relationships which represents every emotional facet of human life, the idiosyncratic ways of Jo’s characters so often proving them true. We have tradesmen like old Dubber Butterfield who’d sit ‘on his three-legged stool amidst the hundreds of boots, shoes and clogs which hung from the walls and ceilings’, and Teddy, a ‘twisted dwarf figure with huge pink eyes and a bald head’, who runs a milk bar offering everything from a cure for toe-ache to a glass of sarsaparilla. Tales of schooldays and truancy bring us old Snake-tongue Jackson of St Mary’s, and elsewhere in Her Father’s Sins the old world is fingered in characters like Miss Tilly and Fancy Carruthers.

Then there is Maisie Thorogood, loose with the Yanks during the war and a rag-a-bone lady now, uproarious, louche, but, like Queenie’s Aunt Biddy, at one with her environment. There is, indeed, no distinction – Maisie is her environment (as indeed are all Jo’s characters): ‘She’d always been part of it, like the gas-lamps and the shiny worn cobblestones.’ Character, it seems, is not forged in response to the regime of life, it is one aspect of the environmental bedrock.

In her teens, when Jo’s parents separated she moved south to Bedfordshire with her mother and sisters. At fifteen years of age she met her future husband, Ken, and they were married a year later. Her father, who had decried her efforts at writing and would be amazed to discover that she is the bestselling British women’s author writing today, cut his daughter to the heart by refusing to give her away. By the time she came to write her first novel (published in 1987) she had long been an exile from her native Blackburn.

Her writing brought her back to her roots. It shocks us with its descriptions of poverty and fears of alcohol-induced violence, but at the same time it puts us in touch with the sense of belonging that underscored everything Jo held true in her childhood, a sense largely missing today in a world where community is too often merely a function of the Internet.

Both sides of Jo’s childhood experience – the dark and the light – can be seen to be rooted in the extraordinary revolution that was enacted in Blackburn from the late eighteenth century, while the traumatic nature of her uprooting from the town in 1955 ensured that everything that has happened since continues to find imaginative reference in it.

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