The Full English, page 17
Today, as well as the shifting nomenclature of the Playhouse (a fading wall sign still bills it as The Priestley), there’s the statue outside the Media Museum. But that’s about it. Bradford has two stations. One is named Forster Square after W E Forster, the Liberal statesman who advocated the shooting of Irish nationalists. The other is Bradford Interchange. Interchange is an unlovely word, I think you’ll agree, and I wonder if anyone has ever suggested Bradford Priestley as an improvement. As it is, there is a drawing of him on the wall, partly obscured by a vending machine full of Kit Kats and Diet Tango.
The one place you would surely expect to do Priestley proud is his birthplace. So, having eschewed Cona’s blackened sea bream in favour of a tactical sausage roll, I trudge up the hill out of town to find out. That is, once I’ve established exactly where he was born. Many scholars and biographers have Priestley down as entering the world at 5 Saltburn Place. It’s an understandable error since he grew up here, wrote a lot about it and never mentioned his actual birthplace. But that is actually a few streets away in Mannheim Road. Both are in Manningham, the area of Bradford that most symbolises the change in this polyglot, fractious, boom and bust city.
Manningham, its streets and people, have changed out of all recognition since Priestley’s day. The signs are everywhere. There are obvious ones like the Muslim Headstone Company and the Madrassah School, but also subtler signifiers. There’s a street called Sylhet Close named after the great city of north-east Bangladesh and many of the cars that pass me are from female-only driving schools: Rose Royce, Pass Girls, Pretty Angels. In 1959, two Pakistani grocery stores opened in Bradford catering for workers from the Indian subcontinent. Ten years later, there were nearly 200 Pakistani businesses in Bradford. Now, it’s thousands. In and out of every Manningham doorway families go to and fro, carrying bottled water and crates of okra, phone chargers and bags of rice. Three quarters of Manningham is now of South Asian heritage, a change that has been exciting and dynamic as well as complicated and fraught. Priestley’s head would have swum at this new and lively scene, the scents, the colours, the signs like the one in the phone shop that reads ‘Back in 10 mints, Prayer Time.’ But he would have felt there was no barrier to the new arrivals becoming citizens of England, with provisos. ‘Priestley argued in favour of a civic rather than ethnic idea of Englishness,’ former chairman of the Priestley Society Ken Smith told the Guardian in 2009. ‘Priestley assumed that anyone who came here would buy into certain things – Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on … He had not envisaged that there would be people who would look beyond these shores for their identity, and he would have had great difficulty grappling with the notion that some people’s identity would be bound up in religion.’
Big changes are rarely smooth ones. Down the road in Burnley, the town where the Communist Manifesto was first translated into English, and which boycotted Southern cotton during the American Civil War and opposed the Napoleonic wars, racist groups made inroads into town councils in the 90s and 00s. There was even a BNP councillor (‘a glamorous 35-year-old grandmother’ as The Times styled her) in genteel Haworth, heart of Brontëland and a sepia Hovis ad vision of Albion. Once hotbeds of radicalism and strongholds of socialism, town after town in what became known as the Red Wall switched their allegiance to varying strands of Conservatism, some darker than others.
In Manningham, there had been a suspicious, sullen relationship between Asian youths and law enforcement for years, stoked by heavy-handed policing and far-right provocations that eventually flared into the riots of 2001. Pubs burned, people were stabbed, thousands of youths waged nightly pitched battles with the police. As ever, specific causality was hard to pinpoint in a welter of accusation and denial on every side. But when Wuthering Heights votes fascist, all is clearly not well.
After the unrest in Manningham the right-wing media confected tales about ‘no-go’ areas where white citizens dare not venture, as it always does in relation to partially black or brown districts. This rabid stuff, though largely bunkum, proves nonetheless dispiritingly resilient. While I was in town, a book called Among the Mosques by the Muslim writer Ed Husain, former pupil of right-wing ‘thinker’ Roger Scruton, raised the issue again, leading to debates in the local press. And once again, Bradfordians from all sections of the community, had to tell the truth firmly. There weren’t ‘no-go’ areas in Bradford and claiming there were was massively unhelpful.
Heading up Toller Lane, apparently the intimidating heart of a ‘no-go area’, walking through these few tight, compacted streets of Manningham, I did at times feel out of place and uncomfortable. But this was much more to do with the cut of my clothes than the colour of my skin. Some of these streets are poor. Not just working class but grindingly, ruinously poor – much poorer than my old council estate in Wigan. Some of these hidden corners of Bradford have the distinct, sour whiff of desperation and neglect; broken windows, filthy lace curtains, ragged settees getting rained on in overgrown gardens. The divide here feels as much about class as race, as rooted in economics as ethnicity.
But that’s a white man writing. Perhaps everything is about ethnicity. On the corner of Keighley Road and Manningham Lane, behind the National Bank of Pakistan, I catch a glimpse of a little lad of about ten tossing a few tentative leg breaks at a wonky wicket aerosoled on a shuttered garage. You’ll see this scene down backstreets and across parks all over Bradford, all over Yorkshire in fact. This is cricket country, where some take it seriously, and others are fanatics. Priestley wrote in 1973 ‘in spite of recent jazzed up one day matches cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure some warm sunny days and an understanding of its finer points.’ We can guess what he might have made of the ‘jazzed-up’ hoopla of 20/20 or The Hundred, of flashy tracksuits and glaring floodlights. But what would he have made of the scandal and outrage that was gripping Yorkshire as I watched that young lad practising his bowling, dreaming of Headingley?
Azeem Rafiq probably honed his offspin on a garage wall in Barnsley. Born in Pakistan but raised in ‘Tarn’, as it’s known locally, he was a prodigious young cricketing talent, captaining both the England under-15 and under-19 sides, leading the latter to the 2010 World Cup and marshalling future big names like Joe Root and Ben Stokes. In 2012, he became the youngest man to captain a Yorkshire side and the first person of Asian origin to do so. But for various reasons, some now infamous, his cricket career first stalled, then ended. In 2018, his son was stillborn and Rafiq took compassionate leave, during which Yorkshire ended his contract. After spells in Pakistan and Derbyshire, he turned his back on the game to start his own catering business, another of elite sport’s ‘nearly’ men.
Rafiq now runs a chip shop and took time out from frying to give a seismic interview to Wisden in August 2020. He revealed the racism he’d encountered at Headingley, talking of a dressing room culture where abuse from senior players was routine, where the P-word was bandied about freely, and where Asian players were told ‘there were too many of them.’ An enquiry was launched, its findings revealed but not published. Seven of Rafiq’s forty-three claims were upheld, but no action would be taken. Racist abuse was dismissed as the regular rough and tumble of dressing rooms, the club’s behaviour merely ‘inappropriate’ and there was no ‘proof’ of institutional racism. No action was to be taken.
Not by Yorkshire Cricket Club anyway. Others saw it differently. Most British media were united in condemnation. Sponsors deserted the club in droves. Michael Vaughan, former England cricket captain and high-profile media personality, came forward to deny the ‘too many of them’ remark, while Gary Ballance admitted using racist and offensive language to his teammate while trying to shrug it off as ‘friendly banter’ between ‘best mates’. Eventually senior executive resignations followed, as well as a House of Commons select committee at which Rafiq spoke with a quiet anger that led to inescapable conclusions and very many questions.
Questions like, in a county with towns and cities full of thousands of cricket-mad Asians, why were there no brown faces in the corridors of power at Headingley? In a county whose back streets, school yards and sports grounds were crammed with those cricket-mad Asian kids playing over after over, how could it be that of Yorkshire’s twenty-nine squad players, only one came from a non-white background. Awkward questions for Yorkshire Cricket Club, not helped when a leaked letter from club staff, clearly annoyed at the credence given to Rafiq, said that he was a ‘problematic’ presence in the dressing room and did not share ‘White Rose values’.
What exactly were ‘White Rose values’? The obvious answer was not very edifying. But where was the root of this problem? Was it Yorkshire Cricket Club, an institution long regarded as prehistoric in outlook by some? Was it Yorkshire as a county? Or was it some national shame. Was it England? The sportswriter Jonathan Liew put it well in the Guardian: ‘“The culture of Yorkshire is stuck in the past,” declared Roger Hutton, the outgoing chairman of Yorkshire. But he was wrong. It’s stuck in the present.’
I continue my journey to JBP’s birthplace on through Lister Park. He would come to this large handsome park as a boy and young man in search of fun. ‘We used to go to Lister Park every Wednesday and Saturday throughout the summer and listen to the military band concerts … It was rather a nice scene, there, towards dusk, with the illuminated bandstand, the red uniforms, the brass instruments gleaming, smoke rising from thousands of pipes and cigarettes.’ Young Bradford still convenes here, enjoying the dance of adolescence whose steps will never come again; sizing each other up, wary as young horses, giggling and flirting. This afternoon there’s culture as well in the shape of events from the Bradford Literature Festival. There was much to divert here; some noisy, energetic bhangra from Punjabi Roots Academy, the Leeds Dance Academy, someone on stilts, a circus skills workshop where small children are being encouraged to juggle and ride unicycles. It’s all very lively and jolly. But when a man dressed as a pirate being pulled along in a small cart begins to sing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’ through a megaphone, I know it is time for me to go.
Manningham is still home to Bradford’s oldest Jewish population. The synagogue on Bowland Street is a Grade II listed Moorish revival building that may be the best example of an ‘Orientalist’ synagogue in Britain, and though the Jewish community here has dwindled, they still come here for Shabbat and Passover and Friday night dinner. Here was where the men who built Bradford’s economy worshipped with their families. The names of the streets around here reflect their roots; Heidelberg Road, Bonn Place and finally Mannheim Road, where Priestley was born on 13 September 1894.
During Priestley’s childhood, 34 Mannheim Road was the modest but respectable home of Priestley’s father, a stern but socialistic teacher, his new wife Amy (Priestley’s mother Emma, a mill girl, died when he was two), JB and step-sister Winifred. Now it is all rather sad. The houses on Mannheim Road are all good solid Bradford stone, but his birthplace looked abandoned to my eyes. In the garden were a few broken planks and a mattress and, most forlorn of all, a burst Mitre football on the small scrubby front patio. When an Independent journalist visited in 1997, they noted that ‘there was nothing to indicate that Bradford’s most famous literary son had been born there, and the house was for sale at a modest asking price of £24,000.’ There is at least a plaque now, erected not by the council but by the Priestley Society. But even this could do with a polish.
5 Saltburn Place, just around the corner, where Priestley grew up feels distinctly more prosperous than the street of his birth. Outside there’s another plaque (‘J B Priestley, Author and Playwright, lived here’) and a car, which at least suggests the house is lived in. Discretely mooching, I glance up at the window where Priestley had slept as a lad and first ventured into prose, as he recalled in the TV documentary about his home town. ‘Up there … in the attic of No. 5, I first began writing. I turned it into a bed-sitting room, bought some orange boxes, stained them and used them as bookcases and there I wrote every night … Really, I didn’t write very much about Bradford. I can remember a poem I wrote about Atlantis which was about as far away as I could get from Bradford in my imagination.’ He was first accepted into print in 1913 and began to write for the Bradford Pioneer, a socialist weekly where he developed a chatty column called Round the Hearth, at eighteen. He wasn’t paid but he did get free tickets for plays and shows, still very much the modus operandi of many a freelancer today. All up there, in that little room, the typewriter on his knee, the orange box bookcase lit by the flickering little gas fire.
My curiosity satisfied, I take a bus back down the hill and into the city centre. At the bottom of Westgate, a group of young Pentecostal types in goth black or camouflage gear are crying and wailing and rolling around in what appears to be some kind of religious fervour, inspiring the local Special Brew drinkers to do the same. The Asian proprietor of the mobile phone shop stands in the doorway and looks on bemused. Loud and presumably football-related chanting emanates from the darkened, unappealing interior of the Rabbit Hole pub. Outside a neon ticker reads ‘No tracksuits. No joggers. No sports shorts.’
At Bradford Interchange I pass by Priestley’s painted image again. For several years another station had been promised and planned under the government’s HS2 rail update, part of the Northern Powerhouse ‘initiative’ of the Cameron/Osborne years. As late as March 2021, this new station, digitally rendered and smoothly futuristic, was still being trumpeted on various websites. But whether they might name it after JBP, as rumoured, became abruptly moot when Boris Johnson pulled the plug on most of the long-promised rail improvements in what looked very like, even to his recent converts up here, a dismissive two fingers waved from an Old Etonian in the general direction of the North. Up here, then, it would still take about twenty minutes to get to Leeds; two minutes longer than in 1910. The Edwardian traveller from Bradford could get to Wakefield by train in half an hour. In 2022 it was forty-eight minutes. England’s seventh biggest city is more poorly served by rail in the age of the internet than it was in the age of steam. Some powerhouse.
2
Fortunately, Halifax is just seven miles and one stop away, so you can get there in eight blistering minutes. It’s worth the trip. Priestley was billeted here, among ‘thickets of mill chimneys,’ as he put it, before he was sent away to Flanders in the First World War aged just twenty. Halifax is known primarily I think for the truly extraordinary Piece Hall. Built in 1779 as a textile hall, a stunning palazzo of three neo-classical storeys frames a dazzling open piazza where fabric was once sold. Today, it’s the jewel in the crown of a resurgent town that has been called ‘the Shoreditch of the North’. This is bunkum of course. If East London were a hundred times more lovely, it might try and pass itself off as ‘the Halifax of the South.’ But it would be a stretch.
This autumn week in the West Riding, the piazza is playing host to three bands I know and love – New Order, Richard Hawley and Manic Street Preachers – so of course I am here most nights, among ebullient Yorkshire crowds reacquainting themselves with the simple collective pleasure of going out. As James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers remarks as he takes to the stage and gazes out across the Piece Hall’s magnificent colonnaded quadrangle with genuine wonder: ‘Who knew there was a piece of Florence in Halifax?’ And as the sun drops behind the roofs of Halifax, Richard Hawley plays his anthemic and uplifting song ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ and there are real tears in some steely Yorkshire eyes, and at least one Lancastrian pair.
According to Clyde Binfield, historian at Sheffield University, Huddersfield is ‘a colder processional city, a foretaste of Edinburgh. The builders may have been hard men but they had a growing sense of responsibility to their surroundings.’ A foretaste of Edinburgh may be overegging it, but local Twitter correspondent Bob Melling says: ‘I think the processional probably means the long, wide Buxton Road/New Street/John William/St John’s axis. Huddersfield does vistas. Also, I reckon before the ring road, the long straight of New North Road passing the mansions, colleges and chapels of the rich, all the way into the heart of the town must have been quite something.’ Perhaps, but Priestley was not impressed – at least not by its looks. Huddersfield, he wrote, ‘is not a handsome town but yet is famous in these parts for the intelligence and independence of its citizens.’
Here he was bang on. They are smart folk here. From its world-famous Contemporary Music Festival to its thriving poetry scene, Huddersfield is a town rightly proud of its vibrant cultural mix. I go to the Contemporary Music Festival every year and love this week-long celebration of the most challenging, exciting, most outlandish classical music. Founded in 1978 as a weekend event with a budget of £3,000, the instigator was Richard Steinitz, a lecturer at the local university who charmed the biggest and most respected names in the contemporary classical music firmament to come to darkest, coldest Yorkshire in November. We shouldn’t overstate this. Huddersfield is not Alaska or Greenland. But if all this squeaking and crashing, bleeping and keening and raging and tintinnabulating were going on in long-haired, dope-smoking Amsterdam or ever-so-slightly-pleased-with-itself, paleo-dieting bohemian New York, it would be completely expected – and therefore also a little ‘meh’.
It throws up some delicious juxtapositions too, in this town known for rugby league and Harold Wilson. There is a justly celebrated picture of three titans of modern music Pierre Boulez, John Cage and Olivier Messiaen enjoying a deep pan American Hot in the Pizza Hut on the Wakefield Road. Graham McKenzie, the saturnine Glaswegian who runs the festival, told Radio 3’s Kate Molleson: ‘We went to that Pizza Hut years later and tried to get them to put up a plaque. They asked head office who said “no”. Nobody had a clue who they were.’ The people who come every November to HCMF certainly know who they are. ‘It isn’t remote or random or provincial for them,’ says McKenzie of the audience, nearly half of whom come from within an hour of Huddersfield. ‘And if it’s dark, wet, cold, a bit shit, well that’s perfect for the festival. If I programme five concerts per day, I know I’ll get my audience coming to all five of those concerts. Because the alternatives? There aren’t many.’
