Spital Boughton

Posted on 22/12/2020 by Bobby Seal

One of my favourite walks in Chester, before the lockdown, was to take the riverside path that follows the west bank of the Dee all the way from the city centre out to the village of Eccleston. Here there was once a ferry that took passengers over to the east bank of the river. The walk is about three miles in length and takes you through the Meadows, an expanse of river-mud enriched pastureland long used by the people of Chester for grazing cows and sheep.

Chester, 1810

Looking Across the Meadows to Chester from Gallows Hill, 1810

On the opposite bank to the Meadows, perched on top of a steep cliff, is the old village of Spital Boughton, now an upmarket Chester suburb. I had a friend once who knew the area well and often walked its streets and passageways, compulsively drawn by its accumulated images of past violence and suffering, the dark secrets beneath the façade of handsome Victorian villas: echoes of an earlier, less polite, era. Memories belonging to other souls would spool through her mind when she walked here, she said. Family memories, folk memories. Remembrance soaked into the very earth beneath her feet.

Chester, 2018

Looking Across the Meadows to Chester from Gallows Hill, 2018

 

Once a riverside village, Spital Boughton is now swallowed up by Chester. But, in its character, it is still not quite part of the city. It sits, barely one square mile of linear settlement, bounded on one side by the River Dee and on the other by an eastbound branch of Watling Street that once led, ultimately, to York. Ranulph, then Earl of Chester, founded a leper hospital here in the early twelfth century, choosing an elevated site just outside the city walls, a place now called The Mount.

The hospital, which was called Sigillum Infirmorum De Cestrie, had a chapel dedicated to St Giles and a graveyard for lepers and paupers, now abandoned. The hospital and graveyard were used once more during the plagues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before being finally closed down and destroyed during the Civil War. It’s memory lives on in the ‘spital’ place name.

You cannot see The Mount from the Meadows, but you can easily pinpoint its location, as it is marked by the soaring spire of St Paul’s church which rises high above the surrounding houses at the top of the bank.

The Meadows

Spital Boughton and St Paul’s from the Meadows

Next to the site of the hospital, on a road now called Barrel Well Hill, is the site of Chester’s Gallows Hill. No amount of name changing can remove its malign influence; perhaps it’s just my imagination, but I swear I can even feel it from the opposite bank. Countless of the city’s accused met their end here, their last view of this world being the wide sweep of the Dee and the Meadows beyond. Ellen Beach, Anne Osboston and Anne Thornton, three alleged witches were hung here in 1656, all of them pleading their innocence until the end. This was a time when old women who lived alone and considered a bit eccentric or young women who were deemed to be too independent-minded, were often scapegoated as witches. A shameful tradition carried on by some in our society today, people who try to blame refugees and migrants for our country’s ills.

There is a memorial here to John Plessington, a Catholic priest martyred by being hung, drawn and quartered on Gallows Hill in 1679. In the same place a Protestant clergyman, George March, was burnt at the stake in 1555. My friend, though not a believer, told me she once felt moved to pray on this spot for the souls of Plessington, Marsh, the three alleged witches and all the others executed here.  Requiesent in pace.

 

Picture Credits

  1. Chester: a Virtual Stroll Around the Walls
  2. Chester: a Virtual Stroll Around the Walls
  3. Chester: a Virtual Stroll Around the Walls
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Mind the Gap

Posted on 11/12/2020 by Bobby Seal

I was at a virtual book launch for Liz Lefroy’s I Buy a New Washer (and Other Moderate Acts of Independence) the other evening. Reading from her book, Liz stressed the importance of gaps and spaces in poetry:

The gaps between the words are pretty much the point and attraction of poetry.

Thinking about leaving gaps on the page reminded me of an incident from my childhood. The 1960s, of course, was a time of love and peace. It was also a time when teachers would regularly beat the children in their charge with canes, belts and gym shoes.

On May 17, 1972, ten thousand kids in London walked out of school to protest against the cane

The incident which came back into my mind was when the Head at my primary school caned me on both hands. My crime was ‘wasting paper’. Apparently, I left too many gaps when writing in my exercise book and needed a new one more often than was acceptable. That was back then, of course, and things were different. But, despite the campaigning of kids, parents and teachers, corporal punishment did not actually end in British state schools until 1986.

A couple of years ago I noticed my headteacher’s obituary. I read about what a wonderful and inspiring man he was and how much money he raised for charity. There was no

mention

of his

violent    dislike

 

for gaps

on the written

page.

 

Picture courtesy of Jacobin

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Psychogeographic Review’s Books of the Year

Posted on 10/12/2020 by Bobby Seal

I’ve read over a hundred books this year. Yes, I’m afraid I’m the kind of nerd who actually keeps an annual record of these things. I’ve also, during the lockdown, discovered the joy of the audio-book, books downloaded from my local library direct to my phone. I love being able to immerse myself in a book while I’m cooking, cleaning the house or working in the garden.

Most of the books I chose to read in 2020 were good, several were excellent and just a few were not so good. From those that were published this year, this extraordinary year, I have selected eight as my books of the year. These are the books I’ve particularly enjoyed and, for the purposes of this blog, are ones which I can just about squeeze into the ‘landscape’ category.

But what is landscape, particularly in this strangest of all years? For much of 2020 most of us have been restricted to exploring places close to home. But, turning this necessity into a virtue, I find it has provided the opportunity to delve deep into the landscape, rather than to wander it widely. Even in urban settings, traces of ancient forests are embedded in the ground beneath our feet; the past sits layered upon our landscapes.

Ali Smith - SummerAli Smith released the first of her quartet of ‘seasonal’ books in 2016 and concluded it this year with the publication of Summer. I never got round to reading any of them before this year. But that has allowed me to have the exhilarating experience of reading all four in a short space of time during the lockdown. Each is a stand-alone novel and it’s not essential that one reads them as a sequence. But while there are stylistic differences between each, all four share a collection of common themes: death, truth, art, consciousness, disappointment, failure, waste and nature. Summer revisits some of the characters Smith has already introduced us to, but it is is not so much a conclusion, as the completion of one cycle and the suggestion of the beginning of another.

In some ways Unofficial Britain is Gareth E Rees’s most                                          unrelentingly strange book. ItsGareth E Rees - Unofficial Britain language has none of the hallucinogenic flights of fancy of earlier works,  such as Marshland. This latest book’s prose is, in fact, resolutely straightforward and is interwoven with much of Rees’s backstory, including his early life. His subject matter, however, is anything but straightforward and he succeeds in summoning up a Gothic vision of modern Britain. A modern landscape that barely overlays a series of pasts:

What I learned on this journey is that everything changes and yet little does. Landscapes overlay landscapes, in ever-turning cycles.

 

Rebecca Solnit - Recollections of my Non-ExistenceRebecca Solnit is a writer, an activist and a campaigner. With Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) she established her credentials as a landscape writer, but a landscape writer who ignored the obvious and instead explored the margins, the gaps and the abandoned. Her theme of giving voice to the silent, to the despised, continued in her later works, such as Men Explain Things to Me (2014). Recollections of My Non-Existence takes as its starting point Solnit’s arrival in San Francisco in 1981 and covers her development as a writer and activist. Non-Existence, she explains, was often an option she chose when she was a young female writer without power, money or influence. It was a way of avoiding being subjected to outright aggression and hostility ‘since existence was so perilous’.

Melissa Harrison gave up a comfortable urban career to move              Melissa Harrison - The Stubborn Light of Things                                  from London to rural Suffolk to try to make her living as a full-time writer. The Stubborn Light of Things is based on the excellent podcast series of the same name and Harrison’s Nature Notebook column in The Times. She takes us through her growing awareness of the natural world all around her, initially in the city and then in her new home in the Suffolk countryside. Harrison writes with passion about the plants, wildlife, topography and weather she sees all about her and urges the reader to open their eyes and see it too.

But Harrison’s nature writing is not just about cosily urging us to ‘look at this’. With gentle insistence, she rails against humankind’s selfish destruction of other species: ‘In making the countryside work so hard for humans, its ability to support other creatures began to be lost.’

Gary Budden - London IncognitaThis is a book about London. Not the city the tourists see, but the dark underside of London. Gary Budden takes us through underpasses haunted by murdered women who do not yet know they are dead, tube station walkways with no way out and  sewers haunted by fatbergs, rat kings and worse.

There is London Cognita, and London Incognita, and I know where I belong. It won’t be long now.

London Incognita is hard to define: weird fiction, punk landscapism and alternative history all feature, but there is much more besides. In a series of linked short stories covering several decades Budden creates a guide book to city that is grimily familiar in its reality, but at the same time disturbingly strange in its imagining.

Francesca Wade - Square Haunting

Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting takes as its setting Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury. The area around the British Museum, later regarded as London’s bohemian enclave, was just another area of cheap rented accommodation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wade examines the lives of five radical feminist writers who made their home in the square: Dorothy L Sayers, Hilda Doolittle (HD), Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf.

The five were not a community of writers, they lived in the square at only marginally overlapping times and rarely did any of them mix with one another. However, Wade shows how Mecklenburgh Square played a significant part in the life of all of the women. It gave each, in her own way, a ‘room of one’s own’ *** in which to think, talk and write and a central London location for ‘street sauntering and square haunting’. ***

Jini Reddy - WanderlandJini Reddy’s Wanderland records the experiences and encounters of a woman of colour exploring the countryside on her own. Many of the people she meets are open and welcoming, while others look at her ‘a second longer than they need to’.

Describing her wanderings in Canada, the UK and elsewhere, Reddy shows an acute eye for nature and landscape. But this is not just nature writing, she delves deeply into the spiritual nature of the landscapes she wanders through.  But it is Reddy’s descriptions of the people she meets and her meditations on her own background and inner life  that demonstrate her abundant skills as a writer.

Helen Macdonald - Vesper Flights

I first encountered Helen Macdonald’s work when I read H is for Hawk some six years ago. In that book she described in stark detail the year she spent training a bird of prey while at the same time dealing with her feelings over the death of her father.

In this series of essays, Macdonald lovingly describes the variety and strangeness of the natural world she observes around her. She reserves the true poetry of her writing for her descriptions of the sight and sounds of birds and insects in flight. But underlying all of these short pieces is a profound sadness at the human-made destruction of habitats and the accelerating extinction of species.

***Both quotes from Virginia Woolf

Summer – Ali Smith (Penguin, 2020)

Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places – Gareth E Rees (Elliott & Thompson, 2020)

Recollections of My Non-Existence – Rebecca Solnit (Granta, 2020)

The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature Diary – Melissa Harrison (Faber & Faber, 2020)

London Incognita – Gary Budden (Dead Ink, 2020)

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars – Francesca Wade (Faber & Faber, 2020)

Wanderland: A Search for Magic in the Landscape – Jini Reddy (Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2020)

Vesper Flights – Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape, 2020)

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Lear’s Fractured Kingdom

Posted on 29/11/2020 by Bobby Seal

And who’s the fool who wears the crown?

Fearless – Pink Floyd, 1972 (Waters/Gilmour)

A legacy divided between two daughters, a third daughter disinherited. Manipulation and calculated flattery are rewarded while honesty and simple filial love is rejected. A kingdom divided against itself. An inheritance squandered.

Map of pre-Roman Britain

Shakespeare’s Lear, aging king of a mythical pre-Roman Britain, seeks to ensure his kingdom’s stable and secure future while living out his remaining days in quiet and honourable retirement. But instead he plunges the nation into chaos and conflict. Lear’s notionally medieval values of a stratified society, with a code of honour, duty and community, are values implicitly shared by his disinherited daughter, Cordelia. But they are usurped by the Machiavellian individualism of Goneril, Regan and Edmund, the ruthless illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester. For Shakespeare, Edmund:

…. embodies something vital which a final synthesis must reaffirm. But he makes an absolute claim which Shakespeare will not support. It is right for man to feel, as Edmund does, that society exists for man, not man for society. It is not right to assert the kind of man Edmund would erect to this supremacy.

Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature – John F Danby (1949)

Back in 1990 I saw a production of King Lear at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. It featured Richard Briers as Lear, Emma Thompson as the Fool and Kenneth Branagh playing Edgar, as well as directing.

Lear and Fool

Apart from the stellar cast, the most memorable thing about this production for me was the stage set. The floor of the stage appeared to be painted with a map of Britain. It was only as the action of the play progressed and the actors moved about the stage that we, the audience, came to realise that the map was not painted, but had been constructed from coloured sand. Presumably, it was freshly put together for each performance.

King Lear programme

As the actors strode, shuffled, paced, crawled and ran about the stage, the sand was gradually disturbed; at first becoming smudged and later completely churned up. The visual metaphor was clear: Lear and his daughters were unwittingly destroying the kingdom by their actions. They were, quite literally, breaking it up. The parallels with 2020 are, I fear, equally clear.

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Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places

Posted on 22/10/2020 by Bobby Seal

With this latest publication, and his three previous books (1), Gareth Rees is building up a body of work that represents an alternative vision of Britain: a vision that reveals the fantastical that lies beneath the mundane. Unofficial Britain takes us on a journey through this island and embraces the kind of things we encounter every day, motorways, council houses, multi-storey car park, pylons and disused factories, but below the surface he reveals a seething cauldron of the decidedly weird.

In some ways Unofficial Britain is Rees’s most unrelentingly strange book. Its language has none of the hallucinogenic flights of fancy of earlier works,  such as Marshland. This latest book’s prose is, in fact, resolutely straightforward and is interwoven with much of Rees’s backstory, including his early life. His subject matter, however, is anything but straightforward and he succeeds in summoning up a Gothic vision of modern Britain.

But this is not a Gothic of ruined castles, windswept moors, ill-fated heroines and tainted bloodlines. Rees’s Gothic is one rooted in the late twentieth century, an era whose time has come and gone but whose artefacts still dominate the landscape of present-day Britain. There is a folklore, a new mythology, Rees argues, that embraces tower blocks, motorways and the remnants of our heavy industries. These are narratives lodged in an analogue world of concrete and wires, an era fuelled by fossilised forests ripped from the earth.

Many of the places Rees visits comprise artefacts of the 1960s and 1970s, an era when Rees, and most of the contemporary influences he refers to in this book, were growing up. This is the world we were bequeathed, he suggests, and in many ways it is the one we live in still. In a nod perhaps towards Derrida, Rees also laments the world we were promised, but which never came to be. The 1960s vision of a modernism of technology, welfare and equality was strangled at birth, but it haunts us still, though it remains just a memory of a possibility.

Older folklore that grew up in our rural past, from a time when our very lives depended on the land and seasons, has somehow survived the industrial revolution and our transition into a largely urban society. This folklore survives in the form of ‘nursery rhymes, aphorisms, myths and legends of witches, boggarts, phantom dogs that roam the hills, and ghosts of grieving widows and long-dead soldiers’. But, Rees argues, it has been incorporated into new mythical narratives which were born in the industrial and post-industrial age:

What I learned on this journey is that everything changes and yet little does. Landscapes overlay landscapes, in ever-turning cycles. The flyover where a viaduct once stood. The Victorian workhouse that became a hospital. The steelworks on the site of a monastery. The burial cairn surrounded by a busy interchange. Motorway earthworks that rise alongside their Stone Age predecessors. The pretty bend on the river that became a dirty dockland then a ramshackle trading estate then an artist’s hub then an estate of luxury waterside high-rises. After each new manifestation replaces the old, it too becomes worn, decayed and saturated with nostalgia, to the point where some mourn its passing as much as others once lamented its coming. So the circle turns.

Unofficial Britain is a powerful and convincing contribution to this new mythology and should be required reading in every motorway service station coffee shop up and down this land. By way of full disclosure, I should also mention that a piece I wrote for the Unofficial Britain website about the Valley Works in Flintshire is featured in the book, together with subsequent conversations Gareth and I had about its history and a walk we both took around the perimeter of the disused works. This is the first time I have, knowingly, been a character in someone else’s book!

Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places by Gareth E Rees (Elliott & Thompson, 2020)

(1) Marshland (Influx Press, 2013); The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018); Car Park Life (Influx Press, 2019)

 

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A Figure Walks

Posted on 14/10/2020 by Bobby Seal

A figure walks behind you
Shadow walks behind you
Figure walks behind you
Shadow walks behind you

We have a local lockdown where I live which means we can’t leave the county borough without good reason. Fortunately for me, as a person who loves walking, we have lots of interesting places to wander near to home. I find walking not just a pleasure, but a therapeutic essential.

The first lockdown was a very mixed experience for me. On the one hand I work from home anyway, so I had no great changes in that regard. On the other I struggled because I couldn’t see friends and loved ones and neither could I do my voluntary work.

Then I got ill with a heart rhythm problem and, for several weeks, I couldn’t do very much at all. What with the lockdown, worries about other family members  and my own health issues I found myself spiralling downwards into a trough of anxiety and depression over the Summer.

I’m much, much better now: almost as fit as before I became ill, though I haven’t started running again yet. A big part of the healing process, particularly for my mental health, has been walking. I try to get out and walk every day, whatever the weather. Yesterday’s walk was just a couple of miles away from my home in town, but a world away in terms of the landscape I wandered through.

I had a job in the mid-1990s which occasionally required me to visit farms and speak to farmers. One legacy of that time is that I no longer eat meat. Another is that I take an interest in what farmers are growing in their fields. In the 1990s maize for cattle fodder was quite an unusual crop in the UK. Now it is much more widespread, as evidenced on my walk yesterday.

Away from the maize fields, and seemingly within every thicket and stand of trees, I came across a pond. Some a glassy sheet of black, others a carpet of green weed. As I stood gazing at one such pond  some words came into my head, the embryo of a story, perhaps:

It’s not what you see in the pond that you need to worry about, but it’s what follows you home when you turn and leave.

I turned the words over in my mind as I walked and almost managed to spook myself: what kind of Lovecraftian creature had my imagination summoned up? Nonsense of course, but I still felt compelled to take the odd furtive glance behind me as I walked. A song came into my head: A Figure Walks by Mark E Smith and The Fall from their Dragnet album:

And now tales of terror
Which my father told me
They never scared me
But not only is it the blind who cannot see
That figure behind you

And, as Smith puts it in his sleeve notes for the album:

Fiction breaks away from fact at the end i.e. it didn’t catch me, obviously (?)

 

A Figure Walks lyrics © The Bicycle Music Company

The Soil Association is concerned about the spread of maize and refers to it as ‘subsidised soil destruction’.

Mind: Coronavirus and Your Wellbeing

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4’33” at 5.33

Posted on 29/07/2020 by Bobby Seal

Recently I have become obsessed with John Cage’s composition 4’33”. I sit at the piano, with the lid closed, my daughter’s cello and bass guitar propped up beside me. Then, checking the timing on my phone, I start the piece. And listen. The sounds of silence. A beating heart within me. My breath being drawn in and whispered out. Outside, beyond the window, a world of clamouring silence.

John Cage

My obsession started when I realised the piece wasn’t just a joke. It was not some kind of avant-garde confidence trick: the composer’s new clothes. Most of all it was not about the performer, but it was all about the performance. The performer’s role is to start the piece and bring it to a close at the end of the allotted time.

But it is the world, the world of sound, that creates the performance. Always silent. Never silent. Always the same. Never the same. I find performing the piece to be both moving and unsettling, and strangely cathartic.

So at 5.33am this morning, drained but unable to sleep, I sat in my garden with my phone at the ready. I pressed record and silently asked the world to perform for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. This is my recording of the piece:

Turn the volume right up. What do you hear? Chirruping birds, cooing woodpigeons, blackbirds searching for worms. A furtive sip of tea. The flapping wings of a pigeon flying low overhead, and then a plane heading into Manchester airport. The distant hum of traffic. A world that is never silent. Even at this lonely hour.

 

Credits

4’33’ – John Cage (1952)

Picture – Erich Auerbach

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The Aerodrome

Posted on 22/07/2020 by Bobby Seal

Remember that we expect from you conduct of a quite different order from that of the mass of mankind. Your purpose – to escape the bondage of time, to obtain mastery over yourselves, and thus over your environment – must never waver… This discipline has one aim, the acquisition of power, and by power freedom.

The Aerodrome – Rex Warner (1941)

So what connects a Second World War airfield, a Cold War listening post, a sand and gravel quarry, a state of the art recording studio and the band, The Fall? All of these, some recent and others just echoes, artefacts and memories, are layered into a small area of the landscape on the edge of the village of Borras, near Wrexham.

Former RAF Wrexham , 2008

Walking along Borras Road and crossing into the adjoining fields, walking for as far as one can wander without trespassing into the still-operating quarry workings at Borras, there is very little sign of the former RAF Wrexham station. Yet this was at one time an important part of the air defences for the port of Liverpool during WW2, launching night-fighters to take on the Luftwaffe in the skies over the docks.

RAF Wrexham during WW2

Borras is a small village to the north-east of Wrexham. It is situated on a flat plateau which results in the land here being well-drained and dry even in wet weather, conditions that were ideal for a grass airstrip. The Royal Flying Corps first used Borras as a training station in 1917 and, with the onset of war in 1939, the Royal Airforce upgraded Borras to a fully-fledged RAF station with concrete runways, floodlights, a control tower and ground defences.

Control Tower 1965

The airfield was closed and mothballed in 1945 and in 1959 much of the site was sold to the United Gravel Company who already had extensive quarrying operations on adjoining land. The MoD retained a small parcel of land on Borras Road, however, and in 1962 built a hardened-concrete bunker to be manned by the Royal Observer Corps. Right up until 1992 and the collapse of the Soviet Union this bunker was used as an early warning listening post, part of the NATO defence network.

ROC Bunker

Overview of bunker

The airfield and most of the RAF infrastructure have long since disappeared under the huge mechanical diggers of United Gravel and its successor companies. However, archaeologists from the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) have had access to the site since 2008 and have turned up some interesting finds. These include pre-Saxon pottery, remnants of Iron Age metal working and evidence of a Neolithic settlement dating back some 4,000 years.

Shortly after the nuclear bunker was decommissioned in 1992 it was let to K-Klass, the 1990s dance music producers who used it as a makeshift recording studio and mixing suite. Rumour has it that they changed some of the internal décor to resemble that of the Hacienda in Manchester.

Standing at the locked gates of the bunker now, gazing through the metal fence which fronts onto Borras Road, the building gives away very little of its former or even its current life. The site comprises an anonymous concrete blockhouse with a pre-fabricated office to one side and a large radio mast to the rear. All of the interesting Cold War remnants are below the surface. The gallery in the former main control room has been removed, a false ceiling installed and it is now the main mixing room.

ROC Control Room

K-Klass have moved on and the bunker, now known as ROC2, is run by producer and former musician Steve Hywyn Jones as a top of the range recording facility, rehearsal room and photographic studio. Amongst the artists to record at ROC2 are Kidsmoke, Delta Radio Band and Catfish and the Bottlemen. Blue Orchids, the band formed in 1979 by ex-Fall members Martin Bramah and Una Baines, also recorded their 2019 album, The Magical Record of Blue Orchids here.

Studio/Rehearsal space

ROC2 Mixing Room

In typically left-field Fall fashion Magical Record is a ‘concept album’ of obscure US garage/psych covers.

Blue Orchids, Martin Bramah on wall

The one original track on the album is Addicted to the Day. It’s a song based on scraps of poetry by Mark E Smith that Martin Bramah recently found in a notebook from 1977 that Smith had borrowed from him. The lyrics are precognitively appropriate for a song recorded in bowels of a nuclear bunker:

That day I stumbled on that trapdoor

How could I have suspected my abysmal future?

A doom which has haunted me

And turned me into a wreck and a parody

Addicted to the day

Addicted to the day

The Day  …

Addicted to the Day –  Smith/ Bramah (2019)

 

Picture credits:

RAF Wrexham 2008 – Shamu 28

RAF Wrexham WW2 – Wikipedia

ROC pictures – Wrexham History

ROC2 studio shots – ROC2

Blue Orchids publicity shot – Blue Orchids

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Before The Fall

Posted on 08/07/2020 by Bobby Seal

All you daughters and sons

Who are sick of fancy music

We dig repetition

Repetition in the drums

And we’re never going to lose it

This is the three Rs

The three Rs:

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

Repetition – The Fall (Baines, Friel, Bramah, Smith, Burns)

The Buzzcocks were due to be top of the bill but they didn’t turn up, so a band called The Fall played two sets. The rumour going round the camp was that the Sex Pistols would play, but that was never really on. They were banned from most venues at that point. Instead we had Repetition. Twice.

Martin Bramah, Una Baines, Karl Burns, Mark E Smith and Tony Friel, 1977

Quite how I ended up on the Right to Work March from Liverpool to Blackpool in September 1977 I’m not sure. I wasn’t actually unemployed; I was between jobs, having just finished a temporary post as a landscape gardener and waiting to start another short contract as a survey assistant for the local council. That’s how it was for new graduates in 1977; ‘career’ jobs were hard to come by.

Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

Career Opportunities – The Clash (Strummer, Jones)

Neither was I a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, of whom the Right to Work Campaign was a front organisation. But several of my Chester friends were involved in organising the event and the prospect of walking to Blackpool to lobby the TUC for more action on unemployment sounded more interesting than another weekend in sleepy Chester, so I agreed to go along.

Right to Work March, September 1977

As it turned out I didn’t do an awful lot of walking that weekend. My friends Bobby K and Harry could both drive so the three of us were put in charge of driving one of several vans from one overnight stopover to the next: night one in Kirkby, night two in Wigan and the third night in Preston. We carried one of several large marquee tents in the van, as well as the odd injured or footsore marcher, driving from one campsite to the next. Once at that night’s campsite we rounded up anyone available to help erect the tent.

That first night we camped on a sports ground in the middle of a council estate in Kirkby, a Liverpool new town: overspilled and underfunded. The night’s entertainment had been arranged at the nearby Kirkby Suite, a Top Rank-style nightclub. I’d been into punk rock since the previous year and went with a group of friends hoping to see The Buzzcocks. Or maybe it would be the Pistols. Either way I’d never heard of The Fall.

Play scheme at Kirkby, 1977

The opening act was Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds – I knew the name but had never heard any of their music. Frankly, they weren’t very good, although I thought the guitarist was OK. Many years later I found out that he was Vini Reilly, who left the Nosebleeds and formed the much better-known Durutti Column in 1978. He (and Ed Banger, who also quit) were replaced by a pre-Smiths Morrissey and Billy Duffy, of The Cult fame.

The Fall performing in 1977

The Fall didn’t look like a punk band, in fact they didn’t look like any kind of a band. Their image was completely anti-fashion and their general vibe was definitely not rock and roll. The musicians ambled onto the stage, played their set with no attempt to engage with the audience and then slunk off again. Then they did the same thing again for the second set.

The exception was the singer, whom I later found out was called Mark E Smith. He had a definite stage presence and seemed to create a sense of danger just by his body language. Smith wore a brown satin shirt and dark trousers over his slim, tall frame. It was obviously his gig shirt in those days, as I’ve seen it in pictures of other performances from 1977 and 1978. His mood seemed to be poised between amusement and aggression. The sound was poor and I couldn’t discern most of the lyrics. But that didn’t matter, what struck me that night and the thing that has stayed with me for over 40 years as a Fall fan, was that Smith sang the words of his songs like he really meant them. And the man’s lyrics, his poetics, are still something completely unique in rock music:

None
No recipes
It was like a see-saw
No
It was like an up and down
Bye bye
Mother, Sister
Mother, Sister
Why did you put your head in?

Mother-Sister! – The Fall (Smith, Baines)

‘Why does the singer add that sound at the end of every line?’ Mike commented between the two sets. ‘You know what I mean? It’s like: “I was walking down the street-ah”. It’s like a working men’s club singer thing.’

I didn’t know the answer then and I still don’t know it now. But I do know that many of The Fall’s early gigs were in working men’s clubs and that Smith’s lyrics and his vocal delivery were the one consistent factor in a Fall canon of 31 studio albums and a revolving door of more than 50 Fall musicians.

I don’t have a set list for that night in Kirkby, though most of the material would have been early versions of the songs later released on The Fall’s first album, Live at the Witch Trials. From reviews of other gigs during this period, as recorded on the excellent thefall.org website, it is likely that the set that would have comprised something like:

Psycho Mafia / Last Orders / Repetition / Dresden Dolls / Hey Fascist / Frightened / Industrial Estate / Stepping Out / Bingo Master’s Breakout / Oh! Brother / Cop It / Futures and Pasts / Louie Louie

The only song I really remember from my first Fall gig is Repetition, probably because they played it twice. Naturally.

The audience at Kirkby were mainly teenage punks who had been looking forward to seeing the Buzzcocks, or maybe even the Sex Pistols if they believed the wilder rumours. Instead they got a double helping of The Fall. Although The Fall operated within a punk ethic, they were never a punk band in terms of the music, so the audience were left both bemused and confused. Mike certainly didn’t like them-ah. But another friend, Richie, declared himself a fan that evening, as did I. Richie was one of the SWP Jesuits, but was a lovely guy. I lost touch with him soon after but I like to think he had a long and fruitful relationship with the band and their music.

The Fall at Buckley Tivoli, November 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been a Fall fan since that night and saw them many times, the last being in Buckley in November 2015. Mark E Smith died in January 2018 and with him the life of the band ended too. But we are left with all that music, and all those lyrics.

We dig it, we dig it,
We dig it, we dig it
Repetition, repetition, repetition
There is no hesitation.

Credits

The Fall publicity shot, 1977 – Kevin McMahon

Right to Work March, 1977 – Joe Neary

Kirkby, 1977 – Neil Macdonald

The Fall performing, 1977 – Kevin Cummins

The Fall at Buckley Tivoli, 2015 – Brent Jones Photography

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May Sinclair at Gresford

Posted on 30/05/2020 by Bobby Seal

Either the operation or the pain, going on and on, stabbing with sharper and sharper knives; cutting in deeper; all their care, the antiseptics, the restoratives, dragging it out, giving it more time to torture her.

May Sinclair – Life and Death of Harriett Frean

Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair, known as May Sinclair, was born in Rock Ferry, Wirral in 1863. Her family lived in a house called Thorncote in the prosperous Rock Park suburb and she spent the first seven years of her life at this address. May Sinclair was a feminist, a successful author and a key figure in the early modernist movement. There has been something of a resurgence of interest in her work in the last few years but she is perhaps still best known for coining the phrase ‘stream of consciousness writing’ when reviewing the work of her friend, Dorothy Richardson.

The Sinclair family lived in a large house with an extensive garden and were attended by a number of servants. Due to a series of unwise investments, May Sinclair’s father, William, lost most of his money and the family were forced to leave Rock Park. May was just seven-years old at the time.

Gresford Pond

Gresford Village Lake from High Street

 

For the next eleven years, until William’s alcohol-related death, the family led a nomadic life before settling in the village of Gresford, near Wrexham. The village is just three miles from my home: a pleasant walk across the fields, sometimes taking in one of my favourite pubs on the way. Gresford is infamous for the colliery disaster of 1934 in which 266 men and boys died as a result of lax safety procedures. The heart of the village, however, is much older than the nineteenth-century expansion which came with the discovery of coal and is listed in the Domesday book as ‘Gretford’ (Old English græs and ford ‘grassy ford’). A number of Roman artefacts have been unearthed around the village suggesting a possible Roman settlement from nearby Deva (Chester).

All Saints Gresford

All Saints Church

We know very little about May Sinclair’s everyday life during the eight years or so she lived in Gresford. But what we do know is that this was a period when May’s career as a writer began to take off, but it was also a time marked by several family tragedies. It is likely too that the family attended services at All Saints parish church in the centre of the village as it is recorded from their time in Rock Park that they were Anglicans and regular churchgoers and that May’s mother, Amelia, was particularly devout. Her faith, however, was inflexible and austere. May later wrote that the atmosphere her mother created in the family home was one of ‘cold, bitter, narrow tyranny’.

All Saints

Interior of Church

While in Gresford May continued her private studies of philosophy and began, tentatively at first, to write poetry. In 1886, when she was aged 23, May Sinclair’s first collection of poems, Nakiketas and Other Poems, was published. To be taken seriously by the male literary establishment, she published the collection under the pseudonym ‘Julian Sinclair’. The longest poem, Helen, focuses on a loveless marriage and Helen’s determination, in a society where she had no other options, to rise above the casual cruelty of her husband, Emile:

                              for I know
That love is not the whole of a woman’s life,
Nor yet of man’s, but there are higher things-
Devotion-honour-faith-self-sacrifice.

Nakiketas and Other Poems is a sombre and serious work and foreshadows the tragedies which befell May and her family during their remaining years in Gresford. In 1887 her brother Harold died at the age of just 29. Then, in 1889, one of her remaining three brothers, Frank, died while serving with the Royal Artillery. I manged to locate his probate record (not settled until 1901) which shows that he left effects to the value of £100 to May. Both brothers suffered with a congenital heart defect and are buried together in the churchyard of All Saints Gresford.

Churchyard

Churchyard

Churchyard

Churchyard

Sinclair Grave

Sinclair Grave

 

In 1890 May Sinclair, her mother and her brother Reginald left Gresford for the final time. I have not been to locate the address in Gresford where May and her family lived. Tantalisingly, they arrived just after the 1881 census and left ahead of that which took place in 1891. May Sinclair’s time in Gresford is marked by a single volume of poetry and the memorial stone to two of her brothers.

 

 

I am indebted to Suzanne Raitt and her excellent biography ‘May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian’ for much of the biographical detail used in this article

I also recommend the website of the May Sinclair Society for further information, research and discussion on May Sinclair and her work

Image of Harold Sinclair monument (grave 377409) courtesy of the Gravestone Photographic Resource (GPR)

All other images ©Bobby Seal

 

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