A global financial crisis has woken us up to the benefits of mutual and co-operative business ownership. Converted building societies have found their plc status no protection against poor management and the drying up of international credit. Those remaining mutual, partly shielded by their structure, maybe dull and safe but with global banking in meltdown a dull and safe place is the best place to keep your money.
For some the Co-op was as an anachronism. Politicians paid tribute to its past, to Robert Owen, the Rochdale Pioneers or in Scotland the Fenwick Weavers, implying it had no future. Patronising the sector with warm words when asking for support (or an extension to the overdraft) but privately thinking there was no place in the modern world of shareholder capitalism for a business owned by its customers.
For them the news of the Co-operative Group take over of Somerfield, putting it back amongst the big boys in the retail sector, must seem like seeing Lazarus. Observers of the co-op scene know better, they may not be widely known but the Co-op has in the recent past benefited from some excellent leadership and their efforts are now paying off.
The renaissance began when the Co-op Bank was re-branded as the ethical bank. Its success surprised everyone, including many in the co-op movement, giving confidence, that after years of decline, there was nothing intrinsically uncompetitive about the co-op model.
Society mergers, mostly from weakness, looked to outsiders like the co-op was closing down and in some places it was. Quietly however from dozens of small societies the co-op was forming a new leaner and more effective organisation.
Then last year came the merger that turned the tide. The marriage of the Co-op Group and United Co-operatives, a union from strength rather than weakness meant that at last the Co-op had the critical mass to grow.
Despite the huge challenges of this merger the process of improving the customer experience went on, creating better products, with an emphasis on ethical and fair-trade products, and better stores. Behind the scenes too new IT and logistics systems helped increase sales.
Those new IT systems have enabled the Co-op to bring back the “Divi” in a meaningful way – paying out over £38 million to members this year.
Mergers are no panacea – like some trade union mergers - on paper the new organisation should be as big as the two organisations added together but somehow they end up smaller. This merger was different; the new Group has in the words of CEO Peter Marks the “best opportunity for 50 years to move forward”.
The increased buying power the Somerfield merger will bring will make the whole co-op retail sector more competitive and put an end to some of those Co-op deserts. It will not be easy to create a democratic structure for the new organisation as the new merged Group is only just coming together. But managing growth is far better than managing decline.
At this years Co-op Congress, Kitty Usher Economic Secretary to the Treasury, promised, at long last, a new legal framework to help this modernisation continue. The FSA who have responsibility for regulating the Co-op and mutual sector (you may think that currently they have more pressing responsibilities) have said “it will enable the movement to enjoy the legislative framework it deserves; one fit for this century, rather than the nineteenth.”
With immense patience former Labour MEP Pauline Green and her colleagues at Co-operatives UK have done a good job in cajoling and educating the FSA to take, a sector of some 5000 businesses employing a quarter of a million people, seriously. But a healthy co-op sector is important not just to the one in five of us that have a share in a Co-op.
The new General Secretary of the Co-op Party, Michael Stevenson, has a good story to tell - how by rediscovering its ethical values and democratic principles the co-operative sector has been able to rebuild its business. Could this be a lesson for the Labour Party and the Government?
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
Thursday, 12 June 2008
The Rise and Fall of Cheap Oil
“Above the fields of Leicestershire
On arches we were borne
And the thunder of the railway drowned
The thunder of the Quorn:
And silver shone the steeples out
Above the barren boughs;
Colts in a paddock ran from us
But not the solid cows:
And quite where Rugby Central is
Does only Rugby know.”
A journey on the old Great Central Railway described by John Betjeman. Many Rugbians today could not find Rugby Central, all that remains is a bump on a bridleway in a disused railway cutting, a long green finger running through the heart of the town, a pleasant place to walk the dog away from the noise of the traffic.
Poems like this helped create that idea that the great days of rail are behind us, killed off by Dr Beeching. Now we know the real killer was cheap oil. Beeching took the flack for closing one third of the rail network and some 2000 stations but he was appointed to head British Rail by, Conservative Transport Minister, Ernest Marples.
Marples made his fortune from the firm he help found, Marples, Ridgway and Partners, road builders (contractors indeed on the M1) he divested himself of his shares on becoming Transport Minister to avoid any conflict of interests – to his wife.
His success was based upon the same cheap oil that did for the railways. At that time most of us would, given the lower costs, greater flexibility and the new found reliability of road transport, built the M1, all those other ‘M’s and closed miles of railways.
Today we are living with the consequences of almost a century’s worth of location decisions based on cheap oil. From the ‘ribbon development’ in the 30’s, encouraged perhaps by that wonderful Shell advertising to the 60’s when the car became accessible to the masses as a symbol of personal freedom. The newly built motorways and trunk roads enabled those in search of the mock-Tudor idyll to leap frog the green belt and for businesses and shops to escape the confines of the cities.
This great dispersal shrank the cities, new towns grew in once green fields, but the new suburbs and towns completely dependent on road transport generated the flip side of dispersal - congestion.
The problem is low population density makes public transport systems uneconomic. Despite the fact that around one third of the population have no access to a car to bring together sufficient people for a football match, a retail centre or even most workplaces requires them to drive. They have little choice - even to the point that this congestion is killing the economy. This new geography locks us into in a high movement high cost society.
To get some idea of the costs involved last year the Seven West Midlands Metropolitan Councils and Centro (the passenger transport authority) sent the Government their wish list for transport improvements it had a £4.6 billion price tag.
This bill, coming in at about half the cost of the complete modernisation of the West Coast Mainline, was far from ambitious, the minimum to keep the metropolitan heart of the region moving they said. The fact the whole region gets around £90 million a year for major transport projects makes it clear that this type of development is unaffordable. This is one conurbation. Imagine the price tag for the whole country.
These numbers made me a convert to road pricing. However having thought longer about it I now realise that of itself road pricing is not enough. The fact is we have fanciful ideas based on that cheap oil about the degree of mobility we can sustain.
It seems those oil futures speculators are not fools – they know we are hopelessly addicted to oil.
When the prices shot up what did the PM, Gordon Brown say? Sell your 4x4, stop flying, or walk to the shops? No he blamed OPEC and demanded more oil from the North Sea.
Now it is not just North Sea oil that is running out. It seems the Greens are right we do not take energy conservation seriously.
Despite the recent huge hike in oil prices the cost of transport is still too low - we have to move to a low movement low cost society and we may only have twenty years to do it.
I am not an extreme Green I believe we have to do this for economic not environmental reasons. We have sold off all our once state owned energy assets making us totally dependent on international markets for our energy. We are a small country with low productivity and a weakening economy we will not be able to afford these ever shrinking resources. The US is already complaining to China and India about there subsidising of their domestic fuel prices.
The economic forces that have enabled long distance travel and long supply chains will soon go into reverse. Many current business models are unsustainable as oil prices grow. No wonder food prices are up. The ludicrously expensive, in transport terms, cost of trucking and shipping, clothes and foodstuffs over vast distances is already becoming uneconomic. Some food production and manufacturing will have to be repatriated.
Planning processes that built the motorways and new towns will now have to plan to recentralise the population and relocalise economic activity. People will simply have to live a great deal closer to schools, shops and work places. (And HM Government please note, GP sugeries and post offices).
As costs escalate some will want to give up their cars and some will be forced too - we have to make it easy for them. There is some truth that with the IT revolution we will be travelling less. But IT also generates new traffic and helps sustain complex long distance supply chains. Despite the constantly threatened immanent arrival of the electric or hydrogen powered car don’t hold your breath there is no technological fix on the horizon.
To return out of town shopping centres and housing to farmland will not be easy and there will be considerable expense in creating a transport infrastructure independent of oil. Completing the electrification of our railways and filling in those Beeching gaps with light rail and trams will not come cheap. The win is of a network that is greener and that will do wonders for our balance of payments.
So how are we to pay for this transport revolution?
So called green taxes have so far not noticeably change behaviour and any revenue has not been spent on alternative sustainable solutions. The problem has always been the Treasury. Its need for the ‘fix’ of the revenue they generate means it never sets tax at levels that really change behaviour.
These taxes have to be a lot higher. Today the price mechanism is beginning to change behaviour but current taxes still have only a very marginal impact on consumers after all since 2005 taxes on road transport have actually fallen.
So where is the money to come from?
The fact that the recent improvements to our rail network are to be paid for by passengers is a clear sign. The user is going to have to pay. We must look again at road pricing. We need a hypothecated tax on road usage for infrastructure improvements. This can be done - we have the technology we should just get on with it.
The challenge is to visibly improve and make cheaper public transport, especially trains and trams, whilst choking off the demand for movement.
It would be unfair to many people who cannot afford to live near where they work to further punish them by increasing what they see as their already excessive transport costs without giving them a real choice.
Unplanned oil price increases have done massive damage before. They cause all kinds of social and economic problems. But this is not a short term problem we can get over but a permanent change.
Effective road pricing can generate a revenue stream to help fund the changes we have to make. Those affluent enough to continue to drive can subsidise those who use public transport. And surely we can come up with varying the charges for essential deliveries or essential workers.
There is less time than we think. We must plan out the need for movement by road. Choosing to carry on as if nothing is happening is foolish in the extreme.
Transport costs are an important component of economic development one of Betjemans other great railway images was that of Metroland an entire landscape enabled by the low cost of cheap suburban trains. With the right planning rules we can do it again.
As socialists we should be pleased that the Thatcherite privatised dream of atomised individuals living in private spaces and travelling alone is coming to an end. Both housing and transport will need collective well planned solutions. Personally I look forward to the reopening of the Great Central as an electric railway and the grassing over of the M1!
On arches we were borne
And the thunder of the railway drowned
The thunder of the Quorn:
And silver shone the steeples out
Above the barren boughs;
Colts in a paddock ran from us
But not the solid cows:
And quite where Rugby Central is
Does only Rugby know.”
A journey on the old Great Central Railway described by John Betjeman. Many Rugbians today could not find Rugby Central, all that remains is a bump on a bridleway in a disused railway cutting, a long green finger running through the heart of the town, a pleasant place to walk the dog away from the noise of the traffic.
Poems like this helped create that idea that the great days of rail are behind us, killed off by Dr Beeching. Now we know the real killer was cheap oil. Beeching took the flack for closing one third of the rail network and some 2000 stations but he was appointed to head British Rail by, Conservative Transport Minister, Ernest Marples.
Marples made his fortune from the firm he help found, Marples, Ridgway and Partners, road builders (contractors indeed on the M1) he divested himself of his shares on becoming Transport Minister to avoid any conflict of interests – to his wife.
His success was based upon the same cheap oil that did for the railways. At that time most of us would, given the lower costs, greater flexibility and the new found reliability of road transport, built the M1, all those other ‘M’s and closed miles of railways.
Today we are living with the consequences of almost a century’s worth of location decisions based on cheap oil. From the ‘ribbon development’ in the 30’s, encouraged perhaps by that wonderful Shell advertising to the 60’s when the car became accessible to the masses as a symbol of personal freedom. The newly built motorways and trunk roads enabled those in search of the mock-Tudor idyll to leap frog the green belt and for businesses and shops to escape the confines of the cities.
This great dispersal shrank the cities, new towns grew in once green fields, but the new suburbs and towns completely dependent on road transport generated the flip side of dispersal - congestion.
The problem is low population density makes public transport systems uneconomic. Despite the fact that around one third of the population have no access to a car to bring together sufficient people for a football match, a retail centre or even most workplaces requires them to drive. They have little choice - even to the point that this congestion is killing the economy. This new geography locks us into in a high movement high cost society.
To get some idea of the costs involved last year the Seven West Midlands Metropolitan Councils and Centro (the passenger transport authority) sent the Government their wish list for transport improvements it had a £4.6 billion price tag.
This bill, coming in at about half the cost of the complete modernisation of the West Coast Mainline, was far from ambitious, the minimum to keep the metropolitan heart of the region moving they said. The fact the whole region gets around £90 million a year for major transport projects makes it clear that this type of development is unaffordable. This is one conurbation. Imagine the price tag for the whole country.
These numbers made me a convert to road pricing. However having thought longer about it I now realise that of itself road pricing is not enough. The fact is we have fanciful ideas based on that cheap oil about the degree of mobility we can sustain.
It seems those oil futures speculators are not fools – they know we are hopelessly addicted to oil.
When the prices shot up what did the PM, Gordon Brown say? Sell your 4x4, stop flying, or walk to the shops? No he blamed OPEC and demanded more oil from the North Sea.
Now it is not just North Sea oil that is running out. It seems the Greens are right we do not take energy conservation seriously.
Despite the recent huge hike in oil prices the cost of transport is still too low - we have to move to a low movement low cost society and we may only have twenty years to do it.
I am not an extreme Green I believe we have to do this for economic not environmental reasons. We have sold off all our once state owned energy assets making us totally dependent on international markets for our energy. We are a small country with low productivity and a weakening economy we will not be able to afford these ever shrinking resources. The US is already complaining to China and India about there subsidising of their domestic fuel prices.
The economic forces that have enabled long distance travel and long supply chains will soon go into reverse. Many current business models are unsustainable as oil prices grow. No wonder food prices are up. The ludicrously expensive, in transport terms, cost of trucking and shipping, clothes and foodstuffs over vast distances is already becoming uneconomic. Some food production and manufacturing will have to be repatriated.
Planning processes that built the motorways and new towns will now have to plan to recentralise the population and relocalise economic activity. People will simply have to live a great deal closer to schools, shops and work places. (And HM Government please note, GP sugeries and post offices).
As costs escalate some will want to give up their cars and some will be forced too - we have to make it easy for them. There is some truth that with the IT revolution we will be travelling less. But IT also generates new traffic and helps sustain complex long distance supply chains. Despite the constantly threatened immanent arrival of the electric or hydrogen powered car don’t hold your breath there is no technological fix on the horizon.
To return out of town shopping centres and housing to farmland will not be easy and there will be considerable expense in creating a transport infrastructure independent of oil. Completing the electrification of our railways and filling in those Beeching gaps with light rail and trams will not come cheap. The win is of a network that is greener and that will do wonders for our balance of payments.
So how are we to pay for this transport revolution?
So called green taxes have so far not noticeably change behaviour and any revenue has not been spent on alternative sustainable solutions. The problem has always been the Treasury. Its need for the ‘fix’ of the revenue they generate means it never sets tax at levels that really change behaviour.
These taxes have to be a lot higher. Today the price mechanism is beginning to change behaviour but current taxes still have only a very marginal impact on consumers after all since 2005 taxes on road transport have actually fallen.
So where is the money to come from?
The fact that the recent improvements to our rail network are to be paid for by passengers is a clear sign. The user is going to have to pay. We must look again at road pricing. We need a hypothecated tax on road usage for infrastructure improvements. This can be done - we have the technology we should just get on with it.
The challenge is to visibly improve and make cheaper public transport, especially trains and trams, whilst choking off the demand for movement.
It would be unfair to many people who cannot afford to live near where they work to further punish them by increasing what they see as their already excessive transport costs without giving them a real choice.
Unplanned oil price increases have done massive damage before. They cause all kinds of social and economic problems. But this is not a short term problem we can get over but a permanent change.
Effective road pricing can generate a revenue stream to help fund the changes we have to make. Those affluent enough to continue to drive can subsidise those who use public transport. And surely we can come up with varying the charges for essential deliveries or essential workers.
There is less time than we think. We must plan out the need for movement by road. Choosing to carry on as if nothing is happening is foolish in the extreme.
Transport costs are an important component of economic development one of Betjemans other great railway images was that of Metroland an entire landscape enabled by the low cost of cheap suburban trains. With the right planning rules we can do it again.
As socialists we should be pleased that the Thatcherite privatised dream of atomised individuals living in private spaces and travelling alone is coming to an end. Both housing and transport will need collective well planned solutions. Personally I look forward to the reopening of the Great Central as an electric railway and the grassing over of the M1!
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Real legacies of Blair, Brown and Smith
Back in the Guardian after the terrible local and London elections.
My old workmates from the 1997 election (Letters, May 17) seem to have fallen into the first trap of politics - don't believe your own propaganda. The best stuff we implemented after the 1997 victory was nothing to do with Blair or Brown; it was the legacy of John Smith - minimum wage, trade union recognition, social chapter, national devolution, regional development agencies etc. The Brownite stuff (independence for the Bank of England and lax regulation of the financial sector) and the Blairite stuff (permanent revolution in schools and hospitals, tougher on crime than its causes) all looks far less attractive in retrospect. Then there is the elephant in the room of foreign policy. Seven wars in seven years - and what happened to being at the centre of Europe!
More important than the policy failings of Brown - on pensions, post offices, tax relief for the dead while increasing tax on the poorest workers - and something even I didn't realise until last year's floods is just how hopeless he is as a politician. We live in a democracy; you have to go out and meet people and understand them (even the Chinese leader has understood this).
Wake up - the "nice decade" is over. Labour will lose the general election whenever it comes. We are facing the same squeeze that the Tories faced in 1997. Who would have thought that the Conservatives would be the first post-Thatcherite party? The changes we need to make have to be done quickly. We must have a new leader very soon so that defeat can be mitigated, giving us a small chance of regrouping; the alternative is we go into oblivion with Brown.
Nick Matthews
(Labour's policy officer for trade and industry and employment in 1997), Rugby
My old workmates from the 1997 election (Letters, May 17) seem to have fallen into the first trap of politics - don't believe your own propaganda. The best stuff we implemented after the 1997 victory was nothing to do with Blair or Brown; it was the legacy of John Smith - minimum wage, trade union recognition, social chapter, national devolution, regional development agencies etc. The Brownite stuff (independence for the Bank of England and lax regulation of the financial sector) and the Blairite stuff (permanent revolution in schools and hospitals, tougher on crime than its causes) all looks far less attractive in retrospect. Then there is the elephant in the room of foreign policy. Seven wars in seven years - and what happened to being at the centre of Europe!
More important than the policy failings of Brown - on pensions, post offices, tax relief for the dead while increasing tax on the poorest workers - and something even I didn't realise until last year's floods is just how hopeless he is as a politician. We live in a democracy; you have to go out and meet people and understand them (even the Chinese leader has understood this).
Wake up - the "nice decade" is over. Labour will lose the general election whenever it comes. We are facing the same squeeze that the Tories faced in 1997. Who would have thought that the Conservatives would be the first post-Thatcherite party? The changes we need to make have to be done quickly. We must have a new leader very soon so that defeat can be mitigated, giving us a small chance of regrouping; the alternative is we go into oblivion with Brown.
Nick Matthews
(Labour's policy officer for trade and industry and employment in 1997), Rugby
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Nick Rocks in the Guardian
Dear Editor,
Labour have at last found the bottle to 'nationalise' something. I hope they get the taste for it. They should come out fighting on Northern Rock. None of the Building Societies that converted to Banks have been seen to be viable long term businesses. With Northern Rock eight out of ten have been eaten up by bigger banks reducing competition in the mortgage sector. Only Bradford and Bingley and the Alliance and Leicester remain - how long do we give them as independent businesses? Demutualisation was a stupid piece of Thatcherite dogma. Financial engineering that stole millions in value from members to enrich managers whilst producing higher mortgages for millions. Labour should not apologise for clearing up this Conservative mess. My only complaint is that they should do more of it clearing up the similar mess the Tories created in other sectors like the railways and the utilities.
Yours sincerely,
Nick Matthews
Labour have at last found the bottle to 'nationalise' something. I hope they get the taste for it. They should come out fighting on Northern Rock. None of the Building Societies that converted to Banks have been seen to be viable long term businesses. With Northern Rock eight out of ten have been eaten up by bigger banks reducing competition in the mortgage sector. Only Bradford and Bingley and the Alliance and Leicester remain - how long do we give them as independent businesses? Demutualisation was a stupid piece of Thatcherite dogma. Financial engineering that stole millions in value from members to enrich managers whilst producing higher mortgages for millions. Labour should not apologise for clearing up this Conservative mess. My only complaint is that they should do more of it clearing up the similar mess the Tories created in other sectors like the railways and the utilities.
Yours sincerely,
Nick Matthews
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Remembering Duncan
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
The very moving events marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster have shone a light into L.P.Harley’s foreign country that is the past in a very interesting way. The world of 1958 and in particular the footballing world of 1958 could not be more different from the footballing world of today.
Take for example the description in the Daily Mail of Manchester United's 2007 pre-Christmas Party.
“United's 19-year-old defender Jonny Evans was questioned today over the alleged rape of a woman at the club's party before being bailed until February 23 pending further inquiries. The players had reportedly paid £100,000 for Monday's party and invited around 100 girls back to the £395-a-night Manchester hotel. The event is said to have been organised by Ferdinand who is reported to have held a whip round to which 25 players gave £4,000 each. Wives and girlfriends were not invited.
…. A total of 35 players, including many multi-million pound stars, began the day with lunch at the Manchester235 casino complex where they were entertained by drag queens and dancers. After three hours, stars such as Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Owen Hargreaves, accompanied by junior squad members, headed to Coronation Street star Liz Dawn's pub The Old Grapes for more drinking.
Later a group including Rooney and Ferdinand drove to a lapdancing club but left without going inside after seeing photographers outside. For the night they had booked out the 30-suite Great St John Street Hotel - a converted Victorian school featured in top hotel guides - where they continued partying into the early hours. One female guest described the party as "a horrendous cattle market" She said: "I like the United players but they were out of control. They were treating girls like pieces of meat. "We got special invites but if we ever get asked again there's no way we would go again." Another said: "A lot of the players were really letting their hair down. Waitresses were handing out pink champagne to whoever wanted it.
"The players seemed to be drinking beer, vodka and whisky. Lots of drink was flowing and there were a lot of the girls there simply trying to bag a footballer for the night. It was all very sleazy."
As Rod Liddle said in the Times , “Yes, of course, the whole business is vile and repulsive on a scale we should, by rights, feel difficult to comprehend. But these days we comprehend it all too well. The obscene extravagance of the party, the gallons of pink champagne flowing down the gullets of pampered and witless imbeciles, the coarseness, the sheer utilitarian intent behind that noble tradition, the harvesting of the slappers. But it would surely not surprise anyone any more. Almost everything our Premier League footballers do is an affront to decency, the result of fairly stupid young people being afforded unlimited incomes and unlimited adulation.
These players think that they can do anything, without censure. By and large they are right. But our sympathies should not be with the equally witless young women who, in effect, colluded in this moronic festival. It should instead be with the state of our national game and with the fans who subsidise such behavior.”
It is that type of behavior that I think that is part of the reason we look back to 1958 with such fondness, it is not simply with rose tinted glasses, there is certainly a degree of nostalgia but nostalgia for the values of a lost age. Compare that coverage on the United players of today with the coverage from the Guardian of old fans who congregated at Old Trafford to remember the exact moment 50 years earlier when the Munich tragedy occurred.
People like Derek Taylor, a supporter for more than 50 years, who carried flowers and a remembrance card with the words from The Flowers Of Manchester, a poem and song tribute to the victims. Taylor was a newspaper copy boy at the time of the crash. "I took the copy from the teleprinter announcing that the aeroplane had crashed," he said. "I was totally devastated. It was just unbelievable, like losing one of your family.
"When I first met Duncan Edwards, he used to come to Old Trafford on a bike. When they realised their value had gone up, the club told them they had to come on a bus!
"Sir Matt Busby used to turn up in his car, put his arm around my shoulder and ask, 'How's my team playing for me?' He was like a granddad for the fans."
In Germany, hundreds of fans attended a memorial service at the site of the tragedy outside Munich. But if the day was marked by solemnity, it was also leavened by moments of humour, not least at a tribute hosted by the television presenter and United fan Eamonn Holmes. The Babes' goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, who risked his own life to pull three others from the plane wreckage, recalled how he returned to the football field just two weeks after the crash.
"We didn't have counsellors or psychologists - trick cyclists, I call them - in those days, we just got on with it. There was no point in sitting at home moping," he said.
Nobby Stiles, a 15-year-old apprentice with United in 1958, and later a 1966 World Cup winner, assessed the talents of those who died, including Duncan Edwards ("The greatest player I've ever seen") and Eddie Coleman ("My idol").
As ever, though, Sir Bobby Charlton, who went on to fulfil the lost legacy of fallen colleagues by winning the European Cup in 1968, fashioned the perfect epitaph for a glorious team.
"I'll never forget what Sir Matt said to us one day when he pointed across to Trafford Park, which at the time was the largest industrial estate in Europe," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "He told us: 'The people over there work hard all week long and it is your job to go out on the field and provide them with some entertainment'.
"And that is what we tried to do; we played for the team, for the club and for the country."
Be in no doubt football in the 1930’s, 40’s and into the 1950’s was the theatre of the working class.
J.B.Priestley in the opening chapter of The Good Companions (1929) said :
"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch 22 hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink... for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgments like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its art."
Priestly was far from being naive about the role of commercialism in football even before the war in An English Journey, his account of a tour of the country in 1933, he describes a game between Notts County and Notts Forest:
“Nearly everything possible has been done to spoil this game; the heavy financial interests; the absurd transfer and player selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualification for the players; the betting and coupon competitions; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the Press; the monstrous partisanship of the crowds (with their idiotic cries of 'play the game Ref' when any decision against their side is given); but the fact remains that it is not yet spoilt and it has gone out to conquer the world.”
I would contend that in 1958, the game was still, “not yet spoilt”, thanks to post-war austerity football was still cheap and attracted huge crowds desperate for some entertainment. Enter into this era the "Busby babes"!
Matt Busby had arrived at Manchester United in 1946 after a pre-war career as a player with Manchester City and Liverpool. Born in a miner's cottage in North Lanarkshire his father and all his uncles had been killed in the First World War. He was an immediate success with United , FA Cup winners in 1948, football league runners up in 1947, 48, 49 and 51 before winning the title in 1952. It was however his commitment to young players that set him apart. United won the FA Youth Cup, in 1954, 55, 56 and 57. The club bought no players at all for three seasons between the 1953/54 and 1956/57. The youngsters he bought through gained United the league championship in 1956 and 1957.
Of these youngsters the best of the bunch signing for United when he was 16 in 1952 was a lad from Dudley. A lad who had played for Wolverhampton Street School, Dudley Schools, Worcestershire County and Birmingham and District and had made his debut for England School Boys at just 14.
Wolves who the Daily Mail had christened the Champions of the World after they had beaten Honved in December 1954 had missed out on Duncan and on what might have been.
As Robert Philip wrote in the Daily Telegraph,
"As early as 1948, a handwritten letter from United's chief scout in the Midlands, Jack O'Brien, landed on Busby's desk. "Have today seen a 12-year-old schoolboy who merits special watching. His name is Duncan Edwards, of Dudley. Instructions please." O'Brien's recommendation was promptly passed on to coach Bert Whalley with the added instructions: "Please arrange special watch immediately - MB."
With the young man in question turning out for Wolverhampton Street Secondary School, Dudley Schools XI, Worcester County XI and Birmingham & District XI, arranging a 'special watch' represented something of a full-time occupation. At the age of 13, he walked out at Wembley on April 1, 1950, to win his first 'cap' for England Schoolboys against Wales Schoolboys in front of a crowd of 100,000; at 14 he was appointed England Schools captain - a position he would hold for two seasons.
With Wolverhampton Wanderers hovering, on June 2, 1952, United pounced, Whalley banging on the Edwards front door at 31 Elm Road on the threadbare Priory council estate at 2am, brandishing amateur forms. Having put pen to paper, young Duncan, still in his pyjamas, left Whalley and his father, Gladstone, to sort out the details while he climbed the stairs to bed, muttering: "I don't know what all this fuss was about. I've said all along that Manchester United were the only club I wanted to join."
Ten months later Edwards made his first-team debut at left-half aged 16 years and 183 days against Cardiff City at Old Trafford; not that the date April 4, 1953, is writ large in the history of Manchester United, a 4-1 defeat leaving the reigning champions in the no-man's land of mid-table. Busby was fully aware that despite his side's league title success the previous season, the majority of the United players belonged to the over-the-hill gang and Edwards' fellow 'Babes', David Pegg, Dennis Viollet, Bill Foulkes, Mark Jones and Jackie Blanchflower, were also introduced during the closing weeks of the season."
His personality shines through in the comments people make of him, "A permanent fixture in the England Under-23 side from the age of 17, United's teenage sorcerer may have grown in fame with every passing game but he remained engagingly modest throughout his all-too-brief career. "He might have been the Koh-i-Noor diamond among our crown jewels," Murphy explained, "but he was an unspoiled boy to the end, his head the same size it had been from the start. Even when he had won his first England cap but was still eligible for our youth team, he used to love turning out with the rest of the youngsters. He just loved to play anywhere and with anyone." (He had one known vice as a child - as well as representing his school at football, he was also a member of the Morris dancing team.)"
What Morris Dancing in Dudley! He continues,
"According to Busby, ". . . the bigger the occasion the better he liked it", and there were few bigger occasions than England's 1956 international against World Cup holders West Germany in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where Edwards scored a goal. With 25 minutes gone and the score 0-0, he gained possession on the edge of his own penalty area and set off on a run that left a trail of West Germans in his wake before smashing the ball into the net from 25 yards."
"By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club in 1953, at the age of fifteen years and eight months. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as ‘the spirit of British football’. On £15 a week and living at Mrs Watson’s boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the ‘Busby Babes’."
Writes Gordon Burn in his book Best and Edwards. Duncan was no saint after all he did two years national service in the army as 23145376 Lance Corporal Edwards D. He did most of his 2 years at the Ammunition Depot at Nescliff on the Welsh border, serving in the same regiment as Bobby Charlton.
In the Daily Telegraph John Russell, who was 23-year-old civil servant in 1957 and acquaintance of Edwards said, "I knew him faintly. I'd see him riding around on his bike near my home in Sale. I'd meet him in the Ashton on Mersey cricket club. We used to bump into the United lads going to the match, walking down the Warwick Road to the ground, or on a Saturday night in the Plaza or Ritz ballroom in Manchester or the Sale Locarno. We'd chat to them, say 'Good match, Dunc'." Munich was such a tragedy."
James Lawton in the Independent asked the question, was Duncan, "The greatest Footballer that ever lived?"
The tragedy of 1958 meant that, "there will be one regret above all others. It was that we never got to see if it really was true that Duncan Edwards was the greatest player who, despite his epic fight, never got to live. Not in the fullness of his talent. Not in the haunting reach of all his possibilities."
On his debut Duncan was the youngest player to play in the First Division he played, 177 games for United scoring 21 goals, and received 18 England Caps scoring five times. He once scored 6 goals in an England under 23 match playing as a centre forward.
He is one of those lost boys whose story gets stronger in the telling as the values of now and then collide. We cannot believe that modern players with all their money and their boorish behaviour are a patch on the players of old. For all their wealth they do not have the common touch and how can they? Making more in one week than the players then made in a lifetime. Television corrupts everything it comes into contact with and part of the joy of celebrating Duncan's life is that there are so few pictures or so little film of his playing days.
When I visited his Grave twenty five years ago it was subject to vandalism even then and was not easy to find in the Stourbridge Road Cemetery today there is a statue in the Market Place and an exhibition at the Museum to join the glass windows in the St Francis Church in Laurel Road. His family and in particular his mum worked all their lives to tend his memory. His father, Gladstone, actually ended up working at the cemetary and his mum turned their home, on Elm Road , into a shrine to Duncans playing career. Much of the contents can now be seen in Dudley Museum. Sarah Anne Edwards passed away on 15th April 2003, aged 93.
Still it's good to know that a lad born on Woodside and raised on the Priory is still considered by Bobby Charlton as the best he ever played with.
"He was incomparable, I feel terrible trying to explain to people just how good he was, his death was the biggest single tragedy ever to happen to Manchester United and English football. I always felt I could compare well with any player - except Duncan. He was such a talent, I always felt inferior to him. He didn't have a fault with his game".
For more about Duncan in Dudley see: www.duncan-edwards.co.uk
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Wednesbury Diaspora Discus Prize Winning Novel
The scene, Alf Day has joined the RAF:
"Pluckrose who was also a sergeant, although it didn't suit him - not that a commission would have suited any better - his face was simply incompatible with Air Council Instructions: it had the wrong atmosphere and superiors took it amiss. Added to which he could never shut up.
'Well I didn't ask to come.' Peering over Alfred's head on the first day, beaming about at the hangar full of blue: men standing as if they could think to do nothing else: others searching as if they were late, as if they had lost something, or had been forgotten: others not alone, begining to be not alone.
'Matter of fact King asked me. I got a written invitation - through intermediaries, tht's just what you'd expect, but it should make a difference, you would think. Of course, I volunteered for this part. And not a soul's been civil to me since - except you.'
He beamed down and Alfred could see no doubt in him no unease, only this sense that he was being entertained. 'Wouldn't have turned up if I'd known. I mean it's hardly been efficiently organised, thus far. More like a total fucking shambles.' And amiability in his voice had made his searing not a personal thing, or angry, more of a musical addition. Truly. I mean, a man could catch his fucking death of cold here, for a start. And i suspect worse.'
Alfred, his words in alump under his tongue, ashamed of themselves, but getting out a decent- sounding, 'Yes.' He was keeping things short, sticking to the phrases he was safe with,the ones hh'd cut away from Staffordshire, that could sound fully RAF.
He still practised in his head.
Yo bin and yo bay. Yo doe and yo day.
You are, or you have been and you aren't, or you haven't been. You do and you don't, or you didn't.
Everything getting longer and longer when you started to say it that way - and harsh too, the h's everywhere to trip you, having to hack out each one.
I bin.
I am. I was.
The way I was. The soft way I was.
His dad had always said, 'Doe talk soft.' But he'd meant don't talk as if you're stupid, he'd meant Alfred was stupid. Now Alfred was talking hard."
What Black Country person on leaving God's country has not felt something similar?
It was a joy to read the Guardian’s G2 section on January 24th. There was a double page spread of an interview by Stuart Jeffries of Alison Louise Kennedy.
Better known as author Al Kennedy she had just won £30,000 from Costa for her novel Day. Well so what I here you say, well the hero of said novel, a former wartime Lancaster rear gunner – the bravest of the brave – returns to Germany to appear as an actor in a film about an escape from a prisoner of war camp like the one he had been held in having been forced to bale out over Germany.
Like a lot of that generation war had given his life a sense of purpose that civvy street failed to provide and in a way it was a journey back to where everything began to go wrong.
Jolly interesting full of all sorts of moral dilemmas about the British character and all that stuff except that the “hero” Alfie Day hail’s from Wednesbury.
Stuart Jefferies takes up the story,
“I tell Kenedy that my parents hailed from Wednesbury, the Black Country town from which Day escapes into the thrill of war, a place whose heavy industries the Luftwaffe tried but couldn’t quite finish off ( the Tories where more thorough) while the RAF was bent on reducing German cities to simulacra of the fires of hell.”
Good start methinks at least the interviewer knows where this wonderful place is!
“Why did she choose the Black Country boy as a hero?” Asks Jeffries.
(Not realising the heroic capacity of all Black Country folk).
“I knew about it because my grandparents were from there”, she says.
So another exiled Wednesbury family two in the same Guardian interview is this a first I wonder?
“Its an industrial area where people did very dangerous jobs and could be killed at any time, and extreme levels of poverty.”
So war may have come as a perverse sort of escape – on the can’t be any worse and you get fed and see the world – She sounds alrighyt this AL Kenedy.
Then she commits the coup de grace!
“She was drawn, too to the strange dialect.”
“There’s an enormous sense of humour in the way Black Country people speak. It’s very playful and very old language.”
What are you waiting for get down the bookshop!!!
A Further review from the OBSERVER :
"YOU CAN CALL ME AL"
In a rare interview, the elusive AL Kennedy unburdens herself on men, the joy of stand-up comedy and the worth of long walks
Geraldine Bedell
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer
Alison Louise Kennedy is contemptuous of this whole undertaking. 'Never mind the work, let's review the author,' she has written scathingly about interviewers on her website. 'Someone who sits alone for a hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it?'
Her short stories and novels, the latest of which is Day, are often mordantly funny and teeming with startling images. Like her approach to interviews, though, they make no concessions: her writing is linguistically and emotionally demanding. 'It's like anal sex,' she explains when I ask her about her fiercely literary attitude to her work and her correspondingly confrontational presentation of it. 'If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening.'
Before we can get on to anal sex, however, I go to see her at a Glasgow comedy club, where she has a regular gig as a stand-up. I catch my first glimpse of her as she's waiting to go on stage, bopping away with another performer in a corner. Having reread her books and studied her website's acidic reviews of her reviews, I have become so alarmed by her that I'm actually shocked to see her doing something so frivolous.
Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair. I learn that her father was from Birmingham and her mother from North Wales, that they went to Australia but then came back to Dundee before she was born and that they split up when she was quite small, which is more information than she ever appears to have divulged in an interview.
'It's a cartoon version of my childhood,' she says when we meet the next day in a tea shop near her home in the West End of Glasgow. She is particularly dismissive of physical descriptions of herself, but she has a strikingly high forehead, which seems to be permanently creased in a frown, and wears jeans, flat shoes and no make-up. One way and another, she appears to suffer very little from the usual female handicap of anxiety to please.
She says she doesn't give away more to interviewers 'because they don't ask interesting questions. Plus I don't particularly want ...' She tails off, but it's enough to make you wonder whether what she does give is another cartoon version. She has said in the past that she wouldn't be doing stand-up 'if my life wasn't completely shagged', and she continues to protest that she performs mainly because 'it's an analgesic'. She sighs, as though this is all too wearisome: 'I lost a friend who made me laugh a lot. He knew a lot about comedy and we used to share comedy and afterwards I had less access to it. I found I wasn't sleeping and I was passing the time by making things up.'
She doesn't want to talk about this friend, she claims, although she does mention him subsequently. She will say that he wasn't a lover. She once wrote obliquely about a male friend who, tormentingly, had sex with someone else in a hotel where she was also staying; whatever the exact nature of the betrayal, it was enough to end the relationship. For a while, she couldn't write fiction, producing instead the brilliant On Bullfighting.
It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.
She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'
What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'. Despite this, her whole life is an attempt to communicate. She acknowledges that this looks a bit paradoxical. 'Yeah, you spend your time shouting into a well. You don't often get the echo back. I spend a lot of time making stuff for other people. It's a huge relief if someone talks back to you in a way that gets your head running.'
I don't quite know how seriously to take this vision of lonely rooms, bereft of company, especially as, when the interview ends, we discover we have mutual friends and she enthuses about them and jolly party games they've played. But if at some level, AL Kennedy has decided to put her writing first, it has not been (at least from a reader's point of view) a pointless sacrifice. She has been on the Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists twice, but is still, in my opinion, underrated. She does things no one else can do, including write about sex better than anyone. 'Oh,' she says, 'but that's because I'm not really writing about sex at all.'
Day is the story of a Second World War tail gunner and prisoner of war who, in 1949, becomes an extra in a war film and tunnels back through his memories to discover what has become of him. It's not as blackly funny as her last novel, Paradise, about an alcoholic woman, but Kennedy insists this isn't because of the stand-up. 'It's not a very funny thing, the Second World War.' She then complains I've missed the two Max Miller jokes.
The big question is whether the images in AL Kennedy's books spring into her mind fully formed or whether they are the result of months with a thesaurus and endless revision. 'A lot of it's because my books are character-based,' she says evasively. 'If you want to make something appear fresh, you rely on the fact that no person has a voice quite like any other. With Day, I got a new vocabulary, because of the period and the military stuff and the mental state he's in, but, yeah, if you look at the rewrites, there are up to 150 or 175. Some of that will be commas, some of it will be major.'
I wonder if she shows the work to anyone or relies on her own sense of whether 150 revisions are enough. 'My friend who went away is the only person whose opinion I was ever interested in. He had a very interesting mind. There aren't that many people with good ears. My editor has a good ear, but you can only read something for the first time once. You commit yourself to doing something until it's right and then you learn what right feels like, tastes like, sounds like. It helps if you're obsessive-compulsive and you don't have any distractions.'
You can't help wondering if some of her moroseness derives from the ever-present fact of physical pain. (This will go up on her website in the glib psychobabble section.) She suffered an undiagnosed herniated disc between her shoulder blades for six months, by which time she had muscle wastage. She also fell off a horse and has a 'squint shoulder' and once broke her sacrum, which sometimes gives her sciatica. She has a special chair to write in, hard to envisage, in which her knees are above her heart.
The most common criticism of AL Kennedy's writing is that its craftedness can become oppressive. 'I don't think it's that,' she says. 'I think it's being in someone else's mind. That's fair enough: that's what I want to do to you. If you define plot by what's happening externally to the character, it's true there's no plot in my fiction, but I'm interested in the things people carry around that you don't necessarily see. I just want to get to the bits that interest me.'
For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'
On the way home, I wish I'd told Alison Louise Kennedy to stop giving that bloke the satisfaction of knowing he's ruined her life. I don't suppose she'd have listened. She told me she wasn't good company and when I objected that this simply wasn't true, she conceded, 'for a limited period, OK. But I get bored very easily. If you were around all week, I'd want to kill you. I wouldn't tell you, even: I'd just go for increasingly long walks. Having achieved the joy of your friendship, I'd find it disappointing, as I find everything I attain.'
AL Kennedy: initial impressions
1965 Born in Dundee.
1986 Graduates in theatre studies and drama from Warwick University.
1991 Publishes first short-story collection, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains
1993 Completes debut novel, Looking for the Possible Dance. Listed among Granta's 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
1996 Booker Prize judge.
1998 Scripts C4 film Stella Does Tricks
2005 Performs stand-up in Glasgow and at the Edinburgh Fringe.
On her use of initials: 'The authors I first loved all had initials - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, E Nesbit, ee cummings - and I actively didn't want to know who they were or have them get in the way of my enjoying their story and their voice.'
Tancred Newbury
· Day is published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
"Pluckrose who was also a sergeant, although it didn't suit him - not that a commission would have suited any better - his face was simply incompatible with Air Council Instructions: it had the wrong atmosphere and superiors took it amiss. Added to which he could never shut up.
'Well I didn't ask to come.' Peering over Alfred's head on the first day, beaming about at the hangar full of blue: men standing as if they could think to do nothing else: others searching as if they were late, as if they had lost something, or had been forgotten: others not alone, begining to be not alone.
'Matter of fact King asked me. I got a written invitation - through intermediaries, tht's just what you'd expect, but it should make a difference, you would think. Of course, I volunteered for this part. And not a soul's been civil to me since - except you.'
He beamed down and Alfred could see no doubt in him no unease, only this sense that he was being entertained. 'Wouldn't have turned up if I'd known. I mean it's hardly been efficiently organised, thus far. More like a total fucking shambles.' And amiability in his voice had made his searing not a personal thing, or angry, more of a musical addition. Truly. I mean, a man could catch his fucking death of cold here, for a start. And i suspect worse.'
Alfred, his words in alump under his tongue, ashamed of themselves, but getting out a decent- sounding, 'Yes.' He was keeping things short, sticking to the phrases he was safe with,the ones hh'd cut away from Staffordshire, that could sound fully RAF.
He still practised in his head.
Yo bin and yo bay. Yo doe and yo day.
You are, or you have been and you aren't, or you haven't been. You do and you don't, or you didn't.
Everything getting longer and longer when you started to say it that way - and harsh too, the h's everywhere to trip you, having to hack out each one.
I bin.
I am. I was.
The way I was. The soft way I was.
His dad had always said, 'Doe talk soft.' But he'd meant don't talk as if you're stupid, he'd meant Alfred was stupid. Now Alfred was talking hard."
What Black Country person on leaving God's country has not felt something similar?
It was a joy to read the Guardian’s G2 section on January 24th. There was a double page spread of an interview by Stuart Jeffries of Alison Louise Kennedy.
Better known as author Al Kennedy she had just won £30,000 from Costa for her novel Day. Well so what I here you say, well the hero of said novel, a former wartime Lancaster rear gunner – the bravest of the brave – returns to Germany to appear as an actor in a film about an escape from a prisoner of war camp like the one he had been held in having been forced to bale out over Germany.
Like a lot of that generation war had given his life a sense of purpose that civvy street failed to provide and in a way it was a journey back to where everything began to go wrong.
Jolly interesting full of all sorts of moral dilemmas about the British character and all that stuff except that the “hero” Alfie Day hail’s from Wednesbury.
Stuart Jefferies takes up the story,
“I tell Kenedy that my parents hailed from Wednesbury, the Black Country town from which Day escapes into the thrill of war, a place whose heavy industries the Luftwaffe tried but couldn’t quite finish off ( the Tories where more thorough) while the RAF was bent on reducing German cities to simulacra of the fires of hell.”
Good start methinks at least the interviewer knows where this wonderful place is!
“Why did she choose the Black Country boy as a hero?” Asks Jeffries.
(Not realising the heroic capacity of all Black Country folk).
“I knew about it because my grandparents were from there”, she says.
So another exiled Wednesbury family two in the same Guardian interview is this a first I wonder?
“Its an industrial area where people did very dangerous jobs and could be killed at any time, and extreme levels of poverty.”
So war may have come as a perverse sort of escape – on the can’t be any worse and you get fed and see the world – She sounds alrighyt this AL Kenedy.
Then she commits the coup de grace!
“She was drawn, too to the strange dialect.”
“There’s an enormous sense of humour in the way Black Country people speak. It’s very playful and very old language.”
What are you waiting for get down the bookshop!!!
A Further review from the OBSERVER :
"YOU CAN CALL ME AL"
In a rare interview, the elusive AL Kennedy unburdens herself on men, the joy of stand-up comedy and the worth of long walks
Geraldine Bedell
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer
Alison Louise Kennedy is contemptuous of this whole undertaking. 'Never mind the work, let's review the author,' she has written scathingly about interviewers on her website. 'Someone who sits alone for a hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it?'
Her short stories and novels, the latest of which is Day, are often mordantly funny and teeming with startling images. Like her approach to interviews, though, they make no concessions: her writing is linguistically and emotionally demanding. 'It's like anal sex,' she explains when I ask her about her fiercely literary attitude to her work and her correspondingly confrontational presentation of it. 'If that's what I want to do to you and you're not into it, then go away, because that's what will keep happening.'
Before we can get on to anal sex, however, I go to see her at a Glasgow comedy club, where she has a regular gig as a stand-up. I catch my first glimpse of her as she's waiting to go on stage, bopping away with another performer in a corner. Having reread her books and studied her website's acidic reviews of her reviews, I have become so alarmed by her that I'm actually shocked to see her doing something so frivolous.
Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair. I learn that her father was from Birmingham and her mother from North Wales, that they went to Australia but then came back to Dundee before she was born and that they split up when she was quite small, which is more information than she ever appears to have divulged in an interview.
'It's a cartoon version of my childhood,' she says when we meet the next day in a tea shop near her home in the West End of Glasgow. She is particularly dismissive of physical descriptions of herself, but she has a strikingly high forehead, which seems to be permanently creased in a frown, and wears jeans, flat shoes and no make-up. One way and another, she appears to suffer very little from the usual female handicap of anxiety to please.
She says she doesn't give away more to interviewers 'because they don't ask interesting questions. Plus I don't particularly want ...' She tails off, but it's enough to make you wonder whether what she does give is another cartoon version. She has said in the past that she wouldn't be doing stand-up 'if my life wasn't completely shagged', and she continues to protest that she performs mainly because 'it's an analgesic'. She sighs, as though this is all too wearisome: 'I lost a friend who made me laugh a lot. He knew a lot about comedy and we used to share comedy and afterwards I had less access to it. I found I wasn't sleeping and I was passing the time by making things up.'
She doesn't want to talk about this friend, she claims, although she does mention him subsequently. She will say that he wasn't a lover. She once wrote obliquely about a male friend who, tormentingly, had sex with someone else in a hotel where she was also staying; whatever the exact nature of the betrayal, it was enough to end the relationship. For a while, she couldn't write fiction, producing instead the brilliant On Bullfighting.
It's tempting to think that AL Kennedy might be playing up her misery, cultivating the bleakness that is often said to characterise her fiction. There is an unflinching, exposed quality to her work: Day is about RAF bombing raids and requires the reader to enter the head of a man who is mentally disintegrating. She is sensitive to absurdity, to the imminence of what she calls 'the pantomime surprise of death'.
She vigorously denies courting unhappiness, claiming to think it's wholly unnecessary to successful fiction. She'd rather have joy, but it's simply not available. 'I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical. It's just the way things have worked out.'
What would make her comfortable? 'Occasional company,' she says. I am starting to find this self-pity slightly comical, so I say: 'I bet you've got a secret husband at home.' Perhaps she has too, because she answers: 'Yeah, I killed him and ate him.' She would like, she says, 'just to have people to talk to who you can actually talk to, which is quite rare'. Despite this, her whole life is an attempt to communicate. She acknowledges that this looks a bit paradoxical. 'Yeah, you spend your time shouting into a well. You don't often get the echo back. I spend a lot of time making stuff for other people. It's a huge relief if someone talks back to you in a way that gets your head running.'
I don't quite know how seriously to take this vision of lonely rooms, bereft of company, especially as, when the interview ends, we discover we have mutual friends and she enthuses about them and jolly party games they've played. But if at some level, AL Kennedy has decided to put her writing first, it has not been (at least from a reader's point of view) a pointless sacrifice. She has been on the Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists twice, but is still, in my opinion, underrated. She does things no one else can do, including write about sex better than anyone. 'Oh,' she says, 'but that's because I'm not really writing about sex at all.'
Day is the story of a Second World War tail gunner and prisoner of war who, in 1949, becomes an extra in a war film and tunnels back through his memories to discover what has become of him. It's not as blackly funny as her last novel, Paradise, about an alcoholic woman, but Kennedy insists this isn't because of the stand-up. 'It's not a very funny thing, the Second World War.' She then complains I've missed the two Max Miller jokes.
The big question is whether the images in AL Kennedy's books spring into her mind fully formed or whether they are the result of months with a thesaurus and endless revision. 'A lot of it's because my books are character-based,' she says evasively. 'If you want to make something appear fresh, you rely on the fact that no person has a voice quite like any other. With Day, I got a new vocabulary, because of the period and the military stuff and the mental state he's in, but, yeah, if you look at the rewrites, there are up to 150 or 175. Some of that will be commas, some of it will be major.'
I wonder if she shows the work to anyone or relies on her own sense of whether 150 revisions are enough. 'My friend who went away is the only person whose opinion I was ever interested in. He had a very interesting mind. There aren't that many people with good ears. My editor has a good ear, but you can only read something for the first time once. You commit yourself to doing something until it's right and then you learn what right feels like, tastes like, sounds like. It helps if you're obsessive-compulsive and you don't have any distractions.'
You can't help wondering if some of her moroseness derives from the ever-present fact of physical pain. (This will go up on her website in the glib psychobabble section.) She suffered an undiagnosed herniated disc between her shoulder blades for six months, by which time she had muscle wastage. She also fell off a horse and has a 'squint shoulder' and once broke her sacrum, which sometimes gives her sciatica. She has a special chair to write in, hard to envisage, in which her knees are above her heart.
The most common criticism of AL Kennedy's writing is that its craftedness can become oppressive. 'I don't think it's that,' she says. 'I think it's being in someone else's mind. That's fair enough: that's what I want to do to you. If you define plot by what's happening externally to the character, it's true there's no plot in my fiction, but I'm interested in the things people carry around that you don't necessarily see. I just want to get to the bits that interest me.'
For all the craft, the revisions, the foraging for the ideal phrase, AL Kennedy manages to be pretty prolific: she is 41, and Day is her fifth novel. There have been four volumes of short stories (she's working on a fifth right now) plus eight or nine drama scripts, a couple of works of non-fiction, regular journalism and, now, the stand-up. 'If you're quite a fast cook, you don't have children, you don't have pets and you've got no one to talk to, what else are you going to do?' she asks. 'I've got vast amounts of time to occupy.'
On the way home, I wish I'd told Alison Louise Kennedy to stop giving that bloke the satisfaction of knowing he's ruined her life. I don't suppose she'd have listened. She told me she wasn't good company and when I objected that this simply wasn't true, she conceded, 'for a limited period, OK. But I get bored very easily. If you were around all week, I'd want to kill you. I wouldn't tell you, even: I'd just go for increasingly long walks. Having achieved the joy of your friendship, I'd find it disappointing, as I find everything I attain.'
AL Kennedy: initial impressions
1965 Born in Dundee.
1986 Graduates in theatre studies and drama from Warwick University.
1991 Publishes first short-story collection, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains
1993 Completes debut novel, Looking for the Possible Dance. Listed among Granta's 20 Best of Young British Novelists.
1996 Booker Prize judge.
1998 Scripts C4 film Stella Does Tricks
2005 Performs stand-up in Glasgow and at the Edinburgh Fringe.
On her use of initials: 'The authors I first loved all had initials - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, E Nesbit, ee cummings - and I actively didn't want to know who they were or have them get in the way of my enjoying their story and their voice.'
Tancred Newbury
· Day is published by Jonathan Cape on 5 April, £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Death of Outstanding Wednesbury Footballer
I thought this obituary of our Norman in the Guardian said it all. A man who won two championship medals and won the FA Cup scoring two goals in the final and won England caps. Who went on to play for Darlo! And ended up as a steward for the Saddlers. Modern players with far lesser talent and all their cash and status could not lace his boots. Those where the days our Norman scored his first goal for the club in a pulsating 4-4 draw with West Bromwich Albion in the FA Charity Shield. Yes Wolves and Albion shared the shield for six months each. The 1954 Champions and FA Cup Winners. Bill Shankly was wrong football is just a game and there are things in life that are more important but Normans life shone trough his football career.
Who would have thought that it would be so long before Wolves won the FA Cup again. Maybe they need more lads from Wednesbury in the team!
"Norman Deeley was a tiny ball of high-octane energy and verve that never lost its bounce during his medal-rich prime with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the end of the 1950s.
An irrepressibly dynamic goal-scoring winger versatile enough to thrive on either flank, he excelled as part of the second thunderously powerful combination moulded by the formidable disciplinarian Stan Cullis, helping to lift two consecutive League titles and the FA Cup, and earning England recognition along the way.
There was never very much of the effervescent Midlander. When he made his entrance onto the international stage at schoolboy level during 1947/48, he stood a mere 4ft 4in and was said to be the smallest ever to play for the team. Indeed, he was to grow only a foot taller, but he compensated amply in skill, determination and bravery for what he lacked in physical stature." Wrote Ivan Ponting in the Independent.
Obituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Deeley
Goal scorer in Wolves' FA Cup victory of 1960
Brian Glanville
Wednesday November 28, 2007
Guardian
Norman Deeley, a tiny winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers in their championship winning sides of the 1950s, whose pace, skill and opportunism made light of his size, has died aged 73. At 4ft 4in, he became the smallest ever schoolboy international for England in 1947, and even when full-grown, he was little more than a foot taller.
Born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, he attended Holyhead Road school. Wolverhampton Wanderers was a natural, local club to join and he served them well for 11 years. Perhaps the peak of his achievement was to score twice in the FA Cup final of 1960, though admittedly it was against a Blackburn Rovers team cut down to 10 men when their full-back, Dave Whelan, now owner of Wigan Athletic, was carried off with a broken leg. Already an own goal down, Blackburn still proceeded to play largely the better football, but as they tired, Deeley, operating on the right flank, but always ready to move into the middle, swooped twice.
Altogether, he played 235 First Division matches for Wolves, scoring 75 goals and winning two Championship medals in successive seasons. The first came in 1957-58, when, in 41 appearances, thus missing but a single game, he scored 23 goals. The following season he scored another 17 in 38 appearances.
When things were going wrong for Wolves, he would do his energetic and intelligent best to put them right. As when, in the absence of the team's playmaker, Peter Broadbent, in a game lost 1-0 at Tottenham in September 1961, one wrote: "Deeley did his best to supply the lack of generalship but, well as he played, neatly as he controlled the ball, cleverly as he passed, a winger can do only so much, even when he wanders."
Deeley won two caps for England, on the ill-starred summer tour of South America: a 2-0 defeat in Rio de Janeiro by Brazil, when he was inevitably overshadowed by the explosive brilliance of his Brazilian opposite number at outside right, Julinho; the second in Lima, when Peru humiliated England, beating them 4-1.
In 1961-62 he left Wolves, and helped Leyton Orient to gain promotion to the top division, coming second in Division 2; he scored two goals in 14 games. Later he drifted into non-league, playing in turn for Worcester City, Bromsgrove Rovers and Darlaston, before retiring in 1974. He later worked at a community centre in Walsall and as a steward for Walsall FC. He lived on his at his late mother's home in Wednesbury.
· Norman Victor Deeley, footballer, born November 30 1933; died September 7 2007
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007ituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who would have thought that it would be so long before Wolves won the FA Cup again. Maybe they need more lads from Wednesbury in the team!
"Norman Deeley was a tiny ball of high-octane energy and verve that never lost its bounce during his medal-rich prime with Wolverhampton Wanderers at the end of the 1950s.
An irrepressibly dynamic goal-scoring winger versatile enough to thrive on either flank, he excelled as part of the second thunderously powerful combination moulded by the formidable disciplinarian Stan Cullis, helping to lift two consecutive League titles and the FA Cup, and earning England recognition along the way.
There was never very much of the effervescent Midlander. When he made his entrance onto the international stage at schoolboy level during 1947/48, he stood a mere 4ft 4in and was said to be the smallest ever to play for the team. Indeed, he was to grow only a foot taller, but he compensated amply in skill, determination and bravery for what he lacked in physical stature." Wrote Ivan Ponting in the Independent.
Obituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Deeley
Goal scorer in Wolves' FA Cup victory of 1960
Brian Glanville
Wednesday November 28, 2007
Guardian
Norman Deeley, a tiny winger for Wolverhampton Wanderers in their championship winning sides of the 1950s, whose pace, skill and opportunism made light of his size, has died aged 73. At 4ft 4in, he became the smallest ever schoolboy international for England in 1947, and even when full-grown, he was little more than a foot taller.
Born in Wednesbury, West Midlands, he attended Holyhead Road school. Wolverhampton Wanderers was a natural, local club to join and he served them well for 11 years. Perhaps the peak of his achievement was to score twice in the FA Cup final of 1960, though admittedly it was against a Blackburn Rovers team cut down to 10 men when their full-back, Dave Whelan, now owner of Wigan Athletic, was carried off with a broken leg. Already an own goal down, Blackburn still proceeded to play largely the better football, but as they tired, Deeley, operating on the right flank, but always ready to move into the middle, swooped twice.
Altogether, he played 235 First Division matches for Wolves, scoring 75 goals and winning two Championship medals in successive seasons. The first came in 1957-58, when, in 41 appearances, thus missing but a single game, he scored 23 goals. The following season he scored another 17 in 38 appearances.
When things were going wrong for Wolves, he would do his energetic and intelligent best to put them right. As when, in the absence of the team's playmaker, Peter Broadbent, in a game lost 1-0 at Tottenham in September 1961, one wrote: "Deeley did his best to supply the lack of generalship but, well as he played, neatly as he controlled the ball, cleverly as he passed, a winger can do only so much, even when he wanders."
Deeley won two caps for England, on the ill-starred summer tour of South America: a 2-0 defeat in Rio de Janeiro by Brazil, when he was inevitably overshadowed by the explosive brilliance of his Brazilian opposite number at outside right, Julinho; the second in Lima, when Peru humiliated England, beating them 4-1.
In 1961-62 he left Wolves, and helped Leyton Orient to gain promotion to the top division, coming second in Division 2; he scored two goals in 14 games. Later he drifted into non-league, playing in turn for Worcester City, Bromsgrove Rovers and Darlaston, before retiring in 1974. He later worked at a community centre in Walsall and as a steward for Walsall FC. He lived on his at his late mother's home in Wednesbury.
· Norman Victor Deeley, footballer, born November 30 1933; died September 7 2007
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007ituary
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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