Mick McCann author of 'How Leeds Changed The World' on Leeds Social Realists

A word from the author.
This essay is in the book but it’s not wholly representative of it. This is one extreme of the content which stretches back to daft one line entries, such as below, and incorporates the light and shade between:

Umbilical cords, we’ve all had them – as has every one who’s been to or even thought about Leeds.

The following chunter was the first thing written, as I had an urge to chronicle Leeds writing. I wrote this piece as the book idea was gestating. Once on with How Leeds Changed The World there were a handful of topics that I thought needed more than a quick sweep (or even a full page), such as Industry, David Hartley, my relationship with LUFC etc.  Towards the end of the process I thought, you should chuck in the piece on writers as well.....save y’loads of work and people will just flick passed it, so I did.

The Leeds Social Realists: From muck to fantasy.

(Being aware of Martin Wainwright’s point that all is not dark and gritty in Leeds (the north), with his example of Lettice Cooper, and that writers can fall into cliché, I thought it best to completely ignore his perspective and hope no-one notices. They won’t notice it y’know, people are daft like that.)

Almost 50 years ago, at the Old Bailey, a jury was left to decide whether a book, previously banned from publication for over 30 years, was suitable to be read by the general population. Along with the graphic sex scenes, one of the main reasons for the books 30 year ban was the frequent use of the word fuck and its derivatives. ‘The star witness’ in The Lady Chatterley trial, sociologist and academic Richard Hoggart, was born and bred in Leeds, he came from a working class background and was educated to degree standard in the city. During the trial he pointed out that, on the way to court, he’d heard the ‘F word’ used three times on a building site and that it was common parlance, also arguing that the book should be available to ‘ordinary people’. The winning of this famous case brought increased freedom of expression to the UK publishing industry.

Leeds has a deep and, to my knowledge, much ignored literary history – hands up who heard of Isabella Ford’s novels, steeped in social realism and ‘ordinary’ people, Miss Blake of Monkshalton (1890), On the Threshold (1895) or Mr Elliott (1901). Writers from the city have provided some telling contributions to the freedom of authors and broadcasters to express themselves however they choose in pursuit of the ‘authentic’, of the ‘real’. There’s a rich seam of gritty, working class life chronicled, and often defended, as the authors map out worlds of survival, drugs, crime, underclass’s, battles with the police and ‘the authorities’, it’s often laced with a blunt, brutal colloquial humour and the fierce resilience of ordinary people. This interest in real, gritty crime has deep roots; while researching this article I discovered Murder Ballads of Old Leeds, a self published pamphlet from 1923, produced by Miss Olive O'Grady-Burt. In the introduction Olive states, 'I suppose my interest in murder ballads was first awakened in my infancy & on my mother's knee.’ In opposition to this bleak cityscape is the more gentle, often positive and playful Leeds outlook, captured by writers such as Alan Bennett and Keith Waterhouse whose characters are nonetheless ‘real’.
 

Armely's sixth most successful author, Mick McCann,
relaxes at home

To give an example of the extent of Leeds writing, I was invited to attend a book day at a West Leeds arts event and to provide a comic, mock literary photo of myself. I captioned the photo ‘Armley’s sixth most successful author, Mick McCann, relaxes at home.' People laughed, which pleased me, but I was only partially joking. Armley is an ‘inner city’ area of Leeds but on taking and collecting my son to his primary school we daily pass through gates that both Barbara Taylor Bradford (last count, 81 million books sold) and Alan Bennett passed through. Peter Robinson, who regularly lurks in the top sellers lists with his Inspector Banks novels, is also from Armley. I’ve discussed the idea of this article a couple of times with Boff Whalley, an Armley resident and playwright who, a few years ago, had his autobiographical novel Footnote published, including tales of his life in Chumbawamba and squatting in Armley. Now I’m a better writer than that lot, obviously, but I reckon they may have shifted more units.

Alan Bennett has, at times, nailed a sometimes gentle but still blunt humour, also found in Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse, that Boff, as an outsider, thinks pumps through the cities heart. Boff (from Lancashire originally but transplanted to Leeds in 1982) believes that ‘there is a unique character to Leeds writing; a grim and sullen bluntness coupled with a down-to-earth, no-frills sense of humour. If there’s a wry smile to be got out of tragedy, then Leeds is the place.’ Boff also suggests that what sometimes seems to be missing (and which becomes a trait of Leeds writers) is a sense of hope, of optimism. ‘Strange that so many Leeds writers end up living in London but that their own protagonists and heroes are noted for being unambitious, homely and ‘local’. ’ Boff touches on something that is very hard to define here, which I recognise, I’m not sure it’s a lack of optimism but there’s certainly an attitude of ‘keeping your feet on the ground’ of ‘not getting ideas above your station’ amongst the people of the city which, as much as anything, is a celebration, an affirmation of the ordinary.

There’s a much darker, grittier side that has fascinated many more writers. When the poem V by Leeds poet and playwright Tony Harrison was due to be aired by Channel 4 in 1987 there was press outrage at, in the words of the poem, ‘a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses’ including repeated use of the ‘C word’. A group of Tory MPs also put forward a Commons Early Day Motion in response, entitled Television Obscenity, to try to stop the broadcast, the poem was aired and the boundaries stretched.

Tony Harrison is concerned with something that also permeates many Leeds writers, capturing and protecting an ‘authentic’ Leeds voice and character. In Them & [uz] he studies the hegemony of working class artists by the ‘establishment’ which is also connected to his experience as a working class lad attending Leeds Grammar School, where his Leeds accent would be fought over. He believed his accent to be as, if not more credible and worthy than Received Pronunciation and fiercely defended it. Harrison has battled lifelong to establish the legitimacy of working class/ordinary people and their expression, pointing out that people like Keats and Wordsworth were ordinary people with pronounced, regional accents.

It’s not just Peter Robinson, and his Inspector Banks novels, there’s a preoccupation with many modern Leeds writers with authority, law, crime and the interaction between ‘under classes’ and the police leading to a gritty ‘real life’ drama. David Peace, from Ossett, 10 miles outside Leeds – also the former stomping ground of Stan Barstow, author of A Kind of Loving – plumbed these themes in his hugely successful Red Riding Quartet, dramatised by Channel 4. Kester Aspden’s critically acclaimed novel Nationality: Wog -The Hounding of David Oluwale documented the late 60s murder of David by two Leeds police officers, preceded by his brutalisation at the hands of the police and the authorities. My last, flopped novel, Nailed – Digital Stalking, had as its starting point the real life arrest of myself and partner by Leeds CID due to a SIM card given away on a message board five years earlier and is a dirty, gritty thriller with suspect police, an unpleasant protagonist and immersed in the nature of Leeds.

Bernard Hare’s hit novel Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew chronicles the real life experiences of a gang of young (many not even in their teenage years) children who are so far outside society that to describe them as marginalised is to underplay their abandonment. It’s a tale of exclusion, car TWOCing, drugs, nonces, battles with the police and the authorities as the children simply try to survive and, maybe, one day escape their awful circumstances. In A Fair Cop, Michael Bunting comes at the topic from a different angle, with the true tale of a police officer wrongly imprisoned. John Lake’s novel Hot Knife follows a group of Leeds ne’er do wells in drug debt visiting petrol stations and post offices with a gun, culminating in gangland killings, it drips with authentic colloquial Leeds colour and diction.

What Bennett and Waterhouse often share with the more modern, ‘urban’ Leeds writers is the sense that this place is our whole world, that trying to escape it is useless – Billy Liar, for all his ambition, doesn’t get on the train. Leeds United fans will attest to this sense of chip-on-the-shoulder ‘digging in’, a fierce loyalty to the team/city, that can’t help but come out. Although some Leeds writers leave, they return often through their writing.



Mick's book launch.

 Billy Liar, by the late Keith Waterhouse, is a seminal work to many Northern people of a certain age, ingraining a certain attitude and playful, trapped, bitter sweet, fantasist comedy in their psyche whilst nailing, for some, the crucial attribute of bullshitting (the film also contained one of the first times the word ‘pissed’ was heard on screen and said by a woman). Morrissey, for example, was heavily influenced by the novel, using many lines from it, see The Smiths song ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’. Consciously and sub-consciously, the attributes of Billy Liar certainly influenced my first book, Coming Out as A Bowie Fan In Leeds, Yorkshire, England. Alan Bennett has also recorded this gentle but still blunt, tell it how it is, Leeds humour, which rears up unexpectedly into poignancy or tragedy. From his acclaimed Talking Heads to the more recent A Life Like Other People's, Untold Stories and production of his early 80s play Enjoy, much of Bennett’s work is submerged in the characters, wit and insights of Leeds.

Keith Waterhouse went on to collaborate with his childhood friend Willis Hall, another Leeds writer who drew inspiration from his working class, Leeds roots. Together they wrote many stage and screen plays, from Worzel Gummidge to the seminal 60s, study of northern life, A Kind of Loving, from the popular 70s ITV series Budgie to the, children finding Jesus in a barn, film Whistle Down the Wind. While I’m discussing film and TV material I mustn’t forget one of my favourite Leeds dramatists, Kay Mellor and her passion for the city and its people, ‘I am Leeds born and bred, and the city, both architecturally and socially, feeds my creativity.’ Her output stinks of the ‘authentic’ and of ordinary Leeds/Bradford folk through popular television drama serials, including Band of Gold, Fat Friends, Strictly Confidential etc. she straddles the space between the dark and gritty, Peace, Hare etc. and the gentler Bennett, Waterhouse etc. Returning to Willis Hall, he also wrote radio plays, musical and straight theatre, nonfiction (with people like Bob Monkhouse and Michael Parkinson) and a successful series of children’s Vampire books, following in the footsteps of famous Leeds children’s author Arthur Mitchell Ransome and his classic Swallows and Amazons series, written 50 years earlier.

Childhood and adolescence, unsurprisingly, is another theme that travels across many of the Leeds writers and a sense of losing/preserving something. Like Tony Harrison’s work scattered with memories of his working-class childhood, Barry Tebb, author and poet, repeatedly tried to capture childhood and its 1940s Leeds backdrop in novels such as Margaret and Pitfall Street and throughout his extensive poetry. Leeds-born dramatist (and currently head writer for TV’s ‘Casualty’) Mark Catley once remarked that he bases almost everything he writes on his childhood years growing up in Beeston, since that time was so ripe with both stories and characters. Bennett's A Life Like Other People's and Untold Stories chronicling the sensitive, awkward, loner child and adolescent in 1940s and early 50s Leeds. Keith Waterhouse painting his 30s/40s childhood and early life through his novels There is a Happy Land and City Lights: A Street Life. In my first book (COAABFILYE) 1960s childhood is considered while I also try to pin down and dissect the freedom of 70s childhood/adolescence. My experience of an expansive, easy, loving childhood was in stark contrast to the 1990s, excluded childhoods cut brutally short or murdered in Hare’s Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew.

As Bennett had done with Beyond the Fringe and the BBC television comedy sketch series On the Margin, Waterhouse and Hall also collaborated on and made a crucial contribution to British satire with programmes such as That Was The Week That Was, BBC-3 (where Kenneth Tynan uttered the ‘F word’ for the first time on British television) and The Frost Report. Leeds people aren’t renowned for their comic nature in a way that, say Liverpudlians are, but humour pulses through the city and its famous writing, comedic sons include Barry Cryer (also The Frost Report) whose writing credits are for a who’s who of British (and American – Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Richard Pryor) comedy from Dave Allen and Tommy Cooper through to The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise. Ernie Wise is another son of Leeds along with Vic Reeves, Jeremy Dyson of The League of Gentlemen, Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh, Leigh Francis creator of Bo' Selecta!, Avid Merrion, and his pure Leeds character and humour of Keith Lemon.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it notes that there is a Leeds literary scene; it’s just that we’re too ‘down to earth’ to mention it, it’s part of the fabric of Leeds not to blow its own trumpet. It helps to explain to me, and thousands like me, part of who I am. It’s also an opportunity to doff my bipperty-bopperty hat at Leeds writers for keeping it real and in the process helping to shape the more realist, reflective and edgy strands of British literature, drama and comedy.

A Writer's Return

By Nick Ahad, Yorkshire Post

Caryl Phillips can sense something in the air.
At 52, the writer has been around long enough to recognise a literary movement, particularly when he’s part of it.
“I am definitely aware that I am part of something,” says Phillips from his New York home. “It happened in the 1980s when I found myself being spoken about alongside Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and others in the context that we were writers and colonial outsiders. We all knew each other, but we didn’t consider ourselves as some kind of group. We did, however, recognise that something was going on.
“I detect something similar in the air now.”
The feeling of déjà vu is because Phillips is now being referred to as part of a new generation of writers who are inspired by the city of Leeds and will be returning to home territory on Thursday to discuss the new movement with Anthony Clavane, author of Promised Land (picture of Phillips and Clavane above).
Born in St Kitts, Phillips’s family moved to Leeds when he was four months old. An exceptionally bright youngster, he studied at Oxford, before embarking on a literary career which has seen him acclaimed as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. In recent years he has also taken up a post at Yale University.
He now fits his teaching duties alongside his own writing and lecturing at Oxford, where he is a visiting professor, and a huge number of other appearances, including the event with Clavane, a Leeds contemporary and friend, whose recent book Promised Land, has been highly praised.
His book concerns itself with Leeds United, which immediately endears it to Phillips, a die hard LUFC fan, but it also examines two other strands – the literary heritage of the city and the Jewish immigration into Leeds and how that has defined it.
As a young black boy growing up in Leeds, Phillips – Caz to his friends – has been outspoken about the racism he experienced, particularly at school. A saviour for Phillips came in the shape of a teacher who at the time the author remembers had a soft spot for him. He later discovered the teacher’s Jewish heritage.
“His name was Ernest Stern. I never understood why he spent so much time on me, encouraging me. He always went out of his way to remind me that I had a responsibility as a boy from the Caribbean and coming here to Leeds,” says Phillips.
“I later found out he was a leader of the Jewish community, a very important member, and I think it was then that I realised he had encouraged me because he understood what it was to be an immigrant in this city.”
The sense of the outsider is strong in Phillips’ work and it is one that links his writing with Clavane’s. “I grew up very much aware of this sort of fortress mentality to the city and that didn’t just come out of the feelings around the football team,” he says.
“It was a very loathed place in the 1970s, it was seen as unhip, dark, dangerous place. If you grow up somewhere which is seen in such a way,
and if that place has nourished you, then you develop this sense of the fortress mentality.”
Leeds, however, has changed. Phillips, who still makes regular trips to the city, says he sees a new city growing out of the one he understood growing up, a place where his London-based literary agent comes for weekend trips.
“I think writers are trying to make sense of that. This place that was not sexy suddenly has people arriving on the train for the weekend and heading into Malmaison with their designer luggage and bottles of water,” says Phillips.
“How do you integrate in your head the image of Leeds as the place where the Ripper stalked, with this gleaming new Leeds by the riverside?
“There is a new dynamism in the city which I think young writers – and writers who are unpublished that we have never heard of – are trying to make sense of.”
Phillips might attempt to make more sense of this when he and Clavane examine the issue on Thursday.

The Young Writers' Hub

"My aim was to find young writers, publish them, get them to come to events, and turn them into proper writers," said Wes Brown, founding editor of Leeds-based online magazine the Cadaverine.

The Cadaverine publishes the best new poetry and prose from writers under the age of 25.

"I saw with the Writing Squad (an Arts Council-funded programme for emerging new writers in Yorkshire and the Humber) that there are lots of young writers, but no young writers' magazines," said Wes. "Or the ones that did exist looked like the attempts of a 40-year-old trying to appeal to a 14-year-old."

Wes applied for funding from the Arts Council, and received just under £5,000 to create the Cadaverine. He said:

"I wanted very high aesthetic values. If you make it look serious and professional, an online magazine can be equal to its published counterparts."

As well as publishing writers online, the Cadaverine has published an anthology – with funding from the Writing Squad – and holds monthly open mic nights, where poets and writers can showcase their work.

With an editorial team of six, the site publishes poetry, prose, reviews and opinion pieces, hoping generate interest not only from the publishing industry but from the wider public too.

"I wanted to have a proper readership, that was the core thing," Wes said.

The Cadaverine has received over 30,000 hits in the three years it has been live and its reputation within the writing industry is constantly growing.

Wes said:

"Publishers across the country pass young writers to us for guidance. We have a huge talent pool, and are well known on the circuit. We've even had people who have never written before coming to us with their work."

Wes is pleased with the work he has been able to showcase through the Cadaverine.

"We've got a generation of writers who will go on to big things. People have met through us and gone on to do new projects," he said. "Readers will read the work in the e-zine then follow that writer on Twitter or read their blog. A writing community can be built around that."

Wes recently stepped down as general editor to take time to write his novel Shark (itax), due to be published by Fruit Bruise press in October. He added:
"I thought that I had done a few years and it was good, but you want to carry on doing other things."

Jo Brandon is now general editor, and Wes feels confident that his magazine is in safe hands. "She's really stepped up to the role," he said, "She's dedicated and talented."

Jo now managed the magazine – overseeing the editorial team and organising events and links with publishers.

"Writing is an extremely hard industry to get into," she said. "I think publications like the Cadaverine are really important. It's very easy to feel isolated as a young writer so I think the key thing is to creative a supportive network."

Jo submitted her own work to the site before becoming general editor, so knows first hand what the Cadaverine can offer. She said:

"I continue to benefit from the Cadaverine as a young writer. We offer feedback and editorial support on work prior to publication, advice on developing drafts, and we have a large and diverse readership."

This formula has proven successful – submissions are coming in from the US and across Europe, and Jo has big plans to expand the site.

"We're going to begin publishing e-books (digital books viewed online) shortly so that will be something new for us and we'd like to publish our second print anthology," she said. "We also want to participate in more national arts events."

Since handing over the Cadaverine, Wes has continued his work with young writers on a wider scale, as the National Association of Writing in Education's (NAWE) young writers coordinator for Yorkshire.

As part of the Yorkshire's Young Creative Writers project, his role is to coordinate a new online hub so that young writers across the region can collaborate, promote their work, and connect with literary communities not only in Yorkshire but across the UK.

The hub will be a resource for existing young writers to develop their work, for new writers looking for guidance and for teachers and educators to offer opportunities for their students.

"It will be run by and for young people," Wes said. "I want to expose writers in Yorkshire - I act as an advocate for them."

Plans include author profiles, podcasts, and a listing service for young writers' blogs, e-zines and writing websites. There are also plans for writers to be able to apply for grants to help develop their work.

Wes said:

"Whatever the reason or ability level, the aims or the aspirations of young writers, as coordinator I can act as a point of contact for the latest news, keep up to date with grass-root developments – the success, the achievements and the difficulties."

Source: The Guardian

Real Leeds: The Poet, The Novelist, The Historian

There is something about Leeds. Or, at least, about Leeds writers. This thought occurred to me whilst watching the West Yorkshire Playhouse revival of Billy Liar. Actually, it occurred during the interval, whilst reading the programme notes about the author, Keith Waterhouse. The article began: “No-one could have imagined that a scruffy, begraggled youngster wearing hand-me-down clothing and living in the ‘wrong’ side of Leeds in a back-to-back house in the 1930s would emerge one day as a revered writer.”

And I thought: “Why not?”

It is somehow expected that writers, musicians, actors and artists that live in the wrong side of, say, Liverpool or Manchester will one day emerge as national figures. It is almost compulsory. From the Beatles and ‘Coronation Street’ in the 1960s to the Manc bands who reinvented indie music, the north has made a huge impact on contemporary culture. But whereas scruffy, bedraggled lads and lasses from our rival northern cities are always viewed as part of a movement – the Merseybeat poets, the Madchester sound etc – no-one ever talks about a Leeds movement.

As I document in my book Promised Land, many of the angry young men of the 60s came from Leeds and its surrounds. In the 1990s, a new generation of iconoclasts emerged, including the likes of Caryl Phillips, Kay Mellor and David Peace. And in 2010, 50 years after Billy Liar exploded on to the West End stage, hardly a month has gone by without another Loiner launching a new publication. And yet the blinkered metropolitan elites down south refuse to acknowledge this new wave of West Riding writers.

In November, I will share a platform with three of them at an event entitled Real Leeds: The Poet, The Novelist, The Historian. It is chaired by Kester Aspden, whose shocking account of the hounding of rough sleeper David Oluwale exposed one of the most notorious racist crimes in British history. The poet is Ian Duhig, whose wonderfully droll new collection of work paints a far truer picture of Britain’s cultural diversity than most documentary accounts have given us. The novelist is Wes Brown, whose astonishing first novel, Shark, combines the grittiness of a David Storey with the existential reflections of a Don DeLillo.

And I am the historian, having taught the subject many moons ago and, in my own book, tried to tell the story of my beloved – and at times bedevilled – city from three different, but intertwining, perspectives: the football team, the Jewish community and the writers who, I believe, have never been credit for their influence on post-war British life.

Real Leeds is on Thursday, 4th November, 7pm at Waterstones, Leeds. It marks the publication of three new books of Leeds interest: Wes Brown’s Shark, Anthony Clavane’s Promised Land and Ian Duhig’s Pandorama. It is chaired by The Hounding of David Oluwale author Kester Aspden. Tickets are free but must be booked through Waterstones in advance on 0113 244 4588

Source: The Leeds Guide