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.