Bang in the Middle. Robert Shore

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ methods were unique. He was essentially a dictator, and not always a benevolent one.’ Given his much-quoted pronouncements on his dealings with his players, Clough could hardly have disagreed with this assessment. ‘We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right’ was how he once explained his manner of dealing with team members who questioned his tactics. He rarely indulged in self-doubt: ‘I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one,’ he famously opined. Yet despite (or perhaps even because of) that, when the end came for him professionally – Forest relegated, Clough battling alcoholism – he cut a peculiarly pathetic figure. And, of course, he never made English football’s top job – manager of the national team – a failure he deeply regretted. ‘I’m sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I’d want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that’s exactly what I would have done,’ he commented. For all his successes, Clough remains the archetypal Midland tragic hero.

      There’s also a more serious, socially engaged side to this eccentric, rebellious Nottingham spirit. It’s a tradition that begins with the Gest of Robin Hood, written in about 1500 – ‘For he was a good outlaw, / And did poor men much good’ – and finds particularly strong expression in the region’s line of Nonconformist (i.e. dissenting from the Church of England) religious radicals. It strikes me that there’s more than enough matter here for a Midland foundation myth or two.

      If you head south-east from Nottingham city centre, you find yourself climbing out of the Trent valley and up Sneinton Hill. Here, outside 12 Notintone Place, stands a weathered statue of a preacher with arm upraised in full oratorical flow. This is William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and the building he guards is the William Booth Birthplace Museum.

      Like his fellow Midlander Margaret Thatcher, Booth (1829–1912) was a Methodist with an extraordinary zeal for his chosen line of work. ‘His spirit was like a white flame … There was nothing of the gentle saint about him,’ a journalist named Philip Gibbs reported in 1902.

      On the day I went to see him, on behalf of the Daily Mail, he started by being angry, and then softened. Presently he seized me by the wrist and dragged me down to my knees beside him. ‘Let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth [the great press baron and owner of the Mail],’ he said. He prayed long and earnestly for Harmsworth, and Fleet Street, and the newspaper Press that it might be inspired by the love of truth and charity and the Spirit of the Lord.

      Amen to that – but did Booth intend this little performance to be at least semi-humorous? Certainly Gibbs paints the scene comically, and there is evidence elsewhere that, for all his spiritual dedication and blood-and-thunder rhetoric, Booth had a splendid sense of the absurd. For instance, the early Salvation Army was a notable equal-opportunities employer, a progressive idea to which Booth gave memorable verbal form when he exclaimed: ‘My best men are women!’

      Indeed, Booth’s heady strain of Midland eccentricity was his greatest spiritual weapon, and it was only when he began to give full vent to it, in 1878, that he really found his feet as a preacher. It was at this time that Booth literalised the notion of Christian soldiers fighting sin by reorganising his Christian Mission along quasi-military lines and renaming it the Salvation Army. Booth himself took the title of ‘General’, with his ministers also being accorded military ranks, and all now began to ‘put on the armour’ (the Salvation Army’s own uniform) for their ministry work. It was a daring, potentially silly idea – but it captured the public imagination: within four years, one London survey estimated that on a particular weeknight the Salvation Army attracted 17,000 worshippers while the Church of England got only 11,000 through its doors.

      Booth’s influence as a reformer extended well beyond purely spiritual matters. His bestselling book In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) in many respects served as the blueprint for the British welfare state in 1948. Booth compared industrialised England with ‘Darkest Africa’ and found the former wanting. In ‘The Cab-Horse Charter’ he wrote: ‘when a horse is down he is helped up, and while he lives he has food, shelter and work’; the same basic level of social assistance, he suggested, should be extended to humans too. The rest of the book is concerned with various schemes to improve the living standards of millions of poor and homeless people in Britain.

      Booth was no Northern socialist, though. Rather, it’s the Midland spirit of self-sufficiency, or the yeoman ideal, as it’s sometimes called, that underpins his thinking. Where the state would not or could not act, the individual must step into the breach, Booth believed. Thus when the General and his wife, the redoubtable Catherine, discovered the national shame that was ‘Phossy Jaw’ (a condition caused by the toxic fumes given off by yellow phosphorus which caused the premature deaths of innumerable female match-factory workers by destroying their faces), the Booths’ response was simple: they opened their own factory, using only harmless red phosphorus in their manufacturing process and paying their workforce twice as much as traditional employers such as Bryant & May. Booth was justly proud of his achievement and organised tours of his ‘model’ factory for MPs and journalists.

      Despite his extraordinary influence, Booth struggled to find favour with the Establishment. Actually, that’s not quite true – like all true Midlanders, he never even tried to curry favour with the Establishment. If Lord Shaftesbury chose to brand him the ‘Anti-Christ’, so be it. If others were outraged by his ‘elevation of women to men’s status’, let them complain: time would prove him right. And indeed, as the tide of opinion shifted, Booth found himself granted audiences with kings, emperors and presidents. When he died – or was ‘promoted to Glory’, as the organisation’s own terminology has it – in 1912, the Salvation Army was at work in fifty-eight countries; 150,000 mourners attended his funeral. As even the archbishop of York came to acknowledge, the distinctively unconventional flavour of the Army’s meetings and services – characterised by joyous singing and a Midland informality – allowed Booth and his followers to get their message across to people whom the Anglican Church had traditionally been powerless to reach.

      * * *

      It’s getting late so I drive north out of Nottingham, through the suburban sprawl of Sherwood Rise and Arnold, into the rolling farmland around Papplewick, on through leafy, wealthy Ravenshead with its Byronic ruins, and back to the ‘once-romantic, now utterly disheartening colliery town’, as local literary celeb D.H. Lawrence characterised Mansfield in his infamous dirty book Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence made this pronouncement eighty-odd years ago and, though it’s still a disheartening place, Mansfield is no longer a colliery town. Thereby hangs a tale, and perhaps a key to unlocking the character of Mansfield folk, and of Midlanders more generally.

      In common with the rest of the country, most of the collieries in the Mansfield area closed in the wake of the miners’ strike of 1984–85. The fabled industrial dispute has often been portrayed as a good-versus-evil struggle pitting ordinary working people, mostly in the North, against an uncomprehending and vengeful government, entirely in the South. Thus, when Channel 4 commissioned an artist (from London) to create a work commemorating the strike, it was an event in South Yorkshire – ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, a confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant – that the artist in question, Jeremy Deller, chose to focus on. ‘On 18 June 1984 I was watching the evening news and saw footage of a picket at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire in which thousands of men were chased up a field by mounted police,’ Deller has written. ‘It seemed a civil war between the North and the South of the country was taking place in all but name.’ That last sentence is quite wrong – the strike affected the whole of the UK – but it fits nicely with the mythology of the North/South divide so it’s unlikely to raise many eyebrows. But were events in Yorkshire and the North, and the stand-off between police and striking miners, the only or even the main ‘story’ of the strike? If they were, it’s hard to understand Mansfield’s role in it, or why chants of ‘scab’ – meaning someone who refuses to join a strike – СКАЧАТЬ