The Ship of Fools lies rigged and masted, awaiting departure for Cloud Cuckoo Land. But lo! here come a few stragglers. They’re wearing cloth caps and clogs, and carrying buckets of coal. By ’eck, they must be northerners! Clamber aboard, noble savages, we are ready to cast off. Steerage, purser.
You can’t beat a good old stereotype, and when it comes to stereotypes it appears you can’t whack those northern students at the University of York who feel, boo hoo, they are surrounded by intruders from the south. ‘We’re being overrun’ is the gist of it, so they have revived the university’s Northern Society to assert their independence.
Nor are they alone. Northern students at Cambridge have barged into the act like tipsy burglars, and there are signs of activity in the Great Wen, where few folk from the north have ever set foot. What fun it must be, with black-pudding nights and George Formby strum-alongs.
Lucy Morville, a first-year student at York, got togged up as a Pendle witch for a ‘getting-to-know-you’ pub crawl. Of course she did. She’s from Burnley, that strange town in east Lancashire where broom-hoppers are as plentiful as buttercups in May. She’s a slow learner. If you live in Burrn-leh even a trip to Oswaldtwistle can be exotic.
Her companions on the parade, it should be noted, included a Wallace and Gromit tribute act and some lost souls who thought dressing down as the Gallagher brothers added a touch of authenticity. So that’s what being ‘northern’ means – behaving like a berk.
Robyn Vinter, a northern scribbler for the Guardian, was swift to fan the flames of perceived snobbery. ‘It’s far from easy being a northerner in spaces and places where the default identity is southern. Still, we survive.’ People from London mocked her accent, was the gist of it, because she’s from Leeds. Of course, nobody in Leeds ever mocks Jacob Rees-Mogg, say, for the way he talks. They’re above that sort of pettiness.
According to Vinter, northern folk occupy a moral Mount Athos. The north, she writes, is chock-full of ‘progressive’ people who vote Labour, though she admits there are some ‘mindless flag wavers’. Those Jew-baiting Palestinian sympathisers get everywhere, even Harrogate.
There are indeed differences between north and south, just as there are differences between east and west. They are not as pronounced as they used to be, when the mines, steelworks and docks offered employment, and Manchester was Cottonopolis. But ancestral memories endure, felt in the blood. Lancashire still produces an abnormal number of comedians, Yorkshire many outstanding cricketers. It’s a cultural thing, absorbed rather than learned.
As a Lancastrian I tend to think well of northern folk, while acknowledging that performative bores let the side down
But how do you define a part of England, from the Mersey to the Tyne, which has given this country so much of its salt? The north is the Venerable Bede and Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. It is also the Beatles and Bernard Manning. It’s the Mystery Plays in York, the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, rugby league in Wigan, and brass bands everywhere.
Gladstone, Wordsworth, the Brontës, Captain Cook, Ken Dodd and Thomas Beecham were northerners. So are Alan Bennett, Joe Root, David Hockney and – saints preserve us – Angela Rayner. As a Lancastrian I tend to think well of northern folk, while acknowledging that performative bores let the side down. ‘Our ’ouse had only four bedrooms. The one next door had six. Don’t talk to me about deprivation!’
People talk differently north of Nottingham, as they do west of Bristol, but there should be no place for inverted snobbery or the creation of bogus working-class heroes. Albert Finney, for instance, may have been born in Salford, but he was no horny-handed son of toil. John Lennon was raised on Menlove Avenue, a symbol of Liverpudlian respectability.
Rex Harrison and Robert Donat, Oscar-winning actors who mastered received pronunciation, were brought up in Liverpool and Manchester. Bryan Ferry, a child of the Durham coalfield, might pass, vocally, for the King. Speaking badly deliberately is not the victory for democracy many class warriors imagine.
Fancy, a Northern Society in York! It makes as much sense as a Southern Society in Windsor. Stand on your own two feet, you soppy students. Face the world as Tom Finney and Leonard Hutton, those sporting knights from both sides of the Pennines, would have done.
As for Miss Vinter, pulling an oar on behalf of a title which began life as the Manchester Guardian, old-timers should remind her of another northern institution that has seen happier days. The only snobbery I have encountered in four decades of journalism was at the Oxbridge-heavy paper she represents so progressively. I got over it. So will she, the moment she puts away her crayons.
Comments