Rochdale, Centre of the Cultural Universe

I, and everyone else, thought I was a world-expert on Beatle-related trivia. Alas, I am found wanting.

Waiting for the Omega batteries to be replaced the other day I perused (lovely word) a bookshop which, by dint of fortuitous serendipity (is there any other kind?) had just had its weekly cart of knock-downs refilled at the front door. One of the three I bought was Melvyn Bragg's '12 Books that Changed The World'. Most of the 12 are sensible choices, eg, 'Principia Mathematica', 'Magna Carta', 'The King James Bible', but one of them, authored by "A Group of Former English Public School Men' in 1863, is a real surprise; 'The Rule Book of Association Football'. For those reading this in North America, that's soccer. A surprise but, when you think about it, it has had world-wide impact. Anyway, I digress because today's writing is not about Bragg's book but about another one, 'A Hard Day's Write' by Steve Turner. As the clever title explains, it's 'the stories behind every Beatles song'; where they were written, who wrote them and what was the inspiration.

Rochdale is famous for quite a few things (this is not digression, be patient, you'll get the conection later), some of which 'everyone' knows and some which are very eye-brow raising. For instance, did you know that Mark Chapman was born in Rochdale? OK, not that Mark Chapman but the BBC Radio 1 disc jockey.

Let's look at famous Rochdale things in no particular order.

The Esplanade
The River Roch flows through a 'dale', so, Roch-dale. The town, as is usual, was built around the river so the river runs through the center of the town. Nothing unusual about that. However, sometime in the 19th century the 'wise' men of Rochdale Council decided to cover the river, which up till then had pedestrian bridges to get from one side of the town to the other. I guess they needed to drive their horse-drawn carriages or maybe they were genuinly visionary and 'saw' the advent of the infernal combustion engine. The resulting road completely 'bridged' and covered the river from one end of the town center to the other and, because the length of a bridge is dependent on the width of a river and the width of a bridge depends on what particular length of the river is being bridged, Rochdale Town center was the second widest bridge in the world at the time and is still reputed to be the widest in Europe.

Rochdale Town Hall
This is such an oxymoronic building of real architactural significance. It sits in the middle of The Esplanade 'lording' it over the train-wrecks of other buildings like the bus terminal which should be donated to Al-Quaida to use as target practice. It would not be out of place as the City Hall of London or in any of the great cities of Europe.

Sir Cyril Smith MBE
'Big Cyril' was the youngest Mayor ever in Rochdale so he 'ruled' the comings and goings at the Town Hall. At his biggest he must have weighed around 400 pounds but he's a lot less now although you wouldn't call him slim. Traditionally the Mayor donated the prize for the 'Borough Championship', a 400 yard freestyle open to Rochdale and the immediately surrounding clubs. I have various inscribed beer tankards but Cyril was always good enough to ask what I wanted as the prize so I got to chose before the event was held :)

He progressed from local politics to national ones, becoming MP for the town and rising to Chief Whip ('put a bit of stick about') for the Liberal Party. Excellent chap; BBC TV did a commemorative programme on his 75th birthday. My copy of his autobiography is nicely and personally inscribed. He once explained to me the difference between a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) and Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE); OBE, he explained, stood for Other Bugger's Efforts, whereas MBE stood for My Bloody Efforts.

Monica Coughlan
When Cyril was doing his Parliamentary stint he would have fequently brushed shoulders with Jeffrey Archer, Chairman of the Conservative Party while Maggie was Queen, sorry, I meant Prime Minister. Lord Archer, represented Great Britain at Track and Field and is famous because he's a world-renowned author of books which sell well in airports and his life is straight out of one of his novels, literally (double pun); when he was 29 he went seriously bankrupt but decided to pay all his creditors back every single penny (and there were over 45,000,000 pennies involved) so he wrote a best selling thriller, 'Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less'. In Britain, however, he's even more famous because he was accused by the Daily Star newspaper of procuring a prostitute for 2,000 pounds (an amount now known as 'an Archer'). The prostitute was Monica Coughlan who was born and lived in Rochdale. Archer sued the Daily Star, winning record damages and costs of around 1.5 million pounds but it turned out he'd lied while giving evidence and he was charged and convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years in gaol. While in gaol he wrote his prison memoirs and so stayed in the best-seller lists. Monica didn't give evidence at the perjury trial; she was killed a few days before the trial when an escaping jewellery thief crashed into her car.

John Bright
Born in Rochdale, this guy became an MP for Durham, Manchester and Birmingham. He was instrumental in the Repeal of the Corn Laws and Parliamentary reform in the 1860's but failed to halt the Crimean War. A splendid orator, "The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land. You may almost hear the beating of his wings." He has a statue erected to him and a street named after him in Birmingham, a statue of him in Manchester, a school named after him in Llandudno in Wales, and a town named after him in Austria. He's buried in Rochdale.

According to manchesterhistory.net 'John Bright was known as an unyielding, unsympathetic mill owner. Whilst he was campaigning against slavery, he was resisting efforts to improve the slave-like conditions under which children worked in factories, including his own. It was also well known that the housing he provided for his workers was of such poor quality that they lived in the worst slums in a town not known for salubrious living conditions.'

Lisa Stansfield
Lisa had a world-wide number one hit with 'All Around The World' in 1989 and sang on Band Aid II 'Do They Know It's Christmas' the same year. She was born in Rochdale and went to Oulder Hill School where your Mum and I had a swim school and where Aquabears Swimming Club trained after I founded it and coached there. Somewhere there's a underwater picture of Tom swimming (eyes wide open) at a few months old in the Oulder Hill pool. When Lisa was around 11 years old she used to sing at our Club 'do's' and she was incredible; absolutely no surprise when she hit the big time. Stansfield is her real name and it's pure coincidence that Rochdale's most famous singer, Gracie Fields' real name, was Grace Stansfield. Lisa does, however, seem to have a sense of humour and irony as her recording studio is called Gracielands.

Gracie Fields
In the 1930's she was biggest singing and film artist in the world; think the Beatles in the 1960's, that's how big she was. Unbelievable but true. She was born in a fish and chip shop on Molesworth Street in 1898 and I used to go past it every day on the way to training.

Her voice was stunning but she used to deliberately hit wrong notes to crack the audience up, then would tell a joke in the broadest of Rochdale accents. A great comedienne and an incredible singer all rolled into one.

Oulder Hill School, where Lisa Stansfield used to attend and Tom first swum, houses the Gracie Fields Theatre.

The Co-operative Movement
Rochdale historians make a big thing of this but I've never understood the fuss. There's a quaint shop on quaintly named Toad Lane which is supposed to be the first 'Co-op' shop in the world. Big deal. The deal was every customer was a 'shareholder' in the company and you got annual dividends, or 'divi' based on the amount of business you did. Every time you bought something you gave them your 'divi number' and the shop assistant would write it out by hand on a small piece of paper with a carbon copy. The customer got the bottom, yellow copy and the shop kept the top, white copy. There's a definitive moment in the splendid UK TV series, Cracker, where Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) points out that you never forget your divi number. And it's true. Grandma's was 14696 and my Grandma's was 21080, pronounced, in best Lancashire as twenty-one-ought-eighty.

But, why not give every customer a simple discount, aka, lower your prices?

The Rochdale Cowboy
Mike Harding gets an honorary mention. He's not Rochdale at all but Crumpsall in Manchester, probably the only place in the world that wishes it were Rochdale! He recorded 'The Rochdale Cowboy' in 1975 and everybody thinks he's from the place. very funny record and very funny man. His autobiography is called, 'You Can See the Angel's Bum, Miss Worswick.'

The Sixth Incarnation of Doctor Who
Colin Baker was brought up in Rochdale before he transmogrified into a Time Lord. The official history casts some worrying uncertainty on his stability:

'Later, the Doctor was put on trial for the second time by his own race, the Time Lords. The prosecutor at that trial, the Valeyard, turned out to be a possible future, and evil, incarnation of the Doctor himself. The events of the trial tangled the Doctor's timeline slightly, as he left in the company of Mel, whom he technically had not yet met.

When the TARDIS was attacked by his old enemy the Rani, the Sixth Doctor was somehow injured and regenerated into the Seventh Doctor; the exact cause of the regeneration, however, has never been revealed on-screen.'

Rochdale Football Club
The Football Groundguide describes Rochdale FC as 'the most unsuccessful league club in history', but adds, 'has a rather nice ground with an odd name of Spotland, makes it sound like a large collection of spotty people but oh well'.

I went down to their training ground one day and they were sitting around doing not a lot. The Manager explained to me he'd given them a day off and they would not do much training for the next few days, 'Because they'd played so well the other night.' When I looked up the result, they'd lost 3-0.

Rochdale Olympic
In February 1961 I stood with your Grandad on Hudson Street and watched the Rochdale Olympic car factory burn down. When you study the lines of these cars from almost 50 years ago you have to marvel at the design. They would not need much updating to look superb even now. The designer, Richard Parker, took a lot of styling cues from his father's Porsche but if you look at Porsches from that era, you can see he moved on and improved a lot of the details, in fact you can see 21st Century Porsche design hints.

I guess one day I should get hold of one; it seems the right thing to do.

That's a pretty diverse group of people, places and things; all very nice and good to know but, apart from, maybe, Our Gracie, they pale into smog-filled, Satanic cotton-mill insignificance in terms of influence and impact compared to this final entrant. The winner was an event of such cultural significance that, quite possibly, every single person on the planet has heard about it and most know all the details except that it was held in Town Meadows, Rochdale, a short distance from the town centre.

The envelope please ... and the winner is;
It took place on the evening of Tuesday, 14 February 1843, St. Valentines day. And what better place to go on Valentine's day than Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal? It was advertised as 'The Grandest Night Of The Season!' and 'Positively The Last Night But Three!' It's no wonder than over a hundred and twenty years later someone who described himself as 'bigger than Jesus' would interpret these statements as the clincher, if you were in any doubt about attendance, 'A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed For All.' Who could doubt it really as they'd been in preparation for 'some days'.

That's right, 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite', the final track on side one of the greatest album ever produced was, as we all know, written by John Lennon directly from an 1843 poster advertising the event. What I didn't know, and I hang my head in shame, was that the 'show on trampoline', 'over men and horses, hoops and garters, lastly through a hogsghead of real fire', was actually in Rochdale. Rochdale! ROCHDALE! Little old Rochdale, scene of one of the greatest pop events in history. Eat your heart out Woodstock, Isle of Wight, Glastonbury, Monterrey.

Town Meadows, Rochdale is the new centre of the pop-culture Universe.

And I didn't know.