Doris was a strong and independent woman. As a teenager, she could dive off the top board in the public swimming baths. She could still do cartwheels into her sixties. Even in her nineties, she refused to the last to walk with a stick and preferred “furniture walking” instead! She had wanted to be a nurse and was desperate to be a Land Girl—going away from home to live and work on the farms while the men were at war. But her class and her father wouldn’t allow it. So, as many women like her did, she put her strength and sense of service into her family, her housework, and her friends instead.
During World War II, Doris married Albert Hargreaves at very short notice, when he received his papers for posting to Egypt (though, at the last minute, flat feet spared him from probable death, and he was posted to British coastal defences instead).32 Albert was seven years older and seemed reliable and steady. But my mum’s father still disapproved of them getting married and was convinced that my dad’s papers were forged. He stubbornly refused to come to the wedding until the very last minute—something he repeated with his youngest son, Raymond, many years later. Doris fought her dad to marry my dad, and, as in many of her other life’s battles, she prevailed.
Albert was the youngest son of a clogger—a maker of wooden clogs for the local mill workers. He was supporting his mother, by then a widow, who, with an arm mangled by factory machinery, lived on a disability allowance. Albert’s mum was heartbroken when she heard he was going to get married. She had imagined he would look after her for the rest of her life. Albert was quiet and calm. A dispensing chemist, or pharmacist, with a grammar school education, and good with numbers, he rose quickly to become a sergeant major in the Royal Artillery.33
Doris gave birth to her three boys—Peter, Colin, and then me—all three years apart and first raised us in a rented terraced house round the corner from her mum. A few years ago, our old street gained notoriety when the local council took Brendan Rodgers, Liverpool Football Club’s former manager, to court for allegedly failing to maintain and repair a property he owned and rented out there. The case was dropped when the council didn’t file its paperwork in time!34
Though wartime was over, rationing and austerity were still realities, so life didn’t get much easier. The front-room floor was a threadbare carpet square spread across green linoleum. The stone-paved kitchen was separated from the front room by an old army blanket our dad had brought home when he was demobbed, or demobilized, from the military—the earliest memory from my childhood. For my mum—and all the town’s working-class women like her—maintaining a clean home was a constant struggle. For all but two weeks a year, when most families left for their annual holidays, the factory furnaces and the coal fires in people’s homes kept the town under a thick pall of smoke and ash.35
By the mid-1950s, Britain’s postwar welfare state brought benefits to our family as it did to many others. We may only have been able to afford to move house on the back of the coalman’s lorry, but going up to the council estate where my mum and dad had been offered a home gave us a bath, a garden, and privet hedges.36
Typical of many postwar parents, Doris and Albert wanted to ensure their children had opportunities. School uniforms and caps were always spick and span. My older brothers went across town for violin lessons. And the annual holiday to the seaside by steam train was the treat for which Doris saved up all year—a week in Southport, three holidays in a row in Fleetwood, and, most exotically, even one overseas trip to the Isle of Man. Mum wouldn’t buy this on tick, or credit. “If you can’t pay for it, you shouldn’t have it,” she’d always say. She often worked two or three jobs—childminding, cleaning, and shop work—to acquire those extras and make ends meet.37
Many of these habits and values have stayed with me all my life. Work hard. Don’t expect things to come easily. Seize your opportunities. Make sacrifices. Never get into debt. Value a good education. Persist. But, whatever happens, always take and enjoy your holidays.
Northern Grit and Wit
When we grow up, most of us are shaped by our families, of course, but also by the language, landscape, and culture of our classes and communities. Accrington is in the northwestern part of England, a region around Manchester, described by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1838 as “the workshop of the world.”38 Barely a mile away from our house, James Hargreaves (no traceable ancestral connection) invented the spinning jenny—an innovation for rapidly winding fibre that revolutionized the cotton industry by replacing weavers with machines. Indeed, so revolutionary was Hargreaves’s invention that it brought a visit from a gang of Luddites, who placed a hammer in his hand and forced him to destroy his own technology.39
Accrington is a small former textile town of around forty thousand people in ranks of slate-roofed terraced houses that march up the hillsides to the moors. On my way to secondary school, I used to walk past hundreds of factory workers, standing outside in their navy-blue boiler suits, drinking hot tea from their pint pots on their union-required tea break. In its heyday, the town was booming.
The mills and the engineering factories are all gone now. So, too, are the Nori brickworks (Nori is iron in reverse) that, amongst other things, provided the foundations for the Empire State Building in New York and for Blackpool Tower—England’s diminutive facsimile of Paris’s La Tour Eiffel.40
Accrington’s singular and somewhat dubious claim to national fame is its football team. Accrington was one of the twelve clubs that founded the English Football League in 1888, the first such league in the world. In 1962, it was also the first club to be expelled from the league because of bankruptcy (it eventually reformed in 1968 and re-entered the football league in 2006, where it sat in the bottom division until its improbable promotion to the division above in 2018). I vividly remember my dad taking me to games as a child, where he stood me on top of an upturned brass shoebox so I could see. I might not have been raised in a shoebox, but once a fortnight, I was raised up by one!
In the 1980s, the club’s misfortunes were parodied in a TV advertisement for the Milk Marketing Board. It shows a boy being teased by his friend, who says that the then famous Liverpool Football Club striker Ian Rush told him that if he didn’t drink all his milk, he would only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley. “Accrington Stanley? Who are they?” the boy asks. “Exactly” is his friend’s riposte!41
Accrington is a subject of national derision, an old musical hall joke, a place that nobody ever goes to without a very good reason. In 2018, Express, the digital extension of the right-wing tabloid Daily Express, judged it to be the eighth-worst town in England (amongst a list of ten that mainly consisted of other towns from the Northwest).42 Even Mum said that the only good thing about Accrington was that you could get out of it easily.
“Leave as soon as you can,” she used to say to us boys. “There’s nothing here for you.” She probably overstated her case because, eventually, one by one, we all did leave—for Canada.
In their own way, though, the people of Accrington were, and still are, fiercely proud, warm, and welcoming. The Northwest is built on forthright men and feisty women whose families once worked in the ear-splitting atmospheres of engineering factories and weaving sheds. My mother, grandmother, uncles, and brothers all had jobs there at one time or another. A few hours spent on Ancestry.com reveals no hidden British aristocracy in our family tree. The only alleged claim to fame is that of Kenneth Wolstenholme, the TV commentator for England’s victory over Germany in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final and creator of that memorable phrase that accompanied England’s final goal, “They think it’s all over. It is now!” He was reputedly the distant cousin of my grandma, whose maiden name was Wolstenholme too.43
Going back several generations, a scan of family occupations brings up weaver, weaver, weaver, with repetitive