Tuesday 10 June 2008
Churchill
The Papers of Piers Brendon
GBR/0014/BREN
Brendon, Piers (1940-), historian
1993–2000
11 boxes
Transcripts of interviews with Alan Brien and Anthony Montague Browne (former Private Secretary to Churchill). Transcript page numbers 435-538. 1 file
Janus
GBR/0014/BREN
Brendon, Piers (1940-), historian
1993–2000
11 boxes
Transcripts of interviews with Alan Brien and Anthony Montague Browne (former Private Secretary to Churchill). Transcript page numbers 435-538. 1 file
Janus
Three After Six: Rediffusion Television & Benny Green
He first worked for the BBC in 1955 and worked regularly for it from then on. In the 1960s he often appeared (with, among others, Alan Brien, Dee Wells and Robert Pitman) on Three After Six, Associated Rediffusion's early evening television discussion programme on current affairs,. In the 1980s he contributed occasionally to Stop the Week, Robert Robinson's Saturday discussion programme on Radio 4. Green also wrote and/or narrated many radio documentaries about stage and film musical stars and Hollywood, his other main interest apart from jazz and sport. He also wrote for magazines, including Punch, and regularly for newspapers. He was a big fan of writer P. G. Wodehouse, about whom he wrote a literary biography (1981).
Profumo & Claud Cockburn
In the summer of 1963 Cockburn took up an offer from Richard Ingram to edit a special edition of Private Eye. It was the height of the Profumo Affair which, coinciding with Cockburn's decision to put greater emphasis on politics in the satirical magazine, propelled Private Eye into mass circulation and national prominence. The format has stayed pretty much the same for the last twenty-seven years. Alan Brien, who worked with Cockburn ...
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/Profumo.html
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/Profumo.html
I suspect that the continued production of indexless books is simply due to a mixture of parsimony and slovenliness.— Alan Brien, Sunday Times (23 Feb
Society of Indexers, Woodbourn Business Centre, 10 Jessell Street, Sheffield S9 3HYTel: +44 (0)114 244 9561 Fax: +44 (0)114 244 9563
info@indexers.org.uk
Why have an Index?
Alan often looked to the index first and sometimes read the last page or paragraph before the end.
info@indexers.org.uk
Why have an Index?
Alan often looked to the index first and sometimes read the last page or paragraph before the end.
As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protégé. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama ..
The man is a lion of prides. The mane is wayward and unhatted. The massive head and frame are by Hogarth, the voluminous suit by Khrushchev's tailor. An excess of ergs twitches his head and fingers; the English hair and teeth, the cockney-of-the-walk intonations announce his presence in the densest lobby crush. In the past two years, the New York Times's Clive Barnes has become a public character, the most theatrical and prolific critic since the days of Alexander Woollcott.
He is not only the Times drama critic but its dance critic as well. He revisits hits to make sure audiences are getting their money's worth. He often has simultaneous reviews in the same edition; once he had four, an event that occasioned a different kind of criticism—from management. They conspired to persuade him to relinquish one job, but ended by giving him two offices, one in which to compose ballet reviews, the other for batting out theater pieces—carried throughout the U.S. on the N.Y. Times News Service.
Soot and Dickens. In addition to his twin assignments, Barnes teaches a course in critical writing at New York University, writes a monthly column for Holiday, flies over 100,000 miles a year on the lecture circuit, appears on educational television, and dictates a monthly contribution to the British periodical Dance and Dancers.
After William Butler Yeats met Oscar Wilde, he wrote: "I never before heard a man talking sentences as if he had written them all overnight." Barnes is Wilde's mirror image. His written work reads as if he had just spoken it. The criticism, the speeches, the conversation tumble out with blithe facility as if on a reel of four-track tape. One wonders whether there will be an end to it: it seems unbelievable that there was a beginning.
There was. "I was your typical working-class overachiever," says Barnes. Like soot and Dickens, he is a London slum product. His father, an ambulance driver, deserted Mum when Clive was seven. The brilliant, chunky lad played his part well in school; a scholarship helped him into Oxford's postwar meritocracy, along with Director Tony Richardson and Sunday Times Arts Columnist Alan Brien. As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protégé. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama and dance criticism."He just liked to turn on a verbal tap," recalls Brien, "bottle the words that come out and then begin filling the next bottle."
London Lisp. The stuff in the bottles sparkled. The New York Times began to buy small pieces in 1963, in 1965 invited him to be its staff dance critic. For Barnes, the deadlines were lifelines; the city was home. "From childhood," he claims, "I had inhaled imported U.S. culture in films and drama. I was immediately Americanized."
Well, almost. The supporting actor who was playing Clive Barnes in the early New York days was considerably different from the star who plays him now. In his first few months on the job, listeners to the Times radio station WQXR were astonished to hear a London lisp on the evening news: "Thith ith Cloive Bawneth, dawnthe cvitic of the New Yawk Timeth." A put-on, many decided. But the speech defect was real. The speaker, moreover, was as straight as a line of type. After shedding his first wife of ten years, Barnes married Patricia Winckley, a lithe balletomane who looked like a swan on leave from St. James's Park. In New York, the Barneses and their two children, Christopher, 7, and Maya, 5, settled into a sprawling pad on Riverside Drive. The overachiever brushed up his diction, stiffened his self-assurance and pressed on.
Even before Barnes became drama critic, his appetite for theatrical performances was notorious. "If you dimmed the lights in a car," says a fellow critic, "Clive would have tried to review it." Two years ago, after Howard Taubman succeeded Brooks Atkinson and Stanley Kauffmann succeeded Taubman, the New York Times turned to Clive Barnes. His first reviews ran on heedlessly, as Barnes reviewed the theater, the audience, the seats. But by the following season he was as relaxed as an actor in the second year of a hit comedy, still babbling, but in the manner of a relaxed and witty raconteur.
Drama Ghetto. The harder he worked, the heavier he grew—and the bigger target he made. "If I decide to stay around Broadway beyond the current season," griped Producer David Merrick, "it will be for the pleasure of throwing his fat limey posterior out in the street." Fellow Critic John Simon fulminated in New York Magazine: "The APA production of The Misanthrope is as bad as . . . as . . . it is hard to find an adequately monstrous simile. As bad—let me try—as its review by Clive Barnes." Dance and Music Critic B. H. Haggin briskly summed up Barnes' critical efforts as "uncomprehending nonsense." The critic's critics have not been entirely unjust. Barnes' manic dance criticism often reads more like promotion than analysis. And frequently a drama review will come down with logorrhea simply because he didn't have time to write a short one.
Now that New York City has but three major newspapers, Barnes has unprecedented authority, even for a Times critic. His raves can light up marquees for two years; his pans have flushed million-dollar musicals into the Hudson River. Staking out territory where first-stringers rarely used to tread, he helped revitalize off Broadway, formerly the ghetto of drama. "Today," Barnes believes, off Broadway "is the last place where a writer has the freedom to fail."
Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."
Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."
Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."
Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."
Time magazine
Overachiever
Friday, Apr. 11, 1969
He is not only the Times drama critic but its dance critic as well. He revisits hits to make sure audiences are getting their money's worth. He often has simultaneous reviews in the same edition; once he had four, an event that occasioned a different kind of criticism—from management. They conspired to persuade him to relinquish one job, but ended by giving him two offices, one in which to compose ballet reviews, the other for batting out theater pieces—carried throughout the U.S. on the N.Y. Times News Service.
Soot and Dickens. In addition to his twin assignments, Barnes teaches a course in critical writing at New York University, writes a monthly column for Holiday, flies over 100,000 miles a year on the lecture circuit, appears on educational television, and dictates a monthly contribution to the British periodical Dance and Dancers.
After William Butler Yeats met Oscar Wilde, he wrote: "I never before heard a man talking sentences as if he had written them all overnight." Barnes is Wilde's mirror image. His written work reads as if he had just spoken it. The criticism, the speeches, the conversation tumble out with blithe facility as if on a reel of four-track tape. One wonders whether there will be an end to it: it seems unbelievable that there was a beginning.
There was. "I was your typical working-class overachiever," says Barnes. Like soot and Dickens, he is a London slum product. His father, an ambulance driver, deserted Mum when Clive was seven. The brilliant, chunky lad played his part well in school; a scholarship helped him into Oxford's postwar meritocracy, along with Director Tony Richardson and Sunday Times Arts Columnist Alan Brien. As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protégé. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama and dance criticism."He just liked to turn on a verbal tap," recalls Brien, "bottle the words that come out and then begin filling the next bottle."
London Lisp. The stuff in the bottles sparkled. The New York Times began to buy small pieces in 1963, in 1965 invited him to be its staff dance critic. For Barnes, the deadlines were lifelines; the city was home. "From childhood," he claims, "I had inhaled imported U.S. culture in films and drama. I was immediately Americanized."
Well, almost. The supporting actor who was playing Clive Barnes in the early New York days was considerably different from the star who plays him now. In his first few months on the job, listeners to the Times radio station WQXR were astonished to hear a London lisp on the evening news: "Thith ith Cloive Bawneth, dawnthe cvitic of the New Yawk Timeth." A put-on, many decided. But the speech defect was real. The speaker, moreover, was as straight as a line of type. After shedding his first wife of ten years, Barnes married Patricia Winckley, a lithe balletomane who looked like a swan on leave from St. James's Park. In New York, the Barneses and their two children, Christopher, 7, and Maya, 5, settled into a sprawling pad on Riverside Drive. The overachiever brushed up his diction, stiffened his self-assurance and pressed on.
Even before Barnes became drama critic, his appetite for theatrical performances was notorious. "If you dimmed the lights in a car," says a fellow critic, "Clive would have tried to review it." Two years ago, after Howard Taubman succeeded Brooks Atkinson and Stanley Kauffmann succeeded Taubman, the New York Times turned to Clive Barnes. His first reviews ran on heedlessly, as Barnes reviewed the theater, the audience, the seats. But by the following season he was as relaxed as an actor in the second year of a hit comedy, still babbling, but in the manner of a relaxed and witty raconteur.
Drama Ghetto. The harder he worked, the heavier he grew—and the bigger target he made. "If I decide to stay around Broadway beyond the current season," griped Producer David Merrick, "it will be for the pleasure of throwing his fat limey posterior out in the street." Fellow Critic John Simon fulminated in New York Magazine: "The APA production of The Misanthrope is as bad as . . . as . . . it is hard to find an adequately monstrous simile. As bad—let me try—as its review by Clive Barnes." Dance and Music Critic B. H. Haggin briskly summed up Barnes' critical efforts as "uncomprehending nonsense." The critic's critics have not been entirely unjust. Barnes' manic dance criticism often reads more like promotion than analysis. And frequently a drama review will come down with logorrhea simply because he didn't have time to write a short one.
Now that New York City has but three major newspapers, Barnes has unprecedented authority, even for a Times critic. His raves can light up marquees for two years; his pans have flushed million-dollar musicals into the Hudson River. Staking out territory where first-stringers rarely used to tread, he helped revitalize off Broadway, formerly the ghetto of drama. "Today," Barnes believes, off Broadway "is the last place where a writer has the freedom to fail."
Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."
Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."
Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."
Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."
Time magazine
Overachiever
Friday, Apr. 11, 1969
Sunderland Echoes
Alan Brien describes his ‘colonial experience’ growing up in the North East; photograph by Duffy
The sea, the North Sea, James Joyce’s “snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea”, which didn’t stay long in its proper playground, the endless Saharan scimitars of sandy beach or the crane-fringed fortresses of the quays, but reared up over the town, like a Disney storm-cloud.
Coal fires on sun-glazed summer afternoons. Parlour doors hung with inch-thick layers of plush drapery. Steamy, sweating caves of bed-clothes inhabited by dented aluminium hot-water bottles wrapped in old flannel drawers, or heavy stone jars with heavy stone stoppers. Backrooms of beer-only pubs, where the regulars, sitting so near their thighs interleaved, formed an idolatrous circle round the totem of glowing pillar-box stove.
Winter promenades along a fume-besieged front, the waves booming like cannons as they thundered under the Hapsburg lip of the beach wall and their spray exploded in great frozen stars of emerald grapeshot. Cold, the Enemy, always in your bones, worse even than the Tories
The last tram on Saturdays almost a jamboree, a cold-climate fiesta, packed with illuminated turn-to-mask faces, passengers swaying and singing inside its hurtling, glassy, goldfish tank, while the conductor gave up jangling his useless ticket punch, and the driver, cut off from us all behind his swinging chain, stamped his clanging bell and groaned us round right-angle bends on his way to the last stop before his terminus, my father’s Tram Shed.
At my father’s funeral, when the sea mist made the sky sag like the roof a waterlogged tent and rose among the grave stones like puffs of smoke, six old tramways-men materialised like genies, immaculate in long moth-balled navy and red uniforms, ticket-punches gleaming, to carry their comrade’s coffin - a working-class ceremonial no Guardees could have out-smarted - before vanishing again to take the new-fangled bus home on their pensioner’s travel passes.
Nobody ever goes to Sunderland by accident. Nobody ever happens to pass through it. It’s not on the road, or rail, to anywhere, or the centre for anything. An Anglo-Saxon Alsatia, it was still to us, growing up there in the Thirties, a North-Eastern Afghanistan where we were as cut off from that faraway capital of Empire, London, as any other colonial people. We weren’t directly occupied by Southern forces, but ruled instead by proxy, a puppet province subjugated by mass unemployment, pacified by the Means Test; our closed-down shipyards and part-time pits barely worth their exploitation. We were all working-class — even the one in three out-of-work; some, like several of my uncles, since the Armistice of 1918. We grew up in the class war, a war our side had already lost, though. Encouraged by my father, I joined a maquis which fought back at street-corner meetings. Even our middle class — the managers and small businessmen — were working class; though they sided with the oppressors, the absentee Tory owners of all we surveyed. But then, the mass of the natives were collaborators too, voting for the enemy — even if they secretly despised their foreign masters.
For everyone outside did seem foreign. Sunderland was England. The North East embodied all other worthwhile points of the compass. Who were the true Northerners, if not us? The Topographical War absorbed, and sublimated, much of the passion which would have fuelled the Class War. Our borders were between Darlington and York. Manchester, described by the alien-controlled BBC as Capital of the North was to us the Gateway to the Midlands. They still laugh, up in Sunderland, at Mike Parkinson’s Barnsley being anything but a Potemkin village, run up overnight for the Hampstead tourist trade, full of Berlitz proles in comic costume, speaking a regional Esperanto probably learned off Linguaphone records.
Sunderlanders thrive on paradox— you could equally say that nobody goes there, except by accident. Today, yesterday, they’re proud and self- pitying, resent you leaving, gawp at you coming back. Good with their hands, canny with their brains, tireless, indestructible, confident of out-doing Japs, Wops, Krauts and Yanks in anything. Yet inoculated against the Work Ethic, always able so find summink bettar ta dee. Never heard of the Problem of Leisure, (something the Depression gave plenty of), so prodigious and compulsive talkers, footballers, growers of leeks, breeders and trainers of dogs, workmen’s clubbers.
Sunderland is a one-storey town full of tall-storey men, a place flattened into a [?], near-
provincial acres of terraced bungalows giving way only to council estates consisting of serpentine culs‑de-sac, making a walk home over twice the distance in half the time a Londoner would queue for a number 11 bus.
They have an indelible local loyalty, history, [??] idiocies, yet watch the old [??] waste with a cynical apathy towns have suffered a planning [?] transplant, ancient mazes replaced by solid concrete plugs. Only Sunderland has been disembowelled with gaping holes. Our Big Ben town hall toppled, into a grassy dent which floods whenever it rains, like every Sunday. Our grandiose Grand Hotel vaporised into a cinder car park. Nowhere have they more cause to hate the Good Old Days, nowhere do they mourn them with such elegiac eloquence.
Home-town love is honourable patriotism. Sunderland: my Tin Pan Alley song. The hole in my foot I got vandalising a private development which dared infiltrate our council estate...the swollen eye-ball from the clod of mud while playing ghouls in the dark…stealing chocolates from Woolworths…seeing how far the tide came up your face in the Holy Rocks…riding our kid’s bike between trams… watching pigs cut open over the slaughterhouse wall…spouting Bolshevism on a box on the sea front... drinking in the Bede School library, hiding the French-letter catalogue inside Masefield’s Life of Jesus…a girl in Mowbray Park who [?] like Veronica Lake and who looks like Irene Handl and [?] the new generation have no standards
Sunderland, I love it, I don’t have to like it. After all, the people who live there, they do, and they don’t.
© Times Newspapers Ltd. 1976
In my mind’s eye, better these days than my body’s eye, I see its sea and streets. Focusing closer, the Docks the Tram Shed, where my brothers worked and where my father worked, twin poles for me of what was practically an off-shore island. Sunderland, originally ‘the Sundered Land’.
The sea, the North Sea, James Joyce’s “snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea”, which didn’t stay long in its proper playground, the endless Saharan scimitars of sandy beach or the crane-fringed fortresses of the quays, but reared up over the town, like a Disney storm-cloud.
Coal fires on sun-glazed summer afternoons. Parlour doors hung with inch-thick layers of plush drapery. Steamy, sweating caves of bed-clothes inhabited by dented aluminium hot-water bottles wrapped in old flannel drawers, or heavy stone jars with heavy stone stoppers. Backrooms of beer-only pubs, where the regulars, sitting so near their thighs interleaved, formed an idolatrous circle round the totem of glowing pillar-box stove.
Winter promenades along a fume-besieged front, the waves booming like cannons as they thundered under the Hapsburg lip of the beach wall and their spray exploded in great frozen stars of emerald grapeshot. Cold, the Enemy, always in your bones, worse even than the Tories
The last tram on Saturdays almost a jamboree, a cold-climate fiesta, packed with illuminated turn-to-mask faces, passengers swaying and singing inside its hurtling, glassy, goldfish tank, while the conductor gave up jangling his useless ticket punch, and the driver, cut off from us all behind his swinging chain, stamped his clanging bell and groaned us round right-angle bends on his way to the last stop before his terminus, my father’s Tram Shed.
At my father’s funeral, when the sea mist made the sky sag like the roof a waterlogged tent and rose among the grave stones like puffs of smoke, six old tramways-men materialised like genies, immaculate in long moth-balled navy and red uniforms, ticket-punches gleaming, to carry their comrade’s coffin - a working-class ceremonial no Guardees could have out-smarted - before vanishing again to take the new-fangled bus home on their pensioner’s travel passes.
Nobody ever goes to Sunderland by accident. Nobody ever happens to pass through it. It’s not on the road, or rail, to anywhere, or the centre for anything. An Anglo-Saxon Alsatia, it was still to us, growing up there in the Thirties, a North-Eastern Afghanistan where we were as cut off from that faraway capital of Empire, London, as any other colonial people. We weren’t directly occupied by Southern forces, but ruled instead by proxy, a puppet province subjugated by mass unemployment, pacified by the Means Test; our closed-down shipyards and part-time pits barely worth their exploitation. We were all working-class — even the one in three out-of-work; some, like several of my uncles, since the Armistice of 1918. We grew up in the class war, a war our side had already lost, though. Encouraged by my father, I joined a maquis which fought back at street-corner meetings. Even our middle class — the managers and small businessmen — were working class; though they sided with the oppressors, the absentee Tory owners of all we surveyed. But then, the mass of the natives were collaborators too, voting for the enemy — even if they secretly despised their foreign masters.
For everyone outside did seem foreign. Sunderland was England. The North East embodied all other worthwhile points of the compass. Who were the true Northerners, if not us? The Topographical War absorbed, and sublimated, much of the passion which would have fuelled the Class War. Our borders were between Darlington and York. Manchester, described by the alien-controlled BBC as Capital of the North was to us the Gateway to the Midlands. They still laugh, up in Sunderland, at Mike Parkinson’s Barnsley being anything but a Potemkin village, run up overnight for the Hampstead tourist trade, full of Berlitz proles in comic costume, speaking a regional Esperanto probably learned off Linguaphone records.
Sunderlanders thrive on paradox— you could equally say that nobody goes there, except by accident. Today, yesterday, they’re proud and self- pitying, resent you leaving, gawp at you coming back. Good with their hands, canny with their brains, tireless, indestructible, confident of out-doing Japs, Wops, Krauts and Yanks in anything. Yet inoculated against the Work Ethic, always able so find summink bettar ta dee. Never heard of the Problem of Leisure, (something the Depression gave plenty of), so prodigious and compulsive talkers, footballers, growers of leeks, breeders and trainers of dogs, workmen’s clubbers.
Sunderland is a one-storey town full of tall-storey men, a place flattened into a [?], near-
provincial acres of terraced bungalows giving way only to council estates consisting of serpentine culs‑de-sac, making a walk home over twice the distance in half the time a Londoner would queue for a number 11 bus.
They have an indelible local loyalty, history, [??] idiocies, yet watch the old [??] waste with a cynical apathy towns have suffered a planning [?] transplant, ancient mazes replaced by solid concrete plugs. Only Sunderland has been disembowelled with gaping holes. Our Big Ben town hall toppled, into a grassy dent which floods whenever it rains, like every Sunday. Our grandiose Grand Hotel vaporised into a cinder car park. Nowhere have they more cause to hate the Good Old Days, nowhere do they mourn them with such elegiac eloquence.
Home-town love is honourable patriotism. Sunderland: my Tin Pan Alley song. The hole in my foot I got vandalising a private development which dared infiltrate our council estate...the swollen eye-ball from the clod of mud while playing ghouls in the dark…stealing chocolates from Woolworths…seeing how far the tide came up your face in the Holy Rocks…riding our kid’s bike between trams… watching pigs cut open over the slaughterhouse wall…spouting Bolshevism on a box on the sea front... drinking in the Bede School library, hiding the French-letter catalogue inside Masefield’s Life of Jesus…a girl in Mowbray Park who [?] like Veronica Lake and who looks like Irene Handl and [?] the new generation have no standards
Sunderland, I love it, I don’t have to like it. After all, the people who live there, they do, and they don’t.
© Times Newspapers Ltd. 1976
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