Leek and the outbreak of World War One

It was a glorious summer, that summer of 1914. The people of the Staffordshire Moorlands were determined to enjoy the season in time honoured fashion by attending events, going on a trip to the seaside, or playing or watching summer sports.

An event that had been going for over 60 years in 1914 was the Endon Well Dressing held in late May. The procession was led by St Anne’s Valley band. The Rev Morris gave the service and crowned Miss Hammersley as the Queen. On the green Morris dancers performed the horn pipe. On the second day a fancy dress was held with Mr Thorley winning the males section dressed as an Indian Chief and Miss Newman the female dressed as Elizabeth 1^st. Miss Grundy won the skipping race and in the Milk Churn race for farm hands S Fletcher of Rudyard triumphed.

There were concerns for the people of the Moorlands that summer. In Ireland there was resistance to the idea of granting independence to the island. The Protestant North threatened to rise in armed insurrection and politicians were unsure of the loyalty of troops. One of the MPs against “Home Rule” for Ireland was Leo Amery who attended a packed public meeting in Leek.

The period before the First World War was known as the “Great Unrest” as strike action took place in most major industries. Troops were seen on the streets of Britain.

The campaign to grant women the vote was reaching a crisis. The previous year Miss Davison had thrown herself before the King’s horse at the Derby. The debate was also played out locally. Suffragette Charlotte Despard had addressed a meeting in Leek in 1911. One should recall also the work done at a national level by Hannah Kidd of Leek.

Away from politics locals could enjoy watching cricket as Leek Highfield beat a team from Abram Colliery of Wigan (Abram had been the scene of a major pit disaster 6 years before).

There were charabanc trips out to Wales or one could stay at home and take pleasure in smoking Egyptian cigarettes supplied by Simpson’s. Again the cinema was in its infancy and the curious could see an American film “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” or catch Kimberley and Melbourne “two favourite comedians” who appeared at the Grand.

A real red letter event was the Leek Rose Festival organised by the Band of Hope (the temperance movement was always strong) with float after float filled with youngsters dressed in the costumes of the people of the Empire. Pride of place went to the Coronation Coach with Queen Carrie Morgan and her ladies in waiting filled with flowers and messages against the evils of drink. The weather was perfect. In the newspaper of the 4^th July reporting the affair were details of an assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in a far off little known town of Sarajevo.

Later in July as Austria declared war on Serbia Vera Brittan, mother of politician Shirley Williams took her Oxford entrance exams at Leek Technical College complaining in the heat of the “odiferous” students in the hall. And as British politicians made their fateful decisions to commit the country to war in the last weekend of peace West End Crusaders cricketers played a team from Wardle and Davenport. Of the 22 players 7 would die in the bloodbath that was about to engulf the world.

Tony Blair- he is not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy

I have been reading of the publication of the Tony Blair autobiography and the furore that has arisen. I met Tony Blair only once and had a conversation with him for about 15 minutes one October night in 1990 when Blair was Shadow Home Secretary. I had been asked by Wigan Constituency Labour party to participate at the 11th hour in an annual public speaking competition involving the four constituencies that made up Wigan MBC. I had little time to prepare and cobbled something from a Fabian Society pamphlet on German Reunification and whether we should fear it.

The event which Blair and the local MP Ian McCarney were due to judge was in Platt Bridge Labour Club.It was based in a run down area of Wigan and prone to vandalism. There were only three of us in the end. Worsley CLP did not show and I was up against two women from Makerfield and Leigh who were to talk about Wigan Social Services and Wigan education respectively.

I went off last and droned on for several minutes when my speech was interrupted by an almighty crash on the fire door. “There are Germans trying to break in”,I quipped much to the amusement of the people in the room. My joke and speech did not carry the day and I ended behind the woman who spoke on Social services who beat the education contribution.

I spoke to Blair afterwards as I was going for the Staffordshire Moorlands nomination later in the autumn and I asked his advice. I cannot recall it but I got the impression that he was an utterly charming man and sensed that he had honed acting skills.

Incidentally a year before I met with Gordon Brown and found him shy.

My next contact with Team Blair was in April 1997 when he spoke at Kidsgrove Town Hall and I and Rachel Annand knocked together a local brief for Blair prior to coming to North Staffs. I don’t think that anything was used but in a packed Kidsgrove Town Hall made the more surreal because I was sitting close to the American writer Gore Vidal, Blair performed his stuff. Of course things were tightly controlled and I can distinctly recall Charlotte Atkins the Labour candidate for the Moorlands rolling her eyes when someone for Fathers for Justice got through and asked an unplanted question.

The truth of the matter is that I never bought into the New Labour Project. I strongly objected to the removal of Clause 4 in 1994 and was always resistant to the policies that Blair and his acolytes were pushing. In the summer of 1997 Mandelson came to Stafford and spoke in the County Council chamber and number of New Labour numpties were planted in the various groups which was debating education policy and some of us were getting agitated by the distinctly pro market direction that some of the groups were going.

The years since 1997 have convinced me that the huge majorities that the party had a glorious opportunity which it missed. I always had this suspicion that it was a watered down form of Thatcherism without the iconoclastic element that the Tories had in the 80s. Blair was never interested in challenging the social hierarchy and the subsequent years have proved evidence of that.

As he said in the Marr interview he believed that he was a man of principle. I answering this as I am busy reading Thomas Paine . I am tempted to quote Paine on George Washington

“he world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.”[

Dialect

What links a ginnel, a twitchell and a weint? Answer they are all dialect worlds for alley from Yorkshire, Nottingham and the Isle of Man respectively. Similarly the words wag, bob and twag all mean playing truant. The reason that I draw your attention to this fact arises out of a news item I heard on radio on the future of dialect words.

Linguists at the British Library have assembled a list of thousands of rare words and phrases from dialects in order to preserve them - and make them available far beyond their native area.

Around 4,000 locally-used words have been contributed to the "wordbank" the public who visited the library, in central London, or attended a series of events at provincial libraries, at which they were asked to provide local phrases.

North Staffordshire, I believe, is particularly rich in dialect words both in the urban and rural areas. One word, which is known throughout the North Midlands, is the word “nesh” meaning susceptible to the cold. It has a long provenance cropping up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and more modern writers such as the Nottinghamshire born DH Lawrence. A word that I particularly like is lozzuck meaning a layabout. There are others like ganzi meaning an outer garment, which may have its origins in Hindi and was probably brought over by soldiers of the Raj. Sometimes words can be misunderstood. The word “starving” in the Moorlands means freezing. In 1947 in the context of the Great Freeze of that year its thought by authority that the natives of Grindon were famished rather than perished. Tragically a rescue plane crashed killing all occupants on what seems to have been an unnecessary mission.

In my travels around the country I have come across other excellent dialect words. My own favourites are “pofagged” from Wigan meaning exhausted, “lakin” a York expression for playing and “clarty” a North Eastern word for “muddy”.

There are those who think that local words are dying out driven out by the media and population movement. I hope not and their continued existence hints at resilience.