Men are from Mytholmroyd John Morrison Introduction 2: Saint Maurice of Milltown 3: A trick of the light 4: The Worse for Wear 5: On the Milltown beat 6: The Last of the Recognised Batsmen 7: Talking books 8: On foot across the Pennines 9: Extra time in the game of love 10: Madder Rose, new-age private eye 11 A brief history of Tim 12 Nat Gomorrah: a life in football 13 Safe hands and clean trousers 14 Ray Vaughan, arts supremo 15 Religion: the remix 16 A Year in the Pennines Introduction The idea for this book came to me as I sat in the little terraced house that my friend Joe calls home. As the winter winds whistled through the cracks, and threatened to prise the tiles off the roof, I huddled for warmth in front of his fire. When I started thinking aloud about a book of Milltown characters, Joe remained unimpressed. “All the real characters are gone”, he insisted as, with frenzied blows from his axe, he reduced the sofa to firewood. Perhaps Joe was right, who knows? After all, will we ever again see the likes of Billy Pockets, who sold his wife for a shilling and then married his horse? Or ‘Flouncing’ Fred Farnsbarns, known as the bastard son of a whoring pope, who won Jimmy Stewart’s dancing shoes in a crooked poker game? Or Frank ‘No Nickname’ Fuselli, whose claim to have been raised by wolves has mocked the best efforts of the Child Support Agency? Or... Well, I could go on. But I think you get the picture. Like so many other South Pennine communities, Milltown has had to change with the times. To see how the town looked a hundred years ago, you should take a look at the exhibition of old photographs on display in the Tourist Information Centre. Shot during the two decades either side of Queen Victoria’s death, these sepia-toned prints offer an intoxicating glimpse into a world that, though only three generations away, already seems infinitely and achingly distant. The pictures were the handiwork of one Archbold Quinlan, local worthy and keen amateur photographer. Though born into a wealthy mill-owning family, he soon wearied of the pursuits traditionally enjoyed by men of his standing, such as riding to hounds, seducing kitchen maids and sending game-birds to meet their maker with his father’s Purdy shotguns. As he yawned his way through the tedium of yet another country house party, he longed to be doing something more useful with his leisure hours. Photography was an eminently suitable pastime for a man of inherited means, with time hanging heavily on his hands. To be able to capture moments of life - instantly and indelibly - seemed to him utterly magical. Once he had converted part of the hall’s old stable block into a darkroom, Quinlan began to train his camera on the immediate surroundings. His family despaired of him; his friends wondered about his sanity. To no avail. He’d found his purpose - his focus, you might say - and nothing would deflect him from it. It is thanks to energetic and mildly eccentric men like Quinlan that we have such an evocative archive of photographs, showing what life was like before the Great War left the fabric of British life so torn and tattered. He photographed feasts and fairs, high days and holidays, festivals and fetes. He was there with his camera for Queen Victoria’s jubilees, when the town was garlanded with bunting. He caught, on unwieldy glass plates, the mood of heady euphoria when Mafeking was relieved. Best of all, however, he didn’t merely concentrate on the recreations of the idle rich, like some photographic dilettantes of his acquaintance. He focused the bellows of his folding wooden camera, instead, on everyday life in Milltown. It’s fascinating to see what the town looked like on those days when the flags weren’t flying: unheralded occasions when sober Milltown folk were simply going about their business. So let’s take a stroll around the exhibition, before the prints disappear back into the archives. Here’s a picture of the hardware shop: a crowded emporium that stocked just about everything our great grandparents could possibly need. A handle for a yard broom. A length of chicken wire. Nails and screws sold by the pound. The shopkeeper, wearing a straw hat at a jaunty angle, seems rather pleased with himself. Business looks good. He is happily unaware that, a century later, his establishment would be transformed into a gift shop where tourists browse listlessly for tawdry souvenirs. Milltown used to have a village idiot, and here he is: the proud owner of a bewildered expression and an extravagant set of mutton-chop whiskers. Having won the West Riding Village Idiot Competition three years in a row, he got to keep the trophy. Village idiocy is rather out of fashion these days - gone the way of the workhouse and the lunatic asylum. Now, with political correctness to the fore, we have a more humane attitude towards the cerebrally challenged. Yes, care in the community, or ‘sleeping rough’ as it’s more accurately known. A boy and his pig stand in a dusty roadway. Neither of them seem in any great hurry to move. There’s no good reason why they should; another dozen years would have passed before the first motor car chugged asthmatically through Milltown. The boy looks towards the camera with studied indifference. He gives the distinct impression that he has nothing much better to do with his time: very much like the youth of today, in fact. The village blacksmith pays no heed to the photographer either. Captured in the process of shoeing a burly carthorse, he has other things on his mind. Like keeping his toes well away from those massive hooves. Anyway, he was unimpressed by photography and other such short-lived fads. He knew that as long we needed to get from A to B, we would need horses; and as long as we kept horses they would need shoeing. Sadly, he was still repeating this mantra when the first car eventually did career through Milltown: raising dust, frightening livestock and changing the face of transport irrevocably. The blacksmith took early retirement (he didn’t have much choice in the matter), and spent his declining years bemoaning the invention of the internal combustion engine. The smithy, remarkably, has a new lease of life. It was recently saved from dereliction by a college professor who, having taken early retirement, decided to spend his declining years producing hanging baskets and ornate candlesticks for the tourist trade. Isn’t it strange the way things work out? A vanished way of life is preserved in the aspic of Archbold Quinlan’s captivating photographs. They transport us back to what we fondly imagine was a rural arcadia, a pastoral paradise. A simpler time, when the world spun more slowly on its axis and everybody knew their place in the scheme of things. Not strictly true, of course, but that’s the power that sepia-toned photographs can have on our jaded sensibilities at the beginning of a new millennium. The past is indeed beguiling, especially from the vantage point of a harsh Milltown winter. It’s tempting to imagine that everything really was was better in the ‘good old days’, especially since it’s impossible to disprove. Selective memory overpaints our earliest recollections with a rose-coloured wash. Were the summers of our childhoods really warmer? It did they just seem that way? The winters, at least, are as long and as dreary as ever. Now, as Joe lobs another chair-leg on the fire, I feel it’s time to cast a jaundiced eye over the Milltown of today, and the characters who have made this little town their home. Archbold Quinlan is a hard act to follow, of couse, but I’ll give it my best shot...
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