Counter Culture

Intro’

It Was Twenty Years Ago This Month

(give or take)

This month, April 2023, marks twenty years since I moved to Liverpool from Manchester. That move occurred twelve-and-a half-years after leaving my home town of Grimsby for the intellectual challenges of life as a mature Social Studies/Humanities student at Manchester Metropolitan University. It’s a sobering thought that I’ve now lived well over half of my life outside of my place of birth, but I thought it might be interesting, and timely, for me to write specifically about my ongoing connection to my adopted home of the past two decades.

This is a connection that, through my own particular cultural tastes, and past political connections, I can easily trace back into my childhood and adolescence, to well before the idea of living in Liverpool even seemed a possibility.

But, in fact, my links to Liverpool go back to a time long before even that, to long before my birth, a connection spanning at least two centuries in facy, though this was completely unbeknown to me at the time of my decision to make a new life here.

 More of that later.

Strangely, the precise date I moved here is unknown to me. The journal I kept twenty years ago refers to the time I first raised with my then girlfriend, whom we shall call ‘H’,  the possibility of my moving to Liverpool in order to be closer to her. That was in March 2003. In my entry for April 9^th, I speculate that it looks like the move is ‘happening and happening soon’. But this was a sporadic journal, and by the time of my next entry, in May 2003, I have already arrived and am commenting on the wonderful spaciousness of my new flat in Liverpool in comparison to the cramped, un-cleanly, high-rise hovel I’d been living in in Manchester for more than eight years.

That said, there is no doubt that my move occurred at some point during April 2003.

One

Mariners v Merseyside

Growing up, as for many children and young people in the 1970’s, Liverpool primarily meant football. It was common for kids from small towns, those whose home football clubs tended to reside in the lower reaches of the football pyramid, which was certainly the case with Grimsby Town, to support their local club, but also to adopt a top-level club, a Big Club. Liverpool F.C was one of the more common choices in the playgrounds of both primary and secondary schools (‘High’ school was a horrible Americanism we were yet to adopt) in Grimsby.

I have hazy memories of the 1970 World Cup, of Pele and Brazil, and of the F.A Cup Final of that year, the real climax of the footballing season in those days, and one of the few matches to be shown live on television. That was between Chelsea and Leeds, and I took the side of Chelsea purely on the basis that my then brother-in-law, Roly, who was living with us at the time, was a committed fan of Don Revie’s Leeds. Chelsea eventually won 2-1 after a replay, the first Cup Final replay since 1912 (no penalty shoot-outs in those days), and I sort of decided I was a Chelsea fan from that point on, though I never stuck to it in the way that, for instance, my best friend Mikw chose Manchester City as a child, and hasn’t wavered from that decision to this day.

I only really became an active football fan during the 1971/72 season. It was then that my other then brother-in-law Roy took me to my first Grimsby match, at home at Blundell Park against, I believe Colchester. That was a good year to be a Mariners fan, a year when we won the Fourth Division championship, clinching the title with a 3-0 victory over Exeter in front of 23,000 fans at our home ground, an unbelievable, and almost certainly unsafe number for a fourth-tier match by today’s standards. I wasn’t at that game, but from that season on, and throughout much of the seventies, I remained a fairly regular attendee at ‘Town’s’ home matches.

I was also a keen follower of the usually downward fortunes of the England national team, seeing them fail to qualify for two successive World Cup’s in 1974 and 1978, kept up with the battle for supremacy at the top of the First Division, took an interest in matters of promotion and relegation throughout the four main divisions, and watched pretty much all of the big matches on television, almost invariably highlights on the likes of Match of the Day, Sportsnight, and The Big Match in those pre-digital, pre-satellite days. Some of the biggest matches occurred on the European stage, generally on a Wednesday night, when British clubs did battle with the likes of Rael Madrid, Bayern Munich, A.C. and Inter Milan, Borussia Monchengladbach, Ajax and Roma, in the European Cup, now the European Champions League, the long defunct European Cup Winners Cup, and the European Fair’s Cup which later became the UEFA Cup and is now the UEFA Champions League.

Liverpool had been a none-descript Second Division Club when the soon to become legendary Bill Shankly, who’d previously had a brief spell at Grimsby, became manager in 1959. But it wasn’t long before he established them as one of the leading English clubs, a rise that more or less coincided with the cities elevation to world-wide cultural significance as the birth place of the Beatles, of which much more later.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, Liverpool, under Shankly and then his successor, and former assistant Bob Paisley, followed by his own assistant Joe Fagan (Liverpool had a great ‘keep it in the family’ managerial policy, of course, with Fagan being followed by Kenny Dalglish as player-manager, then as simply manager) were perpetual contenders for domestic and European honours.

Memory inevitably fades as you grow older, and without checking back online, I wouldn’t be able to tell you precisely when Liverpool won what, though I do have a clear memory of team captain Tommy Smith lifting the European Cup in 1977, the first triumph by a British club at that level since Matt Busby’s Manchester United in 1968, an accomplishment they were to repeat the following season. Today, I know the names of few modern players, even England players, but I can still easily recall the names of many of those who wore the famous all-red strip in the days of my youth, players like Kevin Keegan, Ian Callaghan, Ray Clemence, Dalglish, John Toshack, Emlyn Hughes, Ray Kennedy and of course Smith.

Everton, the other Liverpool club, were much less successful at this time, and I think I was only vaguely aware that Everton were a Liverpool club, with their ground, Goodison Park, within walking distance of Anfield. But I do have a strong memory of listening on the local radio, Radio Humberside, in my bedroom in Newsham Dr, Grimsby in 1984, as my lowly home club defended desperately for almost ninety minutes in the League Cup at Goodison, before snatching a shock victory with a John Wilkinson header from a flicked on free kick. The Mariners also beat Everton in the same competition, this time 3-2 and at Blundell Park, five years earlier, and before conducting a quick online search, I could have sworn that that was the occasion of the 1-0 win I listened to in my bedroom. Apparently not. In fact, it transpires, have no memory at all of the 1979 victory.

Such is life.

The infrequent matches between Liverpool F.C. and Grimsby Town are also something I thought necessary to check back on. A list of these David v Goliath clashes reveals that Liverpool thrashed Town 5-0 in the F.A. Cup in January 1980 (in their first meeting since 1958), 3-0 in the Football League Cup in November 1997, with Grimsby pulling off a shock 2-1 victory in the same competition four years later, with all of these matches taking place at Anfield.

Though I do remember keeping up with the scoreline via Grandstand and/or The World of Sport, both Saturday afternoon staples of my childhood and adolescence, for the first of these matches, I don’t remember the second at all, and was only dimly aware of Grimsby’s 2001 giant-killing act. This latter is purely a reflection of my waning interest in football over the years, though since moving here I’ve spoken with more than one scouser who quickly mentioned the subject of Grimsby’s upset victory when he (and it has always been a ‘he’) found out where I was from. The memories of local Liverpool fans are long and unforgiving when it comes to the beautiful game.

Two

When We Became Fab

The second strand of my Liverpool connection concerns music, and that primarily means the Beatles. I do have a dim memory of my elder brother (considerably older, eleven years older), unpacking an original copy of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album at my first home in Charlton St, complete with cardboard cut outs inside the gatefold sleeve. If that was soon after its initial release, as I presume it to have been, I would have been approaching five-years-old at the time. There is also silent footage, from the Super 8mm silent family movies my dad would record and personally develop, of my two older sisters (again, considerably older, ten and twelve years older respectively), dancing with a transistor radio clamped against one ear, though I can’t recall offhand which sister this ear belonged to. In my mind, I have filled the silence with the Beatles Penny Lane. Is that a later invention, implanted after I became an uber-Beatles fan, and became fully aware of that song, one of my favourites, as it happens? Quite possibly, though I do also seem to remember when this song, coupled of course with Strawberry Fields Forever in perhaps the greatest double ‘A’ side single of all time, was a current hit. Again, who knows what memories are real and which aren’t? I won’t labour this point, though it’s a subject that fascinates me. Frome here on in, we’ll simply take it as red (Liverpool red), that only that for which I have hard, conclusive evidence can be accepted as one-hundred percent, literal truth.

My own journey into Beatles fandom, which at times has reached the level of obsession, began around 1976/77 when I persuaded my parents to let me add The Beatles 1962-66 double-album, now generally known simply as the ‘Red’ album, to my small vinyl collection. It was one of those terrible, corny stereo reproductions that were common at the time, where vocals could be stuck over in one channel, and the musical backing in the other. On my parents’ old-fashioned mono radiogram which was my only means of playing music at this time, this would sometimes have the effect of vocals disappearing from the mix almost entirely, creating an unintended Beatles Karaoke-backing effect. Nevertheless, those early to mid-period Beatles tracks, starting with Love Me Do, track one, side one, and ending with Yellow Submarine as the final track on side four, became the first Beatles songs I knew well. Only later would I discover that some of my favourite mid-period Beatles’ tracks, notably Rain and Tomorrow Never Knows, which should have been included on this collection were omitted. Psychedelia was not much in vogue at the time of album’s release in 1973, though it now also occurs to me that Baby’s in Black, an early classic that is a particular favourite of mine, and which ‘the boys’ themselves loved so much that they were still performing it in 1966 during their last ever tours, was also conspicuous by its absence. There are of course several other Beatles classics I could mention, though admittedly any ‘Best of…’ compilation is the product of subjective choice.

I was not at the time that I acquired this album what could be described as a dedicated music fan in the manner of some teenagers. The first record I ever bought was Devil Gate Drive by Suzi Quatro (I still love Suzie), and I liked pretty much whatever was around at the time, i.e., chart music that you heard frequently on Radio One.

In those days, the singles chart was of much greater importance than it is now, and, for some reason, the new weekly chart would be released on a Tuesday lunch time. It was common to find groups of kids during their lunch break (or ‘playtime’ as we called it, even when we were fifteen) breaking off from their games of war, conkers or marbles in order to huddle around a transistor radio, noting the progress or otherwise of their favourite songs up or down the Top Thirty, which was later extended to the Top Forty. Back then, songs could creep slowly upwards, sometimes to the much vaunted ‘Number One’ spot, over a period of several weeks, rather than in the modern, duller, manner of the most popular artists seeing their latest single zoom straight to the top and then zoom straight out of the charts completely once their fan base has been fully sated and exploited.

So, Suzy, Mud, the Bay City Rollers, Sweet, Gary Glitter (I know, oh,dear, but this was a time of innocence), Alvin Stardust, T.Rex, these were the big hitters in the Yarborough school playground of the early and mid-;70’s, and these were the artists I tended to own singles by. The only albums I listened to were essentially compilations of this type of music, albums that had been heavily plugged on television, and the few that my parents owned, which was older material by the likes of Jim Reeves, Slim Whitman, Tom Jones (Live at Las Vegas), a double album of 1950’s hits through which I discovered the likes of Oh Carol by Neil Sedaka and Diana by Paul Anka. The more hardcore rock ‘n’ roll of greats such as Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, the artists who had most influenced the Beatles were missing from this album, and my passion for them would come later.

In short, I can’t pretend to have been a cool kid when it came to music in my early and mid-teens, the type who went from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to the immediate embrace of the raw energy of Punk, and nor did I know any kids who were. As it happens, I did like the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant when it was first released in 1977, but it was as just another enjoyable sing-along chart hit. My awareness of it as an important component of a vital and necessary social and cultural moment arose slowly, and after the event.

In slight contradiction to what I have said above, I actually was aware of Elvis, having been introduced to him by my aforementioned brother-in-law Roly, and that began another adult-spanning obsession which (almost) rivals my relationship with the Beatles. But initially I was much more familiar with the older, jump-suit clad, big-ballad Elvis than with the young dynamo from Tupelo, Mississippi who’d shaken the world out of its dour, post-war complacency in the mid-1950’s.

It wasn’t cool to like Elvis in 1977, and as chief Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn has pointed out, it wasn’t cool to like the Beatles either, a fact which continued up to the Britpop explosion of the early ‘90’s, and the Beatles Anthology project of the mid-part of that decade. I suppose this was partly because the break-up was still too recent (and I have no memory at all of the break-up) and, for now, the world had moved on, even though the possibility of a Beatles reunion was still a story that would appear and disappear rapidly and sporadically.

It was only when my friendship with Mike, still my best friend today more than four decades on, deepened in the final year or so at school, 1977-78, and particularly once our school days were at last behind us, that my interest in music, and our mutual interest in the Beatles, began to properly blossom.

Mike already had the Beatles 1967-70 (Blue) album, and so between us we had the full set of their most famous recordings. But there was still so much to discover, and once that journey begins it never stops.

In those days, of course, music wasn’t nearly so readily available as it is now, and discovering new music, or ‘new to us’ music, actually took effort and money.

I have a very strong memory of being in a record shop in Grimsby, though no memory of which one, and marvelling at the titles on the back of the Abbey Road album: I Want You (She’s So Heavy), You Never Give Me Your, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, The End (I’d never heard of The Doors song of the same name at that time), and speculating mentally on what such oddly and excitingly named titles could possibly sound like?

I would find out soon enough, and then it would be hard to remember a time before they were an important part of my life.

The same was also true of the equally fabulous array of variety on Revolver, the White Album, Sgt Pepper….

Actually, the very first time I ever smoked a spliff, shared with my seven to sixteen years’ old best friend Neil (RIP), I did the cliched thing  I’d heard of 1960’s hippies doing back in the day, that is of listening to Pepper on the headphones, though the experience was a little disappointing, tempered by the worry that my mam, who was busying herself around me as I sat on the sofa, headphones plugged into the radiogram  (which later moved to my bedroom), would notice something was different about me…

Thinking back now, I must have owned a copy of Pepper quite early on, seeing as Neil left Grimsby to work in the Cowley car plant in Oxford with his brother Carl shortly after finishing school in 1978. It was most likely the second Beatles album I owned, after the ‘Red’ album, and thus at an earlier point than the ‘marvelling at the titles on Abbey Road’ moment.

Anyway, to move forward a little, I was working in a fish factory in the Shetland Isles with Mike, who had family connections there, the first time we heard John Lennon’s Starting Over, on a transistor radio in our wooden hut accommodation, prior to the release of the John and Yoko Double Fantasy album in the autumn of 1980. John’s return to recording after a five-year break really was an exciting event in our young lives, though five years between albums is now commonplace for modern artists. We were actually on the factory floor on December 9^th of that year when we learned from a work-colleague of the fatal shooting outside of John’s Dakota home in New York City. This was a truly shocking event.

So, from the early 1980’s onwards, I became a serious-Beatles fan, that is one who not only knew every recorded track and listened to the band regularly, and avidly, but also read the books, learning every minute detail of their life and times as they were known at that point, a project that is still an ongoing and abiding obsession, further deepened by the happy advent of the podcast.

Initially, my books were borrowed from Grimsby Central Library, a great source of literary and general education for me in this period, with Cynthia Lennon’s A Twist of Lennon and May Pang’s Loving John (now hard to find and selling for a small fortune online) being early Beatles related borrows. Later, I would read Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon, and love it despite, and at least partially because of, the controversy surrounding it, and Philip Norman’s band biography Shout (or ‘Norman Philips’ Shite,’ as McCartney rather deliciously calls it). Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of books, and despite wide and varied interests, my Beatles collection still makes up a sizable proportion of my own personal library.

Three

1984 and all that…

1984 was the year when Mike and I, having been making our own music both together and separately since early 1979, recorded our classic Roctober One cassette album, which maybe we’ll get the chance to vastly improve and re-release sometime, once the MAL AI audio separation techniques pioneered in Peter Jackson’s fabulous Beatles Get Back documentary becomes generally available and affordable. We also made our Roctober the Movie video, which was recorded using expensive, for us, bulky hired equipment. It was also the year when we finally made the pilgrimage to Liverpool, the city ‘where it all began.’

I’d actually been to Liverpool before, in either 1982 or 1983, to march in support of Militant controlled Liverpool City Council, of which much more in the next section. Bu aside from passing Penny Lane, with at least one of our Grimsby/Cleethorpes contingent inevitably singing  Penny Lane as we did so, immediately marking themselves out as an outsider in the city, I don’t recall seeing anything related to the Beatles.

I should stress again how it wasn’t at all cool to be a fan of the Fab Four at this time, and Liverpool itself had yet to realise what it had in being the birthplace of the greatest band of all time. Consequently, no Beatles tourist infrastructure yet existed when Mike and I visited. For this reason, our personal ‘tour’ would have been made with little more than the assistance of a Liverpool A-Z, a selection of bus timetables, and our prior knowledge of what happened where and when, gleaned from our already expansive Beatles reading matter.

Memories of where we did go, and what we did, are now hazy. This was after all also a period of heavy drinking (and sometimes dope smoking, though not on this occasion), and a period of almost forty years have now elapsed since, two-thirds of my life.

We definitely drank in Ye Cracke pub in Rice Street, and possibly the Grapes on Mathews Street, the latter of course being the epicentre of early Beatledom, and both well-known Beatles drinking haunts. We also visited the site of the former Liverpool Institute, the grammar school once attended by both George Harrison and Paul McCartney, and which is now the site of the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA), the ‘fame school’ whose opening was partly funded by Paul, and with which he still maintains a strong relationship. I’m not sure if we made it to Menlove Ave and/or Fortlin Rd, the childhood homes of John and Paul, though there would have been little of interest for us to see/do there anyway at this time anyway. Strangely, given that I’ve lived here for twenty years now, I only finally did the ‘Beatles houses’ tour, now an excellent ‘must do’ for all Beatles’ fans, last year, accompanied by a visiting Mike.

My online research tells me that the Cavern had re-opened by this point, opposite the site of the original, of course also on Mathews Street, where it still stands. if we went inside though, I have no memory of it, and neither does Mike, though it would seem strange not to have done so, if it was there and open.

I believe we did visit the Jacaranda club, scene of some of the Beatles’ earliest gigs, though like the Cavern, I don’t remember going inside despite, according to Wikipedia, it having remained constantly in operation as a local music venue from 1958 to the present day.

We certainly saw the highly unusual and excellent Eleanor Rigby statue by the well know original British rock ‘n’ roller-come-light entertainer-come surprisingly gifted sculptor, Tommy Steele. This is rather out of the way, on a hidden juncture of Mathews St and Stanley Street, though it would have stood out more at this time than now, when one’s senses weren’t being completely bombarded by Beatles related paraphernalia.

I recall that Paul’s No More Lonely Nights, one of the few highlights of his disastrous Give My Regards to Broad Street film project of that year, seemed to be omnipresent on pub jukeboxes, and I still regard this song, especially the ‘funk’ version, as being one of Macca’s most underrated solo tracks.

We definitely took a trip to the waterside, to what was then, in these depressed, Thatcherite, post ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ times, still just about a working dock. We had a cup of tea in a docker’s café, and stopped to chat briefly with a banjo-strumming, aging busker on the Albert Dock bridge, a bridge which now leads, following the huge redevelopment projects that have since taken place, to the Smokehouse pub/bistro, the Beatles Story Museum, and the magnificent Tate Art Gallery.

The strongest memories I have of the visit though are of Mike and I busking by Lime St, and I think also in Church Street, having to make at least one quick dash to what I’m almost certain would have been Hessy’s famous music shop, where the Beatles themselves purveyed and purchased instruments on the ‘never-never’, and which remained open until 1987, in order to replace a broken string or two. Mike and I had begun busking, primarily for ‘beer-money’, for about three months prior to this November ’84 trip, and it was an activity we would maintain and continue right up until 1989, on and off, sometimes together and sometimes separately. Mostly, we played our own songs, unusual for buskers then and now, a dozen or so played in rotation, with a few covers thrown in, like Elvis’ Marie’s the Name (of His Latest Flame) and That’s All right Mama/My Baby Left Me (medley), Dylan’s The Ballad of Hollis Brown, with the only Beatles related songs in our repertoire being John’s Working Class Hero, and Run For Your Life, the closing song on Rubber Soul, a song much derided in these ‘woke’ times, but which I will continue to defend, to the death If necessary, to this day.

As I’ve said, this visit was at the height of the depressed, Tory monetarist period, a time of deliberately ‘managed decline’ for Liverpool, ordered from the very highest levels of government, which didn’t exactly make for rich pickings when it came to our busking exploits. Better financial rewards would come later, in Grimsby, including a Christmas Eve morning when we retired triumphantly at lunch (or more accurately, ‘pub’) time, having already made fifty quid’s worth of beer-tokens.

I will move on shortly in more depth to the political dimension of my Liverpool Connection, but it should be noted here that I’d joined the Entryist, Trotskyist organisation the Militant Tendency late in 1981, about nine months after my return to Grimsby from Lerwick, Shetland. In 1982, Militant had gained effective political control over the Liverpool Labour Party, and through that the City Council, with Tendency member Derek Hatton as Deputy Leader of the council who, along with all-round working class hero and veteran Militant Tony Mulhern, was the public face of Liverpool’s resistance to the Tory onslaught on Merseyside jobs and services.

I was sort of on a temporary break from political activity in 1984, mostly in order to concentrate more on drinking and making music. But I was still with Militant in spirit and ‘our’ control of a major city council, though Militant members were always a minority amongst the later disqualified and surcharged 47 councillors, was still a big deal to me.

At the time of our visit, we were also approaching the final third what would turn out to be a year-long, epic, heroic, but ultimately doomed miners’ strike, perhaps the last stand of the once mighty British industrial working class.

So, that’s what I remember most, political opposition to the Thatcherite counter-revolution being highly visible around Liverpool city centre, with striking miners, Militant supporters, and a great many other political activists being everywhere, rattling tins and selling their printed matter.

Thirty years later, I would immortalise this first trip to Liverpool in my song Liverpool ‘84: ‘In Liverpool in eighty-four/We were on our Beatles tour/Playing in the great outdoors/While miners’ rattled tins’ (Green 2015).

Four

Militant Days

As I’ve already mentioned, my on/off ‘career’ as a political activist began towards the end of 1981. That was a very political year, with the IRA hunger strikes, the summer of riots, and Tony Benn’s narrowly unsuccessful campaign to unseat Denis Healy as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.  I found this latter event, despite the Deputy Leadership in reality being something of a none-job, particularly inspiring, perhaps in the manner that a later generation would temporally, and as it turned out, foolishly, find Jeremy Corbyn’s accession to the leadership of the Labour Party, inspiring.

I’d had a vaguely autistic spectrum-type interest in the statistical, psephological aspect of politics from the two General Elections of 1974 onwards, and became still more vaguely interested in leftist political ideas through a woman called Magda who was amongst our small circle of friends during my three-month stay in Lerwick from October 1980 to January 1981, and whom I remember owning a copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. But it was in 1981, following my return to Grimsby and, as I would later put it in another much later song ‘Ten Months of doing not much’ (Ten Months’, Green 2015) when my political interest, at the end of which my long, and spoeadically ongoing, period of political radicalism properly began.

This first truly manifested itself when my mam read out to me an advertisement from the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, for the inaugural meeting of Grimsby Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS).

I went to the meeting, became immediately active, and through that soon joined the Militant, the semi-secret organisation which dominated the LPYS locally with no opposition, and nationally with little, at least not from within the youth section itself.

Quickly, I went from ‘doing not much’ to doing a great deal. Militant provided me with a friendship group (to use a modern term we would have sneered at back then), a much-welcomed drinking circle, a purpose in life, and a set of ideas and values with which to live it. In many ways, it was a cult-like experience, though a relatively benign one. This subject, the existence of political as well as religious cults, of Left and Right, is one that fascinates me, and is one that I will write more about another time. For the purposes of this article, the point to be stressed is the strong role that the city of Liverpool played in the life of Militant, and of its mostly youthful, membership in the heady-days of the 1980’s.

This wasn’t only because of ‘our’ effective control of the city council, and the regular, though naturally biased media reporting of the struggle of that council against the Tory government, a struggle that saw Dereck Hatton and Tony Mulhern in particular become virtual household names. It was also because of the historic role that scousers had played in the development of British Trotskyism in the post-war period, up to and way beyond the establishment of the Militant newspaper, the public face of the Tendency, in 1964.

Despite my Trotskyist days being long behind me, Militant’s iconic red masthead is still highly evocative as a symbol of my youthful rebellion.

Liverpudlian Jimmy Dene had been an early comrade of our founder and chief political ideologue and guru, South African born Ted Grant, though he’d long disappeared from view by my time. Peter Taaffe, the Political Editor of Militant and effectively the General Secretary of the Tendency, was a scouser who liked to remind people that he’d once had trials for Everton, and still fancied himself, a bit too much for my liking, during lunch time matches at the impressively large Militant Centre in London. Tony Harrison was another early, Liverpool-born, comrade who was still on the scene, and Pat Wall, whom I would campaign with during his narrowly defeated campaign to become the M.P for Bradford North during the General Election of 1983 (he would succeed four years later, though his tenure was sadly cut short by death from cancer, aged 58, in 1990) was another Evertonian who had cut his teeth in opposition to the ‘machine-politics’ domination of the city by Jimmy and Bessie Braddock in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Terry Fields, yet another veteran Liverpool comrade, was successfully elected as the M.P for Liverpool Broadgreen at that same 1983 election, one of two victorious Militant candidates that year, the other being Dave Nellist in Coventry South East.

There are others whose names have now faded from memory, but Liverpool loomed so large in the life of Militant during my time, that there was a standing joke, perpetuated mainly by our rivals on the Left, from the likes of the Socialist Workers’ Party, Workers’ Revolutionary Party, and Revolutionary Communist Party (none of whom existed in Grimsby, where we had the Marxist Left field pretty much to ourselves), of young Militant members (‘supporters’ as we called ourselves publicly) affecting scouse accents, as well as attempting to ape the smart suited image of the likes of Hatton. It was true that there was a bit of that going on, even in the backwoods of Grimsby, but it had little effect on me, a vaguely ‘artsy’ working class youth with a fondness for long hair, straggly beards, and John Lennon spectacles, and who couldn’t have afforded a smart suit even if I’d wanted one.

Following my year or so of inactivity, support for Liverpool City council (LCC) became, especially after the end of the miner’s strike in March 1985, the key issue being pushed through the headlines and articles in Militant. It was an exciting time, when we really did see LCC as a model local authority that was delivering for working class people, leading to it gaining had mass support, which manifested itself in the winning of successive local elections, demonstrating that the idea that people wouldn’t vote for hard-left socialist policies was a myth perpetuated by the Labour Right and the Tory press in order to protect their own power and privilege. Unlike the posturing of the likes of Livingstone in London and Blunkett in Sheffield, here were councillors who really were prepared to put everything on the line in order to take on the Tories.

Again, our rivals on the Left, which we disparagingly called ‘the Sects’, derided us, this time for promoting ‘Socialism in One City.’ But we saw our leadership of Liverpool as a shining example to follow, potentially the spark for a nation-wide struggle and Militant’s transformation into a mass revolutionary party.

It should also be remembered that initially the council did win big concessions and extra funding from the Thatcher government, though largely because the Tories didn’t wish to fight on two fronts. The shrinkage of the power and the influence of the Trade Union movement came first, at least once the little matter of a certain South American Junta invading sovereign British territory had been resolved. Renegade local authority councillors would be dealt at a time of the government’s own choosing.

Being in a political nowhere-land like Grimsby, we could do little more than raise the issues around the struggle of LCC through our sales of Militant. These took place in Grimsby town centre on a Saturday morning, door-to-door on one working class estate or another one evening a week, plus the odd factory gate sale in the days when factories were still relatively plentiful. There were also semi-frequent public meetings, and usually unsuccessful attempts to push supportive resolutions through meetings of Grimsby and Cleethorpes Labour Parties.

But I did also get the opportunity to give some personal, in person support.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’d already marched through the city in support of the council prior to the 1984 visit, though exactly when that was is lost to me. All I really recall of that first visit, apart from the touristy singing of Penny Lane as we marched passed Penny Lane, was the huge crowd, almost certainly the biggest crowd I’d ever been a part of to this point, which Hatton, and others, addressed from the balcony of St George’s Hall. Degsy, as he was known locally, spoke of the possibility of ‘gun boats on the Mersey,’ which I already knew, from the comprehensive political and historical education Militant had provided me with, was an allusion to the events of 1911, when troops were deployed against striking workers in the city.

My second political visit was definitely in 1987, as the council’s struggle with the government finally came to a head, with the council refusing to set a rate (or council tax in modern terms) until they were again provided with greater funds from central government, having passed instead what had been deemed to be an ‘illegal budget,’ putting the individual councillors, the ‘47’ as they became known, at risk of disqualification from office, surcharge and personal bankruptcy.

The council was appealing to local authority workers in the city, of which there was still many thousands in these days before excessive centralisation and outsourcing, to come out on strike in support of them. I well remember standing outside the old, now long-gone Liverpool Stadium handing out leaflets, with many comrades from both Liverpool and around the country, agitating for a ‘Yes’ vote as thousands of NALGO (National Association of Local Government Officers) members streamed past us on their way inside to vote. As it was, it was all in vain. The vote was a comprehensively ‘No’, something like 3800-1500.

Of course, there was also all that business of the ‘grotesque chaos’ of the council ‘sending out taxis to scuttle around the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’ in the words of that appalling hypocrite Neil Kinnock.  But this is not the place to analyse the minutiae of the tactics of Hatton, Mulhern and co. Suffice to say, it was the beginning of the end for Militant’s control of Liverpool, and although Militant’s best, and my best, ever period as a political activist was still to come through our successful leadership of the campaign against the Poll Tax in 1989-90,I believe differences in tactical approach amongst Militant’s own leaders as to the question of how the struggle of the city council should be conducted, differences that were totally unknown to us rank and file members at the time, played a key part in the split of 1990-91 which led to the effective death of Militant. By the time of the Walton by-election of 1991, when Militant Lesley Mahmoud, standing as ‘Liverpool Real Labour’, was crushed by the official Labour candidate, I’d already left, concentrating on my studies and new life amongst new people in Manchester.

Having now lived in Liverpool for twenty years, and having had a good few opportunities to speak with local people who were around at the time of the Militant City Council, I’ve found attitudes towards it to be mixed. There seems to be a general feeling amongst working class people, that the council did some good work, in particular through its house building programme, Militant’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’.  But that Hatton,, someone who I’ve often seen around town, usually speaking loudly into a mobile phone, still immaculately dressed and looking remarkably young for his age, was a ‘wide-boy’ and a ‘chancer’, and that there was too much ‘jobs for the boys’ going on.

Given the current situation, as we approach the 2023 council elections, with the city again being administered by central government appointed Commissioners under ‘special measures’, and with the former Mayor Joe Ashton awaiting trial on charges of corruption and witness intimidation, this all sounds depressingly familiar. There has been some suggestion that Hatton, in his modern incarnation as a millionaire property developer, may be implicated in this sorry business too, though it’s been a while since I heard anything about this, and it should be clearly that despite very long and very expensive investigations and court proceedings, in the so-called Operation Cheetah in the 1990’s, Derek Hatton was exonerated of any wrong doing during his time as Deputy Leader of the Council.

So, that’s pretty much all there is to say about my political involvement with Liverpool, though I do still occasionally dabble a bit in local issues.

In 2019 I attended the Casa, the bar and bistro opened with the redundancy money of former striking dock workers which also acts a welcoming meeting venue for various Leftist and trade union groups and causes (and where I performed at a Play for Cuba gig that same year) for a memorial meeting for the recently deceased Mulhern, who I’d previously voted for in Liverpool’s first Mayoral elections, partly for old times’ sake, when he received a respectable 5% of first-preference votes.

Tony Mull’, as he was generally known, was in many ways an admirable figure who, unlike Hatton, and me come to that, had never deviated from the political path he’d chosen as a young man. After being disqualified from office, he drove a cab and ended up with a Master’s Degree, as a (very) mature student, in History, his dissertation being, unsurprisingly, on the subject of the political thought of Leon Trotsky.  Until not long before his death, he could still often be seen manning the Socialist Party, one of Militant’s two main successor organisations, stall around Liverpool city centre on a Saturday morning. Degsy spoke at the memorial meeting, and spoke well, and it was interesting that the two of them had remained close enough, despite their political divergence (Hatton has effectively become ‘Soft’ Left though, vindictively, he has never been allowed to re-join the Labour Party, even during Corbyn’s period of leadership), for Tony’s family to call him to him to his bedside to see his old comrade one last time, the day before he died. Interesting, and actually quite moving.

Five

Girlfriend ‘H’ and that Wonderful Day

There was very little Liverpool Connection in the dozen years that followed my move from Grimsby to Manchester, and subsequent exit from Militant. I did at one point become a big fan of Julian Cope, not himself a Liverpool person, his dad was actually once the Bishop of Sussex, making him something of a Southern posh-boy, but was formerly the leading member of the iconic late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s Liverpool band The Teardrop Explodes, which had been part of the scene around Eric’s club, the Cavern of its day, along with bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Wah Heat. As well as Julian’s idiosyncratic solo career, which could be described as the career Syd Barrett could have had if he’d kept his acid consumption within the still not inconsiderable levels of Cope, I also loved his two volumes of autobiography, Head On/Face Off, which introduced me to a lot of great new music, in particular to some obscure British psychedelia and Krautrock, or Kosmiche Musik to give it its less pejorative, more properly Germanic name. Although I’ve never been a great gig goer, like John Lennon, ‘I prefer the records’, I have seen ‘Copey’ live live three times, twice in Manchester and once in Liverpool, gigs at which he was, in chronological order, brilliant, terrible, and OK.

I also continued my Beatles obsession during this period, with varying degrees of intensity, perhaps reaching its height during the Anthology period, and although not as football-orientated as previously, I still recall within the excited thrill of watching live as Liverpool F.C. pulled off the ‘miracle of Istanbul’, coming back from 3-0 down to beat A.C. Milan on penalties in the European Cup final of 2005 (actually, they were 3-o down when I arrived back from a meditation group at Manchester Buddhist Centre).

But my connection with Liverpool began to fully and rapidly gather pace when I commenced my relationship with Liverpool resident ‘H’ in the autumn of 2002. This relationship began in the dying embers of my relationship with ‘V’, a rollercoaster/whirlwind two-year affair of which I’ve written extensively in fictionalised form in my novel The Angela Suite, and which has also been the subject of a fair few of my songs, particularly of those collected on the Last Days of Analogue 2002-5 and Digital in Liverpool 2005-7 compilations

Looking back, myself and ‘H’ were initially, though not exactly rollercoaster, certainly whirlwind. Having first met, I think, in October 2002, by December I was already accompanying her to stay at her mum’s (she’d not long lost her dad) big, rambling, freezing cold house in Cambridge, the city from which ‘H’ originated, having moved to Liverpool initially to become a student at Liverpool University. This was one of two occasions we’d make this trip together. I would write of the first of them in my song Cambridge 2002.

I won’t go into how ‘H’ and I met, as some things should remain personal, but she was in Liverpool and I was in Manchester, so our meetings were at first necessarily infrequent, usually[GC1]  taking place at weekends, though sometimes, work permitting, I would also stay at hers, or she at mine, one night during the week.

I was working in Urmston at this time, which was part-way between the two cities anyway. ‘H’ was a keen member of the Rambler’s Association, and walking has been, and still is, generally my foremost means of exercise. ‘H’ introduced me to several very enjoyable ‘Trans-Pennine’ country treks, including one on New Year’s Day 2003.

Anyway, as mentioned early in this piece, in March, lying on my Futon in my hovel of a West Gorton council flat, on the estate where the television series Shameless would begin filming not long after I’d departed, I ‘popped the question’ regarding the possibility of my moving to Liverpool in order to be closer to her.

‘H’ owned her own house which she shared with her teenage son, who had Asperger’s Syndrome, or High Functioning Autism as is the preferred modern terminology, and I think the fact that I worked in this field was part of her attraction to me. This was also true of my leftist political leanings (she’d once been a member of the old CPGB, a Eurocommunist who’d joined the short lived Democratic Left grouping when that party had dissolved itself), as well as the fact that I wrote and recorded my own songs. As regards the latter, she really was the biggest fan I’ve ever had.

Despite her being a house-owner, there was never any suggestion that I would move in with ‘H’. Rather, the plan was aways that I would move ‘near.’ That was at my insistence, and as things turned out, my instincts on this were correct.

As I’ve said, although the exact date is unknown, within a month of my first suggesting the possibility, the Big Move, on that ‘wonderful day’ as ‘H’ would later put it, actually happened.

She sorted out my accommodation, and what is astonishing in the light of the present-day circumstance’ of five-year waiting lists for social housing, is that within a couple of weeks of our mutual decision, she had found me not only one Housing Association flat, but a choice of two.

This was a difficult decision to make. Choice ‘A’ was a small flat in a nice, leafy, suburban type area, close to where the Bluecoat school is, though if you asked me to find it now, I would struggle. Choice B was in the Toxteth/Liverpool 8 area. This area was primarily known to me through the riots that had taken place there during the summer of my year-zero of political radicalisation, 1981. Though that had been more than two decades earlier, Toxteth’s bad reputation had endured, and not entirely without reason. Having lived in another former riot-torn area, on the border of Moss Side in Manchester during my first year as a mature student a dozen years earlier, the idea of living in another danger zone was not exactly appealing.

But space proved to be the decisive in my deliberations. Although both flats were one-bedroom properties in communal dwellings, the living room and bedroom in the Toxteth flat were phenomenally huge by the standards I was used to.

After that ‘wonderful day,’ when ‘H’s ‘man with a van’ transported me, my highly valued book collection (which I regularly have had to cull in the years since), C. D’s and my meagre furniture from Manchester to Liverpool, the process of ‘settling in’ to my new abode began.

On the plus side, as I commented in my journal at the time, I expected my seemingly vast new-found lebensraum to have a positive effect on my creativity, especially on my music, as well as on other aspects of my personal wellbeing. This proved to be the case. More negatively, my few sticks of Manchester furniture looked comically puny in my new home; and, given that there was no central heating, merely a gas fire in the living room, the flat was exceptionally cold, even though I arrived in spring, and soon to get much, much colder. Until the flat was upgraded to a modern heating system maybe three years after my arrival, I would often supplement that woefully inadequate fire with the use of an electric fan heater, and on cold winter nights I would often drag my single mattress from the bedroom into the living room.

But the benefits of my new home very much outnumbered the disbenefits, and a fine old second-hand Rushworth and Draper piano was soon added to my gigantic living room, and musical palette.

I won’t dwell too much here on ‘H’ and I. She really was, and I’m sure still is, a good person, who, initially at least, adored me. I wasn’t used to being adored, and it was a nice experience. She also helped me immensely on a practical basis, assisting me financially in the buying of ‘white goods’ via a local service that supplied good quality items refurbished by young offenders and people with drugs and/or alcohol problems. This company, Create X, is still one that my wife Yingfeng and I still use when necessary to this day.

But, now living in closer proximity, cracks soon began to appear in our relationship. Temperamentally, ‘H’ and I were just too different. Despite my ongoing and varied ‘issues’, I have always been a fundamentally optimistic individual. ‘H’, on the other hand, was prone to a habitual negativity which became increasingly wearisome to be around.

In short, we didn’t work out. Our final ‘date’, after several periods ‘on’ and several periods ‘off’, was a desultorily, dark, early-evening walk around a park in, I think, the autumn of 2005, after which she texted me to inform me that ‘you no longer nourish me in any way.’ I’ve often pondered on the precise meaning of that cryptic message,

and it’s a song lyric/title that cries out to be used, and soon, finally, I hope, will be.

So, after three years, ‘H’ and I ended once and for all, and now, sadly, we can pass each other in the street without even acknowledging one another’s existence.

But the move to Liverpool did work out. I’ve been very happy here, and am happy still. I remember once saying to ‘H’, during one of those earlier, happier times, that part of feeling at home in a new area, based solely on my experience of moving from Grimsby to Manchester, my residency in Lerwick having been too short to count , is when you reach a stage of seeing in the street, perhaps merely glancing through a bus window, people with whom you have some connection or other, either through working with them, having met them once or twice in a social capacity, or those who you merely see on the same journey or in the same place on a regular basis. That, and passing through areas that you have some connection with, again because you worked in that vicinity for a while, or once visited a near-by venue for whatever reason. These are amongst those many little moments in life that enable the place you happen to live at a particular time in your life to start to feel like home.

In the modern divide identified by the excellent political commentator Mathew Goodwin, I am very much a ‘Somewhere,’ very much not an ‘Anywhere.’

Looking back, it’s remarkable how quickly this process of settling in unfolded for me in Liverpool.

Also, I quickly realised once I moved here, how much I was a child of water, of the river and the sea, having grown in Grimsby, within easy reach of Cleethorpes beach, and with many fond memories of long walks along the banks of the river Humber, with my dad, solo, and with others, and of how much I’d become ‘hemmed in’ in by spending too long in landlocked Manchester.

In Liverpool, the river Mersey now plays a similar role in my life to that which the Humber played in the life of my younger self.

In addition, Liverpool had, and perhaps surprisingly still has, an excellent local network system which makes close such fine seaside towns as New Brighton, West Kirkby, Formby, Southport, and for me, best of all, Crosby with its ‘metal men,’ the wonderful open air Antony Gormley art installation, where perhaps I will one day have my ashes scattered, as suggested by my song Scatter My Ashes  on my seaside-themed Another Place album, which was named after Gormley’s installation, album from 2020.

I also love the old part of the city centre, with its beautiful, neo-classical buildings, such as the Walker Art Gallery and St George’s Hall, and the ‘Three Graces’ close to Albert Dock, the Liver Building, the Cunard, and the Port of Liverpool building. Legacies of Liverpool’s former imperialist wealth, some of which was undoubtedly founded on slavery, they might be, but they are still fine examples of architectural beauty which still dominate the city’s skyline, refusing to be obliterated by either woke ideology or the proliferation of luxury student flats.

We have plenty of beautiful modern buildings too, such as the two major museums, the Tate Art Gallery, one of my favourite places to visit, and even some of those pesky blocks of flats for rich, foreign students have a certain Modernist appeal. I also like, in a rounabout, slightly knowing way the Brutalist splendour of Belle Vale shopping centre.

And I almost forgot our two marvellous cathedrals, the highly-distinctive modernist wonder, the ‘wig-wam’, that is the Catholic cathedral, and the magnificent Anglican, which looks much older than it is, and where I have often done my ‘Cultural Christian’ thing.

Liverpool is indeed ‘a beautiful city’ as my described it, soon after her arrival here from China.

So, for me that’s Liverpool: football, the Beatles, politics, the sea, great architecture, yes and the friendly, funny people of legend, though we can’t ignore the multi-cultural elephant in the room, the mass immigration that year by year, and now sometimes seemingly day by day, is diluting and perhaps destroying forever the distinct scouse culture.

But I have never regretted my decision to move here, and I can’t envisage a scenario which would ever cause me to do so.

Six

Family Matters

After a few initial problems finding suitable employment, once I realised that frequent commuting back and forth by rail between Liverpool and Urmston was both expensive and impractical, I ended up working for the same Liverpool-based social care company for eleven-and-a-half years, including seven-and-a-half in low-level management positions. This was the only time, if I’m honest, I ever experienced any ambition in my chosen field of employment, that of supporting adults with learning disabilities/autism/mental health problems, other than to be good at what I did.

In fact, it was on the day that I was to travel to China to meet Yingfeng for the first time following ten months of email correspondence, that I interviewed for my first ever team leader job, and had already I discovered I’d been successful by the time I was on the bus on my way to the train to the airport.

I have written about Yingfeng at greater length in my ‘A Very Chinese Wedding’ piece, and so won’t dwell too much on the subject here. Suffice to say that it was to my aircraft-hanger like Toxteth flat that she first arrived as my wife, already six months pregnant following our Beijing honeymoon, which itself took place seven months after that first physical meeting at Guangzhou airport.

And it was to here that we transported our ‘made in China’ baby son Charles on the short journey from his place of birth at Liverpool Women’s Hospital.

The flat had become something of a man-cave by the time of Feng’s arrival, with the huge book collection piled, uncased, against one-wall in the bedroom, the student-style posters, the musical instruments and recording equipment, and the trippy trinkets stuck to walls and hanging from ceilings. It wasn’t really the place for a married man or more importantly a married woman, and although I liked the privacy afforded by the trees outside my living room window, it was clear that Feng found the flat dark and somewhat depressing. Given that she arrived in December, when periods of daylight were short anyway, this was always going to be a problem for someone arriving from a bright, sunny, tropical climate.

Within eighteen months of her arrival, we were fortunate enough to be offered a three-bedroom house in Speke, where George Harrison had grown from childhood to adolescence and fame. Our son Charles attended Stockton Wood nursery school. Paul McCartney was the most famous old boy of its attached Primary school.

Everything connects.

And it was to this house that our second son John (or John Paul, named, inevitably, after Lennon and McCartney) became the final, surprising, but perfect addition to our family, three-years-and-ten-months after the arrival of Charles.

(Incidentally, I so enjoyed the Matrix trilogy whilst Feng was pregnant that first time, that for a time I considered calling our first son Neo. Sensibly, family tradition won out, and Charles it was).

Four years later, we moved again, this time to Wavertree, where George Harrison had been born, to make it easier for Charles to get to his new school of King David, an excellent school which both boys now attend, with John about to join Charles in the High School this coming September. We are very fortunate. King David is one of the best schools in Liverpool, and that it encompasses both a Primary and a High school is very rare. How many children can potentially remain with, mostly, the same group of class mates from the age of four to the age of eighteen? It really has been a pleasure for me, as a parent, something that happened to me late in life, and that I’d quietly assumed would never happen at all, to stand in the school yard with the other parents and watch these babies grow into fine young men and women.

I’ve been happy in all three of my addresses in Liverpool, and I believe my family, once it emerged as an outgrowth from my more meditative, sober mode of consciousness (yes, I sort of do believe in this ‘outer as an expression of the inner’ business) has been, and despite financial issues that, like for so many families, are now worse than they have been at any point, and despite an increasing lack of space as our children wilfully continue to grow, a happy family. If I achieve nothing else in life, I married Yingfeng, as close to my dream girl as I could ever hope to reach, and raised with her two wonderful, bright, intelligent, fit and healthy children.

That isn’t nothing.

It’s only now, looking back, how quickly and easily I took to fatherhood. Parenthood is perhaps the hardest thing one will ever do, but it’s also the most natural, and once it began, although I might do this or that bit differently if I had the chance to do it over, it seemed from the off as though I was born to it.

Maybe that’s just my intrinsic optimism again. Even in the most difficult of times, I had, and still have, an assumption that everything will ultimately turn out OK. Is this because I believe in a Just, benevolent, creative force at work in the universe, God, if you like, or do I believe this merely because I am an optimist?

So, Liverpool is the city where I raised a family of my own:

how could I not feel a strong connection to it?

Yet, there was still one more, unexpected connection to Liverpool for me to explore; and it is to this that I will now turn.

Seven

The Return of the Buckley Clan

In 2013 I decided to trace my Family Tree on Ancestry.com. I had only previously known my family line up to my grandparents, and had always been particularly interested in my father’s branch of the family, as both of my paternal grandparents had been dead before I was born, grandmother Charlotte for six years, and grandfather Charles for sixteen. On my mother’s side, I did at least have the chance to meet and know my grandparents.

The Soldiers Handbook of granddad Charles Green was gifted to me by my dad’s sister, my favourite aunty, Aunty Gwen, when I was in my mid-teens,  because she knew I would look after it. I’ve always felt a responsibility fulfil that act of trust in my younger self.

The ‘Small-book’ as it was called, had been issued to Charles on September 2^nd 1914, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, and would have been carried by him in the trenches of Belgium and France. Charles was wounded three times during this conflict, until finally being invalided out of hostilities in February 1917. After that, he apparently always walked with a stick (pre 1914 he’d been a walking races competitor, according to my dad), and survived on an army pension, basically raising six children single-handedly during the 1930’s after his marriage to Charlotte, something of a ‘party girl’ it seems, foundered though, as was the norm back then, was never officially terminated. Charles was an admirable figure, it has always seemed to me, and this war-time artefact is a precious family memento, which I hope will one day be taken good care of by at least one of my sons, before hopefully passing it on to yet another generation of Greens’.

It was fascinating to discover through Ancestry that grandad Charles’s father, my great-grandfather, had also been called Charles, and to trace his birth to Legbourne, a small Lincolnshire village about seventeen miles outside of Grimsby. I also discovered that he and his new bride, Mary Jane, had made the move to Grimsby in the early-1870’s, soon after the opening of a railway link, as part of the process of migration from village to town that was a nation-wide phenomenon at this time, the height of Britain’s Victorian Industrial Revolution.

On Ancestry, I journeyed back further, to his father, my great-great-grandfather Thomas (the same name as my dad, it’s interesting how these names re-occur in families, traditions being passed on, a practice I of course continued with our Charles), and his birth, also born in Legbourne, in 1812, in the latter period of[GC2]  the Napoleonic Wars.

 In this branch of the family, I was able to reach back one generation further still, to Thomas’ mother Mary Green, Brown as was, born in Laceby Acres, five miles from Grimsby, a village to which I made at least one school trip as a child, in 1776, the year of American Independence. A knowledge of world history greatly enhances the enjoyment of the discovery of family history, and this works in reverse also.

I could find no information about great-great-great grandmother Mary’s husband William, other than that that was his name. In fact, it was fortunate that Mary lived long enough to be registered in the 1851 census, Britain’s second ten-yearly survey of the population, and the first with a real degree of accuracy, otherwise I wouldn’t have found her either. Going back to pre-Victorian, pre-census times involves scouring through old church records, and results are by no means certain, as not everyone was Church of England, and not all births and deaths were even recorded.

That’s something I have yet to do.

The high-point of my family research was my first visit to Legbourne, and the discovery, in the All-Saints church yard, of the intact gravestone of great-great-grandfather Thomas’, with his dates, 1812-95, and the inscription ‘Life’s race well won/Life’s work well done/Life’s crown well-worn/Then comes rest’, which I thought was beautiful, and would later use in my song ‘The Wise Old Labourer’ on my Origins album..

But, for the purposes of this piece, it is to the branch of the family married into by Thomas’ seemingly only offspring Charles that is of most relevance.

Great-grandfather Charles lived an unusually short life by the happy standards of my family, dying at a mere forty years of age of heart failure in Grimsby in 1887. But he did have two children, grandfather Charles, and great-uncle William with his wife, one Mary Jane Buckley, whom he married in 1874.

In marrying Mary Jane, Charles literally married the girl next door, the 1851 census clearly showing the Green’s and the Buckley’s as living next door to one another in Legbourne.

But the real surprise, and one which deepened my Liverpool Connection in a manner I could never have expected, was that her father was revealed to have been Christened at St Peter’s church, Woolton, Liverpool, ‘Liverpool, York’s’ according to the census, in 1824. His father, my great-great-great-grandfather Buckley, was also called Thomas, and was also listed as a butcher, a tradesman.

At some point between 1924 and 1841, Thomas Buckley Jnr, most likely though not certainly with his parents, must have made the journey from Liverpool, then a major port, to the tiny North Lincolnshire village of Legbourne. We can only speculate as to why he would have made this one-hundred and sixty-one-mile journey. Almost certainly in search of work, either for himself alone or himself and Thomas Sr. one would assume, and perhaps Legbourne was just another stopping off point in this search for a place in need of hired hands. Maybe he, or they, was escaping urban squalor, though Woolton Village, as it is still known, really would have been a village at this time, long before it was swallowed up by the city sprawl of Liverpool. Our guide for the tour of Mendips, John Lennon’s childhood home, described Woolton as ‘semi-rural’ even in the 1950’s.

At any rate, stopping off point or not, in Legbourne Thomas Jr remained, presumably until his death, though I could find no record of this death, and it was there that, in 1851, he bore a daughter, my great-grandmother Mary Jane, with his wife, Jane Buckley-nee-Laking.  Mary Jane married into the Green-line by marrying the boy next door, as I have said, and from this coupling came by grandfather and future World War One hero Charles in 1881.

When Charles Sr. and Mary Jane made the trek to Grimsby around the time of their marriage in 1874, it was to an area known as the West Marsh where I was born eighty-eight later, and where one of my sisters and her family still live to this day.

(Incidentally, great-grandmother Mary Jane lived on until 1922, the year after the birth of my father. I like to think of her, a very old lady by then, of whom a photographic record must exist, though I’ve yet to discover any, holding baby Thomas, my dad, her grandson, in her arms.)

There are no aristocratic strains in my family history, as far as I am aware. We were agricultural labourers who became industrial workers, with only Buckley’s Sn., as a tradesman tradesmen, being but a short-step up from that.

So, when I moved to Liverpool in 2003, it was as if the Buckley branch of the family was returning home after an absence of maybe a century-and-a-half or more. Such discoveries make family history endlessly fascinating to me.

(And did old Thomas Buckley Jn, her father, ever take his daughter to visit Liverpool, his place of birth?)

And there are still further levels to investigate yet. There had always been rumours of ‘Irish blood’ on my dad’s side of the family, and the Ancestry DNA test I took as the culmination of my family history research in this period actually did reveal that I am 17% Irish. It turns out that the name ‘Buckley’ is in fact a derivative of the Irish name ‘Buckleigh,’ thus it is likely that the Buckley/Buckleigh’s at some point, like so many before and after them, maybe in the early nineteenth century, maybe earlier still, made the journey across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Liverpool.

I would love one day to discover where exactly in Ireland this branch of my family hailed from.

That is for a future project…

And finally…

So, a great-great-grandfather christened at St Peter’s church in Woolton, but a short step or two away from where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time a hundred-and-thirty-three years’ later., and after whom I would name my second son another

Fifty four years after that.

Everything connects.

I have nothing much to add. To misquote whomever said it first, you can take the man out of Grimsby…etc’, and I will indeed be ‘Grimsby ‘till I die’. But Liverpool is very much my home now, in a way that Manchester never was. It is after all where I have, and still am, as a late-dad, a strangely re-occurring tradition in my family, raising a family of my own

My boys are half-Chinese, and I hope that one day they will explore and embrace those cultural roots to the fullest extent possible. But they sound scouse and, being Liverpool born and bred, I suppose that is as it should be.

As far as I’m concerned though, I never thought that I had picked up the accent to any great extent, until recently when I watched my recorded playback of an open mic’ performance at the Beeswing pub on Smithtown Rd.

There is most definitely a Liverpool-twang in my between song patter!

So, there it is. My Liverpool Connection, a connection that has been long, much longer than I ever imagined.

Long and fruitful and long may it continue.

Anthony C Green April 2023

All of the original songs and albums I have mentioned are available on Spotify and Amazon. My four published novels, including The Angela Suite as mentioned in the text, are also available on Amazon.

Picture attribution

The three graces mage by sue davies from Pixabay

Liverpool Football flag Image by jorono from Pixabay