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A National Treasure 2
In Praise of Jack Rosenthal
Regular readers of my column (doesn’t that sound grand, am I getting slight B-list celebrity syndrome here?) might recollect that quite a while ago I did a piece about Stuart Hall under the title of “A National Treasure”. Stuart, you might recall, had done a few of his radio reports in book form and some of them were Burnley, so naturally I thought these and Stuart Hall, were the best things since (being an old fashioned sort of ex headteacher) blackboards, chanting tables, chalk and desks facing the front. But - I have to confess that I now love another man.
Well, before you get any ideas, not really, it’s his writing I love, having come to it rather late, seeing as he has been around for ages and written so much TV comedy and drama, so it’s now Jack Rosenthal who has replaced Stuart Hall in my affections. He actually dates back to very early Coronation Street days and that Sunday night all time favourite London’s Burning, for which he wrote the first episode, so therefore the idea is his, and quite rightly he will be forever associated with it.
And what has all this got to do with Burnley you might well ask? Well, life works in funny ways, so let me explain.
Basically I’m a squirrel, I can’t bear to part with things like books, magazines, supplements, old newspapers and stuff, if I think that one day they will be useful or have something in them that I can use, or bring to the page. How I love that phrase, isn’t it just so pseudo intellectual? I first heard it on a radio book review programme where a selection of pretentious folk give their vain high-brow opinions on the latest book – usually obscure novels up for some award but which you and I have never ever heard of. These folk, however, find several levels of meaning and a hundred and several layers of isms and they identify with this and that, or aren’t quite in tune with the central character Rosalind, and then they decide it’s a book that brings hope for the future. I don’t ever suppose Robbie Fowler’s book Snorting It Like It Is or Beckham’s book Every Outfit I Have Ever Worn, will ever get a spot on a programme like this, but I live for the day that it will. The latter is a book to my horror that I found on a shelf in a bookstore in Englewood, Florida. Jeez the bloke gets everywhere and not a Willie Irvine book in sight.
So there was this pile of supplements on a shelf in the basement, and I thought this is ridiculous I must clear them out (to make room for more obviously)… but first I’ll just flick through and see why I kept them. For the life of me I couldn’t think of any reason why I had kept any of them but then, there, in the middle of one of them, I looked, blinked, stared and stared some more, because there was a piece about the Burnley 1946/47 Cup Final and promotion team that I had totally forgotten about.
“Bloody hell,” I thought, “What’s this…I wonder who wrote it? I wonder what this bloke’s brought to the page?” And so I read it, not once but several times and now this piece of writing is firmly positioned at number one in my ever-growing collection of Burnley writing. The point of all this rambling is this, that Jack Rosenthal wrote it, and lived in Colne for many years, having moved there from Manchester when one of Goerring’s errand boys kindly reduced the Rosenthal household to dust. Mother and children moved to Colne, father stayed to work in Manchester and lived in lodgings.
So Jack, thanks to the war, as good as grew up a Burnley lad, and for quite a while lived and breathed all things Claret with his best pals. The record of all this is in his book By Jack Rosenthal and Jack being Jack, original and unique, wrote his biography in the format of a six-act screenplay. It takes some getting used to, reading it, but you eventually get the hang of it and think back to those days at school when you read Shakespeare, (me with our elderly, short, rotund, spinster English mistress, Miss Maud, with a face like the granny in a Giles cartoon, who when seated always looked like a sack of spuds). A Rosenthal play is however, far, far funnier.
So in later years when Jack was rich and famous, well maybe not that rich, he, along with other celebrities was asked to write a piece for the NSPCC. All these pieces were about the childhood days of each particular author and were published in a book that raised money for the NSPCC. Rosenthal wrote about what he remembered best about his days in Colne: Burnley and the 1946/46 Cup Final team, and this, in addition to other extracts from the NSPCC book was later reproduced in a Sunday Times supplement. He and his pals went through the Saturday afternoon ritual of a game at the Turf for a number of years, but the Cup Final they listened to on a radio. His description of each player is a gem. Harry Potts he was convinced was so good at hitting the crossbar that Rosenthal was convinced that was what Potts actually aimed and preferred to do and practised in training. And then he was an accomplished diver, and this was long before action replays and videos and SKY and Andy Gray (thank God), and so his penalty-winning prowess was seen as a talent to be admired, not infamy to be sneered at. And then there was Potts’ crafty shirt pulling, always done on the blind side of the ref so that it was the opponent who was penalised for retaliating.
So one by one he goes through each player, goalkeeper Strong always looking earnest; Harold Mather like a bull-necked centurion tank; George Bray, rough, tough; Potts, blonde hair shimmering in the sun; Peter Kippax, brylcreemed hair, always looking slightly bored; Woodruff, bullet-jawed, billowing cloud of yellow hair; Atwell lunging into sweeping tackles; Policeman Alan Brown, guarding his area like a mother pterodactyl; and all of them, mythical kings. The NSPCC book? Sorry I have neither the name nor the publisher. But the October 11th, 1987 Sunday Times supplement? Maybe, like me, you’ve got one in a heap in the garage that you put there years ago.
But it’s in his biography that you get a glimpse into a Colne of yesteryear and also how the name, Peter Kippax, provided the inspiration for the title of one of his TV plays. I don’t suppose Peter Kippax ever had the faintest idea about this. In later years when Rosenthal moved away from the Burnley area, he became a dedicated Manchester United supporter, (the only flaw in him that I can find so far), but not even Bobby Charlton had a play named after him.
“Thanks to Herman Goering’s sense of humour, we were just in time for a wayward Junkers 88 to dodge the pom pom guns on the Ship Canal and, aiming for Ferranti’s in Manchester drop its bombs and in a direct hit on the nurses’ home of the Jewish Hospital across the street from our house. We were bombed out; the nurses were bombed to smithereens. The next morning, a cortege of charabancs queued to take away what was left of the corpses. And David and I were evacuated again. This time to a little cotton town in east Lancashire called Colne…
“Although only a bus ride from Manchester, Colne was a juddering culture shock. To a city boy’s eyes, a sort of Just William world of chickens, sheep, cowpats, gumboots, allotments, five barred gates and stiles. (But not colonels).
“A population of 27,000, not one of them circumcised but all convinced that Jews were buried upside down. In these parts it was common parlance to use the Oxford English Dictionary’s alternate to the verb ‘to cheat’, which was until 1958, ‘to Jew’.
“A sleepy little town that became the noisiest place on earth every weekday morning at half past six and in the afternoons at half past five.
“The clog chorus… hammering its way to the mills, and reprised on its way home, an almost deafening, anvil splitting, ringing, grating cacophony of iron against stone. In the hours between, the silence screams with the incessant metallic thunder of thousands of looms…
“Young women weavers and spinners on their way to work, arm in arm in rows of four or five, singing or gossiping or yawning as they go, heads turbaned over their curlers shooting sparks with each step. L S Lowry-Land.
“Donkey-stoning the doorsteps. The donkey-stone was a soft grey stone that, with elbow grease and sweat, would give you that whiter than white doorstep, which meant your average housewife could hold up her head in public…
“The grocer’s shop was run by Mr Beaumont, pronounced Bewmont. I pinched it for Annie Walker’s maiden name 21 years later, when I began writing Coronation Street. He was also our half-a-crown-a-week rent collector. He worked on the principle that somebody, someday would come out from behind their sofa.
“It may only have been a bus ride from Cheetham Hill, but it could just as well have been a trip in H G Wells’ time-machine. I could barely understand a word of the east Lancashire accent. It was like a medieval foreign language. Thee’s and Thou’s and, on that first morning in my new school - the word yonder. I didn’t know what o’er meant and I was completely flummoxed by yonder.
“At dinnertime, the Cock of the School, i.e. the biggest bruiser, felt it his patriotic duty to knock the helzel out of me. And I won. I was Cock of the School on my first day. And it all happened just there. O’er yonder.
“Colne – 1945 – a children’s victory street party. Long trestle tables covered in Union Jack bunting stretched down the middle of the street. Twenty or so excited kids including me, David and Wally Butler, grabbing sandwiches, biscuits, cakes, and lemonade. Lakey, my mum, and other housewives, including Alsace Lorraine, running run between their houses and the trestle tables with more goodies…
“Burnley was our local team. Very local. No one else had heard of them. They were my adolescent infatuation before my life-long, true-love affair with Manchester United began the following year. Funny, frustrating Burnley, unbelievably at Wembley in their new, silk claret-and-blue shirts…
“A Philco wireless sits in the middle of the table. No score at half time. No score at full time. No score till six minutes from the end of extra time. Then the wireless heard, Hurst centres from the right… it goes to Duffy… Duffy shoots… Duffy’s scored… The Charlton players mob Duffy in delight… unfortunately Duffy didn’t play for Burnley…
“We switched off the wireless and went out into the big, wide world of our street. At some point in life you have to grow up. We started six minutes from the end of extra time… bloody Duffy.
“The Burnley outside left was the often slightly unfit, always slightly bored, Peter Kippax, Brylcreemed wizard of the wing, Peter Kippax. To Pot, Shaz, Jimmy and me, his name became as entertaining as his dribbling. So Peter Kippax became P’Tang, Yang, Kipper, which became P’Tang, Yang, Kipperbang, which finally became our password and eventually the no doubt mystifying title of one of my screenplays 35 years later and transmitted by Channel Four… the rites of passage story of Alan Duckworth (me) fighting, and losing, the agonising struggles of adolescence”.
Jack Rosenthal died in 2004. Not many people know of his early love for all things Claret. Peter Kippax I doubt ever knew that a screenplay was named after him. And like I say, not even Booby Charlton had that honour bestowed on him, even though he was perhaps Rosenthal’s greatest ever hero. My thanks go to Maureen Lipman for her permission to use all the extracts from Jack’s book By Jack Rosenthal (published by Robson Books) and her permission to include the full account of the 1947 Cup Final and that glorious team of 1946/47 in the next BFC Anthology, No Nay Never Volume Two seems a good enough name for that when it eventually appears.
By Jack Rosenthal is only 1% Burnley related but the remaining 99% is so entertaining, dry, droll, and pithy I heartily recommend it. But fancy that… one of our greatest ever writers being a Burnley fan, you live and learn.
Dave Thomas February 2006.
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