Footnotes Read online

  It wasn’t the same for Jolly Jack. He exuded bonhomie, of course, and propped up the bar, pint and pipe at the ready, holding forth, looking ever more Falstaffian as the years passed. There was only one period in his life when he lost himself in drink, just after he’d been wounded in the trenches for the second time, and all his mates were being killed, and he must have thought there wasn’t much point in doing anything else; but then he decided, reluctantly, to take the officer training that was being urged on him, and he went back to the trenches, and was gassed, and at last the war ended, and he never went back to live in Bradford but took one of those degrees at Cambridge that were being offered to ex-servicemen, and after that he got married, and worked ferociously to get clear of the poverty, and mostly drank moderately (but I guess with dedication) because as he said, it didn’t take much to make him ‘a little muzzy’ and then slide into ‘a spirit of mischievous lust’.

  Back in the bar I am startled to hear myself attempting to explain ‘sifting basheline shindrome’ to a man who seems absolutely thrilled to hear all about it. He then asks me what kind of music I like. The bar (or is it even the same bar?) is thrumming with life and urgent conversation. I am surprised to see how late it is. Double whiskies are the way to keep an evening going, when there are so many beautiful and fascinating people here (how times have changed since 1933, Jack) of so many different ages, shapes and colours, and no one seems remotely interested in going home – and certainly not me, because where would I even smoke in the Holiday Inn Express, now that I am re-addicted for ever. It’s just perfect here, surfing the tidal roar. Cities are the thing! We’re human. We need noise. Movement. Laughter. Screw the Hobbit. I bloody love Brum.

  I am standing on the fifteenth floor of the Holiday Inn (Express) staring out at a grey Birmingham morning. I can hear a low male voice rumbling in the corridor and for one ghastly moment I think it is Kingsley Amis, come to administer his patented hangover cure. I might even welcome the distraction. At some point in the night an intruder has blowtorched my tongue and air-dried my eyeballs, before trowelling the inside of my head with wet Brummie cement.

  If I can only manage to leave this room, my plan is to head to Bournville, on the outskirts of Birmingham. It is the home of Cadbury World, the vast and glutinous chocolate-themed shop and visitor attraction, as well as the site of the headquarters of the Cadbury (now Mondelez) global chocolate research centre (yum!). The Cadbury factory is also here, which cannot fail to raise a vision of chocolate waterfalls tumbling into Tuscan-brown lakes of caramel and velvet, lapping at the foothills of sugar-dusted, marshmallow mountains under a honeycomb sun. I do know, of course, that reality is going to trample all over this childhood dream, but I have to follow Jack and Beryl.

  Bournville is also the village created by the philanthropic Quaker George Cadbury in 1900. He and his brother Richard inherited the chocolate business from their father and in 1879 moved the factory from the centre of industrial Birmingham into what was then farmland, although there was already a railway and a canal. When Richard died in 1895, George dedicated the rest of his life to doing something about his belief that ‘the root of most social evils lay in the bad housing conditions in which all too many had to live’. He bought 330 acres of land near the factory and by 1900 had built 300 houses, not just for the local Cadbury workers but for many others on low incomes. Rents were set appropriately. Infant mortality and adult death rates plummeted.

  Jack continues the George Cadbury story with a quote from one of the local Bournville publications of the 1930s:

  He then handed over the whole property to a body of Trustees – the Bournville Village Trust – on behalf of the nation. He thus gave up entirely his financial interest in it, and secured that all profits … should never accrue to any private individual or body, but be devoted to the development of the Bournville Estate, and to the promotion of housing reform elsewhere.

  He further stipulated that no house could occupy more than a quarter of its own site, and that one-tenth of the land (quite apart from private gardens) should be reserved for parks and sports grounds. Since then, the Bournville Village Trust has boomed and spread, with many more low-cost houses, and not just here but in Greater Birmingham and beyond. Their mission remains the same (at least, so far as I can tell: their published Corporate Aims gabble about ‘customer-focused services’ and ‘a Digital First approach’, but I reckon we know what they mean; they are also, for the record, committed to ‘Business growth’).

  Can you imagine any modern-day company owners doing what George Cadbury once did? You could say there’s Bill Gates and his extraordinary work in global health. But in 1933, as Jack put it, the Cadburys ‘genuinely prefer spending a good part of their money on their factory and its employees instead of on racing stables and yachts and Monte Carlo’. He is talking not only about the Bournville Village Trust, which as I said was never just for the Cadbury employees, but also the dozens of clubs and schemes that the Cadburys set up for their workers, including sports halls, theatres, lectures, conferences, club rooms with billiards tables, drama, music, games – everything, in short, except a place to get a drink (and thank God, I find myself thinking, for the teetotal Quakers). He was told when he visited that there were about 7,000 employees and ex-employees signed up to the various clubs. Model yachting was especially popular in those distant days, so the Cadburys had provided a small lake. In their turn, the workers clubbed together in 1937 and donated a statue to their employers to commemorate the opening of their lido. God bless them, one and all.

  By the time Beryl got here in 1983, things were rather different. She found just five women working on the automated production line (Jack had witnessed many hundreds) and when she went for lunch in the canteen she met a small bunch of grumbling old men looking forward to cashing in their pensions and tending their gardens. The lido and the clubs were closed and the employees were being asked to pay for membership of their own sports halls. But that was far from the end of it. In 2010 Cadbury was bought by Kraft, the US convenience food mega-corporation, in a hostile takeover, accompanied by much hand-wringing in the UK media, who were mostly upset about the trashy inedibility of Hershey bars. The company once known as Cadbury became Mondelez (not on its products, but for the purpose of corporate growth in the lucrative new world markets), and in 2014 its American CEO pocketed $21 million for a job well done. In 2016 the Independent ran this headline: ‘How one of Britain’s best-loved brands went from a force for social good to the worst example of brutal corporate capitalism.’ And to round it off, in 2017 Mondelez paid no corporation tax in Britain, despite profits of £185 million. And what do George Cadbury and his one-time workers make of all that, I wonder, as they paddle their yachts in their celestial pools? I bet they’re not eating Oreos.

  Beryl and Jack were both led around the factory, checking on the workers, but I’m on the ‘self-guided’ tour of Cadbury World, accompanied by coachloads of sugar-fuelled schoolchildren. We are all handed a couple of bars of chocolate when we buy our tickets. Over in the factory itself I have read that the latest machine is churning out one million bars of Dairy Milk every day, with just four employees to keep an eye on things. There is no sign of even the smallest chocolate waterfall. The tour takes us past lush Latin American dioramas, where a waxwork Mayan, who looks a lot like Cher, is fondling a large wrinkled cocoa pod. Stout Cortés is there too, picking disconsolately at his helmet while a young Aztec woman offers him flowers, or perhaps a mug of hot chocolate. Anyway, that’s the theme – the human lust for chocolate – and we find ourselves in Victorian Birmingham, staring at the first Cadbury shop, and then the disembodied head of George appears, talking with a soft but nonetheless grating voice about how superior his chocolate was (and is) to any other version, and a Cadbury employee hands us more bars (a Flake and a Caramel, hurrah), and we sit through a film about the production process where the bench seating shakes us around like so many cocoa nibs and I realize too late, with the chocolate swilling
and slopping on an empty stomach, and the schoolchildren erupting all around me like a row of uncorked sherbet fountains, that this is no place to be dawdling with a hangover.

  I do find a small chocolate fountain at the end of an echoing corridor. Round the next corner I am given more chocolate (a Boost and a Twirl) and I eat it absent-mindedly. Note for Kingsley: I may have found an alternative cure for hangovers. There are four Cadbury employees here, dressed in white lab coats, decorating eggs and smoothing out trays brimming with brown chocolate, and one of them kindly shows me the quickest way out, which takes me past rooms filled with the Cadbury marketing campaigns of old. Curly Wurlys! Creme Eggs! And here at the end is an animatronic gorilla thumping out the climactic drum solo from Phil Collins’s ‘In the Air Tonight’, with a crowd of forty-somethings filming it on their phones. It was an advert, I am sure you remember, for something or other. I have a suspicion I’ve found the teachers, and if so they really should get upstairs fast to deal with the sugar-based catastrophe that is unfolding in another part of the building. The rooms are glowing Cadbury purple. Welcome, Jack, to the sticky and addictive heart of admass.

  Outside in the autumnal sunshine of Bournville village, just a short stroll from the factory gates, I sit in front of a café, opposite the green, and watch adults gathering their children at the end of the school day. I know that much of the Bournville estate is set aside for people on low incomes, but everyone here seems very well-to-do: sleek, groomed, in no hurry at all. I presume that not much of the housing is occupied by Cadbury workers these days – there probably aren’t enough of them to fill half a street. There is a stately, between-the-wars atmosphere, familiar from BBC Sunday night television. Red postbox. Wide pavements. Lines of mature lime trees, their leaves slumped in the gutters. Ducks on the green. Despite the 4x4s humped up on the kerb, I am surprised not to see the children running around in long grey shorts and school caps, stuffing conkers into their satchels. The half-timbered houses look solid and well loved: the irrefutable legacy of George Cadbury.

  Jack was uneasy about the Cadbury and Bournville set-up. It was horribly paternalistic. ‘No factory workers in Europe have ever been better off than these people’, he wrote, but ‘it is when one takes a longer view that doubts begin to creep in.’ Isn’t it disempowering? When Australian workers were offered the same deal – the clubs and subsidized housing and theatre halls – they said thanks, but we’d rather have the money. So Jack chewed it over, dragging in Hilaire Belloc (who thought that this ‘servitude’ would lead to the decay of genuine democracy), and fretting that the paternalistic employer was ‘wrecking the proper scale of values’. The average worker would start to believe that ‘he was made for his factory and not his factory for him’. Jack wanted workers to be free of bondage, running their own lives, ‘forming associations far removed from the factory’, using their leisure ‘and demanding its increase, not as favoured employees but as citizens, free men and women’.

  Yes!

  And somewhere in Poland there are Cadbury workers, with no sports halls or theatres or boating lakes, and certainly no half-timbered village to call home, churning out bars and eggs at knock-down prices for the European market. Except that right now, with automation, it has again become cheaper, and more expedient – at least until the next currency fluctuation or political upheaval – to carry on making the Dairy Milk here in Bournville. But there is one thing we have all lost, since Jack wrote those words – and that is the idea that automation will set us free. Do you remember that? The belief that more leisure is to be welcomed, because it will be paid for. That everyone will benefit from the technologies that replace us. And the reason for our loss of faith, as Jack would be the first to point out, is that the new wealth created by all these labour-saving machines has not spread to the workers and ex-workers and people of Bournville and Birmingham. No. It has flowed up and away and over the hills to ‘Monte Carlo’.

  J. B. Priestley didn’t really want to return to Bradford as part of his English Journey, but he did and he dragged Beryl and me in his wake. He was born here in September 1894 and left for good in September 1914, when he joined the army and was sent to France, aged just nineteen. For him there were two Bradfords, the city he was revisiting in 1933 and the other place that was frozen in the pre-war years of his childhood and youth: ‘I have changed, of course; but I think the place itself has changed even more than I have.’ He recaptures that earlier, pre-First World War Bradford exquisitely in his 1946 novel, Bright Day – and not just the fabric of the city, but also the atmosphere of a place that is living through the last years of the good times, when the wool trade on which all its wealth was based was still flourishing (although the decay was setting in), and the theatres, restaurants and music and concert halls were buzzing, and the large German-Jewish community was still welcome. The Independent Labour Party had been born in Bradford (or Bruddersford as he calls it in the novel), and his not-so fictional uncle (based it seems to me on Jack’s teacher father),

  still lived in that early optimistic Labour atmosphere, before anybody had sold out and before the party machinery had grown too elaborate. In those days Merrie England, with more good cricket and W.W. Jacobs and Exchange Mixture and roast pork and bilberry-pie and June mornings in Wensleydale for everybody, still seemed just round the corner.

  W. W. Jacobs was a writer of escapist short stories, and ‘Exchange Mixture’ was Jack’s favourite blend of pipe tobacco – and as for the rest of it, we’re not too far from Enid and her picnic blankets. The whole country seemed to be yearning for those never-never Edwardian days in 1933. And what is especially worrying is that, almost ninety years later, it feels like it still is.

  Clever Jack left school at sixteen. His father (with dreams of university) was disappointed, but he found Jack a job as an apprentice in the wool trade, where Jack mucked about and bunked off to walk across the moors (fancying he was Wordsworth) and wrote all the time, submitting articles to the local paper and even, in 1913, getting one published by a London magazine, the London Opinion. Jack’s mother had died when he was two and his father had remarried four years later (Jack liked his stepmother) and he grew up at No. 34 Mannheim Road, where now there’s a fading blue plaque and a neat front garden and a small child peering from behind a thick curtain. It’s a steep, trim little street of low, yellow houses and new dormer windows, with mature rowan trees on both sides (Beryl mentions them) and roses and suburban silence. A young British Asian woman walks past with four young children trailing behind her, the youngest boy dragging a cricket bat.

  The family turns onto Bonn Road. There’s also a Heidelberg Road round the corner – reminders of Bradford’s German-Jewish days. I wonder at what point street names are chosen to reflect a local heritage – or even renamed, although no doubt that would cause difficulties. There has been plenty in the news about the unhappiness of Bradford, especially racial tensions, but also the terrible unemployment rates and degenerative poverty. Bradford is officially Britain’s youngest city, with one-quarter of its residents under the age of sixteen, and although it now has its own university (unlike in Jack’s day, when bright students had to travel to Leeds or beyond), there is inevitably huge pressure for jobs. What also troubles policymakers is the fact that the different communities of Bradford tend to live apart, grouping together in the same areas, many of them never meeting anyone from another background. Or so we hear. Of course, you could see this as a positive thing, with families and communities helping each other in difficult circumstances, but there’s also deep anxiety that people of different faiths and cultures never speak to one another – and that, they say, was one of the causes of the 2001 riots.

  Jack had predictably robust views on the matter of immigration. The language has changed since his times, of course. In 1983 Beryl was writing about ‘Asians’ and ‘Indians’ interchangeably, but not ‘British Asians’. The demographics of Bradford have been in flux for three or more generations, and at the last (2011) census twent
y percent of the population was of Asian heritage, predominantly Pakistani. In some parts of the city it is closer to ninety percent. Jack would have been amazed to have walked with me the two miles from the centre of Bradford to his old street, and seen hardly anyone whose family wasn’t originally from south Asia, and all the mosques, and the shops glittering with gold and silks (Jack, by the way, loved to shop), and the spices in the air, and the occasional Polish deli, and the extraordinary number of cars with women in hijabs, and other cars (or the same cars) vibrating with music from every continent.

  But this also makes it sound more exciting than it is, because I think what would have struck Jack even harder than the arrival of so many Asians in this stolid northern town are the rows of broken and boarded-up shops, especially in the old centre. It is a Sunday, mind you, but all along Kirkgate and Market Street and Bank Street and Hustlergate, and throughout the magnificent but battered Victorian centre where Jack used to linger in his lunch hours, escaping the office for an hour (or three), there is almost nothing but closed and bankrupted shops. Waterstones is still here (and a beautiful branch it is), but the streets are empty and littered and if you stand at the junctions of Bank and Tyrrel streets all you’ll see are ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ signs and closed charity shops. The council has been putting money in – the paving is fresh and patterned and young street trees flutter on the sides of the roads – but everyone out today looks hard-pressed and the last few shops look on the verge of collapse.

  Jack said he’d like to end his days running a stall at Kirkgate Market, selling old books and gossiping with the tobacco and hat sellers. The old market was ripped out in the 1970s and replaced with a characterless concrete box, so I think he’d struggle to raise any enthusiasm for what he’d find there today. There’s a new shopping centre in town, The Broadway near Cheapside, and it seems to be draining the last of the life out of the surrounding streets, and maybe also the old/new Kirkgate Market. There’s only so much money to go round and this is where it has apparently pooled, among the familiar signage of Next, Carphone Warehouse and H&M.