Have you ever heard of “mauveine measles”? Likely not. I certainly hadn’t until I came across it in accounts of the rapid uptake in the use of newly synthesised purple dye in 1850s and 60s. It is not, in fact, an illness. 

You will be familiar with the notion that purple has historically been the colour exclusively worn by royalty or clerics. The reason for this was because it was so expensive to make purple dye from the mucus of a sea snail found in the Mediterranean. It’s reported that this “Tyrian purple” was first made in Tyre (in what is now Lebanon) and that in 1^stcentury CE a pound of the dye cost as much as half a Roman soldier’s annual salary. This all changed when, in 1856 a young chemistry student named William Perkin discovered, quite accidentally, a way to synthesise a purple dye. He’d actually been trying to make quinine to treat malaria when he noticed a purple solution emerge from his mixings. He tested the effect of this unexpected colour on a piece of fabric and when it came out purple he quickly patented this first synthetically produced purple which he called mauveine. A craze for purple clothing took off and soon the label “mauveine measles” was being used to describe how the fashion statement was spreading through Britain.

I’ve learned all this after a Ramblers http://ramblers.org.uk walk yesterday took me to Manchester’s newest park (first in a hundred years), Mayfield Park. A site manager gave us a brief history of the site and told of its industrial past, in particular it having been where a man called Thomas Hoyle set up a dye works in 1856. We were told that it was Thomas who had first worked out how to make a purple dye from a plant, rubia tinctorum or European Madder. The park has been planted with many different purple plants to honour Thomas’s legacy as an innovator in making purple fabric available to ordinary folks not just the elite. Despite extensive searches I’ve not been able to find much at all about Thomas’s discovery and have to come down in favour of Perkin as the man who brought the colour purple to the masses.

Thomas Hoyle was, however a progressive employer at his dye-works and notably built a bathhouse for his workers. In 2019 when the site was being excavated for development the remains of the bathhouse were found. The tiles used in the pools were in remarkable condition and many have been saved and will be used in further building on the Mayfield Park site.

I haven’t written any poems about dye works but here’s one I wrote for my first manuscript (for my MFA, 24 years ago!!) about my family history through 19^th and 20^th centuries and Industrial Revolution stories from that time.

Queen of Red Clay

Some irreverent wag, looking at her

standing…broad wooden sceptre in

her hand and her yellow turban on her head

might call her the Sultana of Edom or 

the Queen of red clay…

Elihu Burrit 1868

She stands statuesque

her turbanned head, her thin garments

spattered with clay she works into bricks,

slaps into moulds, her hands

lift and turn these inedible loaves.

Pale-skinned girls

blood drained by the weight of wet clay

they carry on their heads

might be her pages.

if only their court was gold-painted,

scented by spiced meat searing over open fires,

lady and attendants dressed in silk.

Instead they smell the blaze of kilns

push each common day toward week’s end

and a few pennies for the gin palace

 Beyond the factory wall

men are building monuments to labour.

No ceremony, no kings or queens cut ribbons.

Just brick on brick, slate roofs and chimneys

stacked against a raddled sky..

https://mayfieldpark.com/

https://www.soci.org/about-us/history/notable-scientists-and-inventors/william-perkin

#mayfield stories

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/10/victorian-mayfield-bathhouse-uncovered-archaeologist-beneath-manchester-car-park

Opened in 1806 the Portico Library https://www.theportico.org.uk/ was funded and supported by 400 initial subscribers all of them well to do men. Women didn’t get a look-in until 1870 with the influence of the Married Women’s Property Act. The first committee envisioned a place which would hold a collection of books, journals and newspapers for the edification of its members and also provide them with a relaxing lunch venue. The Portico, as well as being a fine library has always had an excellent cafe. 

Early members and those who sat on the library’s committee numbered amongst them some world famous names. There was Peter Mark Roget of thesaurus fame, and other members included John Dalton and numerous renowned authors, scientists, future Prime Ministers and  wealthy industrialists. Like many old established institutions in Britain, the Portico is engaged in an examination of its connections to empire building, colonisation and the slave trade. No question that these were sources of money that funded the library and its book collection reflects this history. However, its members also included some radical abolitionists and anti-poverty campaigners.

When I landed in Manchester again four years ago (after 39 years away), I needed a quiet place to write. I did a tour of some of the libraries in the centre of Manchester seeking that perfect spot where I’d be able to sit through a day and quietly get words on to paper. The Portico’s reading room proved to be perfect for my needs. I became a member of the library and in the past year have also been volunteering one day a week which is bringing me into closer contact with the books. 

The Portico Library is a membership library, but it is open to the public who can enjoy its atmosphere and its cafe. The library gained charitable status in 2017 and now has the goal of re-occupying the entire building, taking back the ground floor which has been rented out since the 1920s when the library was short of funds. 

Members of the Portico have access to its collection of books numbering more than 25,000, mostly 19th century, but with some books much older.  

Here is the oldest book in the collection, Historiae Animalium by Conrad Gesner, It is written in Latin and includes many stunning illustrations of animal species. It was published in 1551. There are two volumes which were discovered lying in an extreme state of disrepair, water damaged, in the attic of the building in the late twentieth century. The books were restored and rebound in 1999.

#porticolibrary, #oldbooks, #16thcenturybooks, #19thcenturybooks

Rhythm, rhyme, the expression and stirring of emotion, memorable phrasing, all elements of poetry and of music. All through the ages, poets have been inspired by composers and composers by poets. 

I got my chance, last year, to realise the magic that occurs when music and poetry combine. Isaac Zee, a highly talented young composer isaaczee.com came into my life when he rented  a room in my house (how to pay the mortgage). He was invited to compose a piece for an innovative music project conceived by his colleagues Tristan Zaba and Mackenzie Warrener. Through their new company, Slow Rise Music they had landed funding from the Canadian Music Centre to produce three new vocal multi-instrumental compositions. Isaac was to write one of these and he needed lyrics. Would I be interested? How to say no! And yet I’d never before worked with a composer. 

The theme, initially inspired by the previous year of pandemic, was “Survival”. And yet we were invited to think more broadly on this theme. What did survival mean to me? I’ve always written landscape poems — survival of the environment; I’ve written about my mother, who I care for, surviving life itself (she’s 91).

I began to write a new piece based on notes I had made on the topic of domestic abuse. The “Me Too” movement had raised awareness of the endemic nature of toxic masculinity and its impact on women. In England, many of us were raw with anger and sadness after the murder, by a serving police officer, of Sarah Everard a young woman simply walking home. For myself, I know too many women who have borne the scars of abusive relationships. And I know women reject the notion of victimhood. Women survive.

Isaac and I began the work. We met over Zoom and had wide-ranging discussions about how a poem works: structure and form and elements of musical composition. How did I write a poem and how did he compose a piece of music?

Our collaboration brought the composition “Cardinal” into life. It was one of three pieces for voice, keyboards and guitar performed in November 2021 in a concert, “Hanging By a Thread”, for a small Toronto audience. Tristan, guitar and bass voice and MacKenzie, keyboard and soprano voice had begun to realise their goal of breaking down barriers between genres in classical music. Conventionally this concert would have been a quartet, two musicians, two singers. Pop music or perhaps folk, more associated with the set-up they chose. 

The video has a slow, silent start, be patient. Cardinal is the second song.

My thanks to Isaac for lifting up my words inside his music and to Tristan and MacKenzie for a profoundly moving performance.

I met Peter Street at a poetry reading when he was reading from his new book of poetry.

(Remember when we used to do that? Go out of an evening to a venue, maybe in town, where people gathered, even sat down next to each other and talked face to face?)

I was drawn immediately to Peter’s voice in his poems which personified plants and tackled political, social and environmental issues in bold and often amusing ways. This, from a review at the time:

Everything natural is beautiful and itself and a metaphor at the same time; everything is dangerous and true “remembering those poor beetles  / who tested the waters and teased  the millions of elms into suicide  / even then we were still ignored”.  This is a book we all need to read. Caron Freeborn 

When Peter told me about his memoir, coming out later this year and asked me to review it, I was happy to do so.

But I’d like you to check out Peter’s poetry too.

Saying No To The Icebergs   Sand Sedge Carex arenaria

like all families we have fought

put it behind us
an army is washing
towards us

waves of them
from land of ice and water
we have to be ready

or be washed away

come and stand with us
here next to my triangular stems
shields against their salt-burn

we have to slow those waves down

take the battle to them here
on these dunes
Sand Sedges are natural warriors

we take root colonise
safe in numbers
know what we have to do
are you with us

_______________________________________

Peter Street’s Goalkeeper – Games, secrets, epilepsy, love pulled me through its fast-paced story. With its weaving together of all that its sub-title promises the story grabbed my attention and was a quick read. It begins dramatically enough in war-torn Croatia in 1993 when Street has gone as a volunteer during the Croat-Bosnian war. Soon, his memories return to the streets of Wigan and Bolton, his home with “Mum”, Kitty, and “Dad”, Thomas, who is responsible for quite a few of the secrets. There are friends and more than one potential girlfriend who provide, at different stages of Street’s life, empathy, companionship, early stirrings of love and desire and tragic losses. But these are not Streets true friends. He describes the comfort and ease he felt when it was just “me, ball and wall” as he practised his football skills and played marbles in the old outside toilet where he felt safe and happy.

“On rainy days, I would spend most of my time inside that outdoor toilet. It seemed to come alive with purpose whenever I turned up”.

The heart of this story is in Street’s documentation of learning difficulties at school and in a string of soul-destroying jobs, epilepsy surfacing at the age of fifteen, ultimately ending his passionate wish to be a professional goalie. Not that he doesn’t have some success at football and there are gripping play by play accounts. Street also very effectively conveys his experience of being a child who was clearly showing signs of autism spectrum disorder from his very early years. He shows us what this was like in so many of his recollections by depicting objects as having agency, appearing to be more human than the real humans in his life. At first I thought that this way of describing things acting on him was a stylistic choice and perhaps rather over-used until I began to see that this was exactly how Street saw his world. The stairs and the doors are active players in his games of football, cobbles and steps walk him along, pictures in books admired him as much as he admired them. And the young lad, Peter, was more at ease by himself than with most other people. Being around people set off uncomfortable sensations and at times caused him real distress.

“To me, lonely was a kind of freedom for my ears and my whole body, giving the real me a rest”.

Goalkeeper includes charming pictures illustrating life in the North in the 50s and 60s that really bring Street’s account alive. It is a satisfying read that is often heart-warming and at times heart-wrenching as Street battled (even when not fully aware of the nature of his foes) all that life threw in his path. The human spirit is strong. Peter Street has become, if not a famous goalie, a talented writer and poet.



View all my reviews

An overcast but dry day waited for us to get going on our hike up Ilkley Moor. The moor, for those not familiar with the geography of Yorkshire sprawls above Ilkley a small town north of the West Yorkshire city of Bradford.

https://goo.gl/maps/h96mEC7qwYh2a9kE6

Moors are wild and often bleak places, uplands of low-growing vegetation, heathers and bracken with high rainfall and peaty soil which is a rich store of carbon. The website of Friends of Ilkley Moor tells us: “It is estimated that there is twice as much carbon stored in Britain’s soils as there is in its woodlands.” https://www.ilkleymoor.org/discovering-ilkley-moor/conservation/

On this typically British summer day, cloudy and just the right side of warm (perfect for a hike) my companion and I had a mission, a destination in mind. We were heading to the Beck Stone, one of seven large rocks located across the Pennine Watershed, each with a poem by Britain’s Poet Laureate Simon Armitage carved into its surface. This project was conceived by the Ilkley Literature Festival in 2010 who commissioned Armitage to write a series of poems for the South Pennine Watershed. Armitage wrote poems which, in his words, celebrated “the element which gave shape and form to this region, namely water.” Each poem describes water in a different form: Beck, Puddle, Mist, Rain, Dew and Snow. The seventh Stanza Stone was placed in a secret location and remains unfound to my best knowledge. Pip Hall, letter-carver, carved the poems with her assistant Wayne Hart and the Stanza Stones Trail, which covers 47 miles between Marsden, Armitage’s place of birth and Ilkley was devised by landscape architect Tom Lonsdale.

We set off on our walk from Darwin Gardens Millennium Green close to Ilkley town centre. The Millennium Green was built to celebrate the turn of the 21^st century and incorporates its own carved stones to honour Ilkley’s famous one-time resident. We had fun tackling the stone flag maze at the Green’s heart.

My companion cheerily told me it wasn’t far at all to the Beck Stone, only a mile. When we were, later, scrambling up some rocky stretches at times unstable underfoot, I remarked in response “Maybe only a mile but you didn’t tell me it was a mile straight up!”

As well as the most obvious heathers and ferns, we also came across cottongrass, crowberry and bilberry and, as we climbed, a stunning vista opened when we turned to look down on the town we’d left behind.

In his introduction to the Stanza Stones trail guide Armitage refers to the tradition of carved stones across the moors. From pre-historic standing stones, boundary stones placed throughout time right up to contemporary graffiti, people have been placing and inscribing stone in the wild environment for millennia.

When we reached the Beck Stone it did not disappoint. Backstone Beck, trickles then rushes down the hillside and getting close up requires a small jump across the stream and a bit of a clamber onto an adjacent rock. I did it! I perched on the rock and read the poem out loud. Here it is:

The Beck Stone

It is all one chase.
Trace it back the source
might be nothing more than a teardrop
squeezed from a Curlew’s eye,
then follow it down to the full-throated roar
at its mouth – a dipper strolls the river
dressed for dinner in a white bib.
The unbroken thread of the beck
with its nose for the sea
all flux and flex, soft-soaping a pebble
for thousands of years, or here
after hard rain, sawing the hillside in half
with its chain. Or here, where water unbinds
and hangs at the waterfall’s face, and
just for that one, stretched white moment
becomes lace.

©Simon Armitage 2010

This poem evokes a perfect image of the beck, its persistence through millennia carving the landscape as the words are carved into the stone.

Our next goal was to find the Poet’s Seat promised to us beyond the Beck Stone. There, walkers and aspiring poets are invited to write and post a poem in the clever postbox which then spits out another poem left by a previous visitor to the Seat.

We walked on and gradually climbed and reached the Poet’s Seat where a family, mum, dad, uncle and kids were busy writing and talking about poetry. When asked if she had written a poem to post, one of the girls told us perkily, “Parent’s doing it”! Clear division of labour in that household.

We had brought poems to post but realising the intention to encourage on-the-spot composition, my companion took up the challenge and wrote a short ditty about coming across Simon Armitage on the moor. 

What more to desire — fresh Yorkshire air, glorious vistas of moor and communities below and poetry!  I’m looking forwad to finding another of the Stanza Stones on our next adventure.

Here’s a review of “Stanza Stones” the book by Simon Armitage, with Tom Lonsdale and Pip Hall
(Enitharmon Press, 2013); hbk, £15

https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2015/02/18/stanza-stones/

Procrastination atop the Yorkshire moors

The stark and promise full moor beckons.
I might venture up to Stoodley Pike,
grand obelisk, peace built
into every brick, nothing surrounds it
taller than scorched tussocks, scrubby grass.
I could turn north, strike out for Haworth Moor.
What chance to come upon Emily dreaming there?
Perhaps a half-glimpse of her ethereal skirts turning
in a swirl of mist or her voice on a whisper of air.

If I head down toward the wooded valley,
dark gatherings of trees press close
to stone houses ranged on the hillside.
I can swish through knee-high grass in the field,
a picnic table beside a gnarly apple tree,
good rest stop. But still the need
to consider Blackshaw Head,
to imagine all its seasons beyond this
slow-breathing summer. Rain
lashing in at 45° or snow stacked against stone
like a battlement. Never a soft enfolding.

Also the necessity of bathing.
A huge breakfast cup
to stream water over my head
indulgence of bubbles, slosh of water
over my shoulders, breasts and belly,
water in big splashes, playful
and somehow surprising.

After dressing there are the plants
to water: greenhouse tomatoes, cucumbers
and all around the house, pots and baskets;
pelargoniums, hostas, petunias,
impatiens, and lined against a wall
or in a space between path and grass,
the ones easy to miss.

At last, I approach the blank page,
after I find the right spot, summer house
and bench in the garden too hot.
On the swing-seat I can sway, push into a rhythm
find words to match, fill paper
with this place.