Mondays,
Magyars & Movies
By
Dominic Horton
On
Monday evening I had the pleasure of attending a Black Country film
night at Netherton Arts Centre, presented by the organisation
Multistory as part of the Flatpack Film Festival. I was reticent to
go to the film night at first as it meant missing a chunk of a Magic
Monday at the Flagon & Gorses – my favourite night of the week
at the pub – but I am delighted that I went as it turned out to be
a really special evening and the three shorts films that were shown
were simply wonderful.
 |
| Tom Corneronly in the Flagon & Gorses |
More
than any other time in the Flagon on Monday all hands converse
together and join in with the general laughter, discussion and
bonhomie. All gather in the bar leaving the back room and the
Barbara Cartland Suite unoccupied and unloved. Everyone knows each
other and the comfort of that means that the evening has an intimate
ease to it, like dinner in a favourite restaurant with your
sweetheart. Tom Corneronly occupies his customary corner, leaning on
his stick, and Weston Super-Leeds sits at the other end of the
L-Shaped bar, reading the paper and making odd little notes, and
everyone else sits somewhere in between drinking beer and
eating communion wafers (Mini Cheddars.) I have yet to
learn the nature of the notes that Super-Leeds scribbles but my guess
is that he is secretly working on a screenplay about the pub, which
he is hoping will catapult him to stardom. If he is successful his
movie might be shown at a Black Country film night at Netherton Arts
Centre in years to come, you never know.
The
first film we were treated to on Monday was Teddy Gray's
Sweet Factory (directed by Martin Parr, 2011), which was a
delectable, heart-warming 20 minute vignette about the legendary
family owned business in Dudley, established in 1826. Betty Guest and
Ted Gray now run the company and they have worked there for 65 years
and 50 odd years respectively. Although demand for Teddy Gray's
sweets far outweighs the firm's maximum production the business has
effectively remained a small cottage industry which has resisted the
temptations of expansion or takeover. All of the confectionery is
still hand made and incredibly Gray's operates with no computer
or fax machine – the whole operation is organised by Betty, Ted and
the other office staff by paper methods and via a landline telephone.
Betty does all of the figures and arithmetic (or “reckonin'
up” as Black Country folk usually call it) for the books in
her head and she is apparently highly accurate.
It
is most likely that when Betty Guest and Ted Gray retire or pass on
that the next generation of Grays might well modernise the
business so I would imagine that Martin Parr was keen to make a
record of the old fashioned and traditional firm before it changes.
It reminds me of the work of the painter and author George Catlin,
who died in 1872, who spend a large part of his life recording in
paintings and print the culture and lives of native American Indians.
Catlin knew that much of the native Americans way of live would die
out given the dominance of North America by settlers
of European origin. Catlin was of course right, but his work remains
as an amazing legacy and record of the subject.
 |
Joe Mallin the Chainsmith, by request of
Toby In-Tents.
|
Teddy
Gray's boiled sweets remain enduringly popular and one wonders
whether this is because of a sentimental hankering for the past or
whether certain old fashioned ways and products are just better than
their contemporary counterparts and worth keeping alive as a
consequence. Due to the persistent and dedicated work of the
Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) cask beer has seen such a
meteoric resurgence that it is now rare to walk into a
public house that does not sell it, which is incredible given
that at one time cask beer had almost entirely been replaced by the
less satisfying nitrokeg equivalent. Like the ever loved Teddy
Gray's confectionery, the demand for quality cask beer is not
based on rose-tinted nostalgia but it is because drinkers like
and desire the product.
Cask
beer featured in the second film, Joe the
Chainsmith (directed by Philip Donnellan, 1958) which is a
30 minute snapshot of the life of Cradley Heath chainmaker Joe
Mallen. The film is an amazing chronicle of the Black Country in the
1950's and it features such typical Black Country set pieces as
Staffie's, pubs, heavy industry, pigeon racing and grim landscapes.
There is one unbelievable scene in the film where Joe and
three of his chainsmith work colleagues are making a large, thick
piece of chain which is about 4' by 3' and it is a job that takes
them the whole day to complete.
In
the scene in question four men shape the chain with heavy lump
hammers, with all four hammering the chain link in sequence in
split-second synchronicity: if one man makes a mistake and
mistimes his hit with his hammer the lethal weapon could
strike a fatal blow to his mate. The strength, dexterity, skill and
timing shown by the men as they shape the chain is a phenomenal sight
to behold and I was transfixed viewing the film clip. The fitness,
endurance and physicality shown by the workers in continually working
the hammers for a number of minutes is formidable and Joe was by no
means a young man in the film, he looked to be in his 50's or 60's.
 |
| Betty Guest & Ted Gray, proprietors of Teddy Gray's sweet factory. |
That
said it is hard to fathom the age of people from olden times. For
example, in his pomp Wolverhampton Wanderers and England legend Billy
Wright (who was married to the Beverley Sisters) looked like a
pensioner and in this regard he was not alone among his
contemporary footballing fellows. In fact Wright must have felt like
a pensioner when England famously lost 6-3 to Puskas's Magical Magyar
Hungary team at Wembley in 1953, but that is another story.
The
final film that we watched was another by Philip Donnellan,
entitled House of Friends (1964) and it focused on
drinkers in the Turk's Head pub in Brierley Hill. In the
programme the film is described as “an unsentimental picture of a
vanishing world” but the pub life portrayed in House of
Friends is remarkably similar to the reality of today in a
whole number of pubs across the country. One of the drinkers in the
film said, “we like a good drink of a night. We don't try to
escape it.” The words could quite easily have been uttered by my
associate Neddy La Chouffe in the Flagon & Gorses.
 |
Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton in Karel Reisz's 1960 film
adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's book Saturday Night &
Sunday Morning
|
In
their work Donnellan and Martin Parr have documented the lives and
culture of ordinary British people. “Ordinary” doesn't adequately
describe the likes of Betty Guest, Joe Mallen and the other subjects
of the film but I think you know what I mean. When we were at school
we were force fed Shakespeare and none of us understood it, let alone
enjoyed it. Shortly after I left school I read Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, the celebrated novel
about young Nottingham machinist, drinker and rebel, Arthur Seaton.
The book made me connect with literature because I could identify
with the lives of the characters that Sillitoe wrote about. At the
time I thought to myself, why couldn't we have studied this book in
school, it would have made more sense to me? I might have even passed
the English Literature exam but as it was I failed it spectacularly.
This was mainly on account of me only having read the first chapter
of the book that we were studying, so trying to write the exam paper
referring to the opening pages only of the text was a task beyond my
youthful capabilities.
In
a round about way Saturday Night and Sunday Morning lead
me on the path to writing this column and the other things that I
scribe. So if you want someone to castigate for having to put up
with these ramblings every week then blame Alan Sillitoe not me.
©
Dominic Horton, March 2015.
Lowlife
is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
Email:
lordhofr@gmail.com
