plum crumble portions for Budgens in Exeter.’
These signs usually suggest that you’ll be offered a small dish of hand-picked olives stuffed with low-fat organic Tuscan soil at £30 an ounce, or stilton mixed with conkers packed in the sort of fancy box you’d use for a wedding ring. But in Wigan they don’t need to artificially recreate the chic individuality of pre-industrial shopping. These stalls really have been there for a hundred years. If any designers for farmers’ markets were to wander in they’d clap their hands and shriek, ‘Oh, how rustic! It’s so authentic!’
There are countless racks of kids’ dresses, and shirts for four quid, and a record stall with a range from Hot Chocolate to Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Top of the Pops albums. There’s a stall selling sherbet by the ounce and stuck-together pear drops, and a café with rickety chairs that belong in a primary school, that only sells lobby, which is a stew with potatoes that looks as if it’s been made at a camp by scouts.
And there’s a tea bar, that sells tea from a huge green metal pot with the enamel flaking off, in huge white mugs. As we sat slurping in contentment the old couple, wrapped in so many scarves and hats and coats and jumpers that if a madman had gone berserk with a rifle they’d have been perfectly safe as no bullet could penetrate all those layers, glared at us as if we were occupying troops in full uniform. The man nodded in our direction and said with utter disdain, ‘Manchester thespians.’
If I’d gone across and told him I was from even further away than Manchester he’d have said, ‘Surely not Stockport, you pouf.’
Outside this market is the pedestrianised centre of Wigan, indistinguishable from the centre of anywhere else. The building societies, W.H. Smith and anti-vivisection campaigners are all in their designated places, and it’s by a door opposite Clinton Cards that you pass through a magical vortex into the market, a world that hasn’t so much resisted modern corporate life as remained unaware that it exists. Maybe that’s because for a century or more Wigan fitted the notion of what was considered a working-class town better than anywhere, so that when George Orwell wrote his study of working-class life, it was Wigan he went to live in, to see what the proles get up to.
The pier that provides the title of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a slightly raised step, about two feet long, on one side of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, from where coal was once tipped into the barges. The area alongside the canal used to be packed with one of the greatest concentrations of mills in the country. One of those mills, just behind the pier, became a mill museum, but now that’s shut down as well. You can’t get more working-class than that. Presumably the actors who had to walk round dressed as Victorian loom operators went home one day and said, ‘Bad news I’m afraid. There’s trouble at Mill Experience.’ Now they’ll have to hope that someone invests in a museum about what it used to be like working in the museum.
Opposite the pier is a factory that anywhere else would have been converted into offices or flats or a restaurant, but that turns out still to be a factory. It makes Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, the pride of Wigan. According to the logo, the mint balls will ‘Keep you all aglow’, and there’s a picture of Uncle Joe looking like your favourite uncle in a top hat, and you think you remember skipping down the street in short trousers with the sixpence you got for polishing Mr Higginbottom’s Austin Rover to buy a pack of mint balls, which were not only the finest sweets but back then were believed to prevent whooping cough.
The mint balls are defiantly Wigan, and I imagine the old couple from the market would be astonished if they met someone who’d never heard of them, as if they’d said they’d never heard of a banana.
No doubt the place is just as proud of its mint balls as it was of the Wigan man declared to be the fattest person in Britain. Eventually he couldn’t get out of his specially made seat, and relied on his wife, who, once it was confirmed he held the record, boasted about it to all her neighbours – ‘He’s the fattest in Britain now, you know’ – and showed them all the newspaper clippings that confirmed this triumph. It turned out she’d only met him after reading about his size in the local paper, and decided to make him her own. When he died the windows had to be removed so he could be hoisted through them, as there was no way he was getting through the door. A neighbour I spoke to, who’d never met him, was asked by his wife to go the funeral. When she said she was sorry, but she really couldn’t make it, the wife said with astonishment, ‘But he was the fattest man in Britain.’
Even the irresistible force of the Premier League has stumbled in its attempt to overwhelm Wigan as it does most places. Despite the local side having been in the top division for the past six seasons, the crowds are smaller than for the rugby league team.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the historical local hero, commemorated with a statue in the centre of town and his picture on all the official leaflets for local events, is George Formby. If Wigan’s most famous figure was a prominent physicist or an influential Pre-Raphaelite painter it would be a terrible let-down, like finding out that your great-grandfather was a pimp.
George Formby was a buck-toothed banjolele player who sang slightly saucy songs with lyrics such as ‘If you could see what I can see, when I’m cleaning windows’. It’s unlikely that any of his songs will ever be covered by 50 Cent, but he was a super-star who people from a place like Wigan could identify with, who they could imagine bumping into at the pub. This image went beyond Wigan, as he became hugely popular in Soviet Russia, and it was even rumoured that Stalin had awarded him the Order of Lenin. This would presumably have irritated the odd Soviet commander, who might have lived through the siege of Leningrad for two years living off earthworms and fighting the Nazis using whittled toenail clippings as weapons, only to lag in the queue for a medal behind a banjolele player from Wigan. The story of the medal was an exaggeration, but there was something about Formby that was the embodiment of Wigan, not just working-class but unashamedly so. Otherwise how could he have sung a song called ‘The Wigan Express’ that went ‘She got some shocks in her signal box’?
In 1946, when he toured pre-apartheid South Africa, he upset his hosts by refusing to play segregated venues. As a result a black member of one audience presented Formby’s wife Beryl with a box of chocolates, and George gave the man a hug. National Party leader Daniel François Malan, who would introduce apartheid two years later, heard about this and phoned Beryl to complain, to which she replied, ‘Why don’t you piss off, you horrible little man?’
At first the idea of George Formby and his wife as radical anti-apartheid activists seems as surreal as finding out that Bobby Davro spent five years as a guerrilla fighting with Che Guevara, but in a way it symbolises Wigan’s history as an apparently jolly working-class town getting by without complaining, but with a calm commitment to rebellion underneath. In 1779 cotton workers in Wigan staged one of Britain’s first riots against unemployment. It lasted for several days, until the militia was brought in from Liverpool. The area was at the centre of the Lancashire Luddite riots, and in 1842 a strike of spinners ended up in a battle with two companies of riflemen.
The first miners’ strike of the twentieth century was in Wigan, in 1921 Wigan miners rioted until dispersed by the 16th Hussars, and the local pits were influential in every national strike. It feels as if a Wigan historian might say, ‘Ee, I’ll not call it proper decade if we’ve not been fired on by yeomen or suchlike.’
All this may make Wigan an unlikely setting for a vegan pagan café run by warlocks and called the Coven, but it was right opposite the main station. The warlocks greeted you with the most unsettling behaviour warlocks could manage, by being disconcertingly normal. ‘Hello love, right windy today, isn’t it? How about a piping-hot mug of elderflower-and-nettle tea to warm them bones up?’ one of them said.
The place was cluttered with sticks of incense, dream catchers and models of black cats, and there was a cheery sign informing you they’d cast a spell for
