Billy Bragg Read online

  He didn’t know much about history at school, but that’s a reflection of how they taught it. He didn’t go to university, but his job has been a continual source of higher education.

  A natural raconteur, Billy also possesses that rare, teacher’s gift: the ability to make anything interesting. Even history and its pale little brother, local history.

  With this in mind, it would be remiss to start the Billy Bragg story without some background.

  In the Mike Leigh film Career Girls, two young women view a luxury apartment high up in Canary Wharf, for a laugh. The more cynical of the two, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge), looks out of the window and says, ‘On a clear day I suppose you can see the class struggle from here.’

  There’s London in a nutshell. A great view of a great mess. Just as you can pick out the Great Wall of China from the moon, if you’re stuck in a holding pattern over London on the way into Heathrow you can see the Northern Outfall Sewer, built in the 1860s, cutting through the North Circular around Beckton and delivering all of North London’s shit into the Thames at Barking Creek. ‘It looks like a ley line,’ observes Billy Bragg, ever the poet.

  Billy was born Stephen William Bragg on 20 December 1957 in Upney Hospital, Barking, at the time part of Essex, but swallowed up in 1965 by Greater London; although you try telling the locals they don’t live in Essex (you can take the town out of the county, but you can’t take the county out of the town).

  His father, Dennis Bragg, was of proud Essex stock. In 1870, a huge gaslight and coke plant was opened at Beckton, west of Barking, which supplied almost all the electric light for East London; the plant even had its own docks on the Thames. As an employer, the gasworks drew many into the area, including Dennis’s grandfather Frederick Bragg, who came from the ancestral home between the rivers Stour and Colne, east of Colchester, in Essex.

  Billy’s mother, Marie D’Urso, came from the East End in London. Her grandfather was an Italian immigrant who’d run a fruit and veg shop on Cable Street from the turn of the century through two world wars. He never learnt to speak English, and even sold ice cream from a bicycle in front of the Tower of London. Billy once visited the Italian church in Clerkenwell, where his mum’s grandfather and grandmother were married, and looked up the happy event in the register. ‘This church was so Italian,’ he remembers. ‘The Monsignor had a picture of the Italian football team up in his office.’

  The D’Ursos had fourteen kids, of whom Marie’s father was the eldest. Billy, however, never knew him, as the couple were divorced in 1950; very unfashionable, especially for Roman Catholics. ‘I can’t think what my grandpa must’ve been doing to my grandma,’ he ponders, holding her in the sort of high esteem he routinely reserves for the women in his life. ‘A great woman, she held the family together through the war.’

  It is the potent combination of East End Cockney and the Essex suburbs that shaped Billy Bragg.

  The East End is far and away the most mythologised corner of the capital, thanks to such crafty Cockneys as the Kray twins in the 60s, Alf Garnett in the 70s and the residents of Albert Square in the 80s and 90s. True Cocknitude is traditionally reserved for those born within the sound of Bow Bells, which means, given the hundreds of second-generation Asians, among others, who may legitimately claim the Bow-earshot birthright, even the source of the area’s anachronistic Pearly pride has been dragged into the multicultural present. The East End’s truly cosmopolitan populace is ever at odds with the old-fashioned fascism that lives on there. It doesn’t take a genius to spot why institutional racists get themselves organised in multiracial areas, but when the British National Party secured a council seat in Tower Hamlets in 1993 the East End became once again identified as some kind of tatty, Neanderthal outpost. The spectre of Sir Oswald Mosley, whose blackshirts marched there in the 1930s, reared its ugly head.

  Not just a hotbed of racial and political imparity, all socioeconomic life can also be seen in the East, certainly post-Thatcher. Parts of it are conspicuously run down, both Jack the Ripper ancient and 1950s ‘modern’, and yet the Thatcher years saw Rotherhithe, Wapping, Limehouse and the Isle Of Dogs transformed into a London Docklands Development utopia. A yuppie overspill that was handy for both your job in the City and cheap body shops for getting your Golf GTi fixed up after some local urchin had scratched it with a 50p piece. As they say in the area, ‘Sweet as’.

  Wapping itself became a totem of Thatcherite progress (or betrayal, depending on which side of the security fence you were on). Rupert Murdoch’s News International relocated there without print-union agreement over manning levels, and riot police were sent in to ‘ask’ 5,000 pickets to move on. On a clear day you could hear the dismantling of the trade-union movement.

  The East End has it all: pride, joy, hope, glory, violence, class war and some divine little markets. It is entirely feasible to live in London all your life and avoid the place – unless, that is, you want to get out to Essex or the nearest bit of seaside (Leigh-On-Sea, Southend, Shoeburyness). In which case, to quote that famous Cockney song, ‘Take the A road, the OK road that’s the best/Go motorin’ on the A13’.

  The song, ‘A13 Trunk Road To The Sea’, is by Billy Bragg, who, unable at the time to get his kicks on Route 66, immortalised his own rock’n’roll thoroughfare (‘It starts down in Wapping/There ain’t no stopping’). Although, at first, the lyric sounds like a colloquial, narrow-screen novelty, it actually reveals the historian in Billy as early as 1978 when he wrote it. (The song was never recorded, except for his first Peel session, but it remains a live treat for diehards.) In 1991, for the expanded songbook Victim Of Geography, he wrote a beautiful piece of ‘me-history’ about the A13’s significance.

  ‘Travelling eastwards,’ he wrote, ‘it’s possible to read London’s development as a city like the rings on a tree.’ He recalls boyhood family holidays at Shoeburyness, his dad letting him drive the green Morris Oxford across the car park field behind the beach, ‘a primal driving lesson that ended abruptly when I nervously stamped the clutch and the brake pedal down to the floor and he bumped his head on the windscreen. I must have been about twelve years old, yet I can still feel the leather of the driver’s seat warm on my bare back and hear the bonk! as Father, sitting sideways and caught unawares, hit the Triplex very hard.

  ‘What great days.’

  Except for the first evacuation, the schools never closed. Every common requirement of everyday life continued – the dustman, the postman, the paper boy and the milkman never missed their customary rounds, although the night had been a holocaust of noise.

  Danger Over Dagenham, May 1947

  The gasworks, the sewage treatment works, the docks and the car plant – it’s little wonder the area comprising East Ham, Barking and Dagenham grew up this century into a working-class heartland. And it’s no surprise that they got stonked during the Second World War.

  Although war was not declared between Britain and Germany until 1939, things had been looking dicey ever since Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933, and the Nazis had begun their reign of terror on ‘imperfect Germans’. Without the benefit of CNN, it seemed a long way away to most Britons, as did the Spanish civil war. However, when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and Poland in the name of ‘Lebensraum’ (more ‘living space’), there was nothing else for it, and five years of gas-mask training, increased defence spending and the theoretical construction of air-raid shelters came to horrifying fruition on 3 September. By this time, roughly 17,000 mothers and children had already been evacuated from Dagenham to Norfolk and Suffolk, Marie D’Urso and her sisters among them.

  Main target was the Ford Motor Works at Dagenham, or, as it’s known locally, ‘Ford’s’. Built between 1929 and 1930 on Hornchurch Marshes near (aptly enough) America Farm, the car manufacturing giant quickly became the area’s number-one employer. ‘If Ford’s packed up the whole borough would fall into the Thames,’ Billy says. ‘It’s the buckle on the belt that keeps Barking and Dagenham from slidin
g into the marshes.’

  This self-contained production-line shanty town seems to stretch as far as the eye can see. It’s like a Doctor Who set made of steel, or the ugliest university ever built. Its gigantic, Stalinist warehouse blocks are untroubled by windows. Like many a school-year of Essex boys before them, Billy and his friends, aged thirteen or fourteen, were sent to Ford’s for careers lessons, to be seduced or otherwise by the opportunity of riveting Ford Cortina after Ford Cortina after Ford Cortina – or the ‘Dagenham Dustbin’ as it was known. (‘We hated it,’ he confirms.) For those who failed their eleven-plus when Billy did, it was just about the only higher education available and, as such, looms large over the story of anybody from the area.

  But let us not overlook the glamour of the place – there is more to its Mecca-like magnetism than sheer necessity. As a boy Billy recalls being dazzled by his peers whose dads worked here not on the production line, but as engineers and skilled labourers. Their families would disappear for six months to fictional-sounding American places called Dearborn and Ypsilanti in Michigan on company-funded retraining courses. They’d come back with Boys’ Own exotica like baseball cards, Marvel comics, Superman toys, and home-movie footage of being driven around Detroit in big-finned cars. (As a general rule, the Irish kids in Billy’s street, whose unskilled dads banged out doors for Zephyrs, never got to go.)

  As part of the war effort, Ford’s were turning out endless V8 engines and ‘tracked vehicles’ at the plant. Billy’s Grandad D’Urso was a Ford’s spot welder and was required to stick around while his contemporaries went to Europe and Africa – quite a social stigma, especially over the back fence among war wives. Grandpa Bragg, born in 1893 and old enough to fight in the First World War, failed his army medical because he had one leg longer than the other, and was too old to fight in the Second. So he ‘did his bit’ as an ARP warden, wielding a stirrup pump and bucket, and putting out incendiary bombs that landed on the roofs. Dennis Bragg left school aged fifteen in the summer of 1939, to work for McQueen’s, a milliner’s, but was transferred from there after just a month, to relay messages between Barking’s ARP units during lulls in the bombing.

  In September 1940, the borough’s very first casualty, a Mr H. Onslow, received at a makeshift mortuary in a school at Beacontree Heath, was a Ford worker killed by an oil bomb as he rode his bike along the factory approach road. As the nightly bombing rained on, Ford’s provided emergency food vans and even cooked meals-on-wheels in the factory canteens. At the end of the war, it was calculated that the embattled car plant had produced over 260,000 engines and over 300,000 vehicles.

  Henry Ford. So much to answer for. Dagenham may well be the Detroit of England, the Motown of Essex, but Billy Bragg was a rare son indeed to have found musical inspiration here among the metal.

  Barking: from the original Berecingum (‘Berica’s people’). A ‘Beacon for England’ in Saxon times. A fisher port in the 1300s. A fresh-aired country retreat for Londoners in the early 1800s, and noted producer of potatoes and flour. A bustling, ever improving town by the 1900s. It was granted borough status in 1931, marked by a visit from HRH Prince George and an historical pageant. In 1965, thanks to widespread boundary-jiggling, Barking stopped being in Essex.

  If Ford’s has characterised and dominated the area throughout the twentieth century, Barking Abbey had a millennium before that. Built in the rather inappropriate year of Our Lord 666, it was one of the most powerful institutions in the country, from late Saxon times into Norman – hence the Christian tag, Beacon for England. In 1066, after his coronation at Westminster Abbey, William the Conqueror kipped over in Barking while he had the builders in at the Tower of London.

  In 1540, the Abbey was dissolved and demolished and its 30 nuns were paid off. Today, only the Curfew Tower remains. However, in 1910 Barking Urban District Council bought the land and excavated it, leaving remains of some walls exposed to view, and turned the site into the well-tended Abbey Playing Field. As the late local-historian James Howson optimistically noted at the end of his article on the Abbey, ‘demolition of old and unsightly buildings in the vicinity is opening up a pleasant prospect in the centre of town’.

  Modern-day Barking could be anywhere in red-brick Britain: with a one-way system, a shopping arcade, a food court, a ‘hoppa’-style one-decker bus service and a pedestrianised precinct. It’s pay-and-display, homogeneous, interchangeable with a Chester or a Corby or a Merthyr or a Taunton. It would be easy to come here for a cup of coffee and a spin round Vicarage Field Shopping Centre and not have your life changed by the experience. There’s nothing about it that says ‘London’, Greater or otherwise, except the underground symbol at Barking Station.

  Only about seventeen tube stops from Central London, Barking is connected. When London’s calling to the faraway towns, Barking can be there in 40 minutes. This proximity, we shall see, was key to Billy Bragg’s musical and cultural education, and convenient as he found his first professional footholds in the music biz of the West End. But Barking made the man. Its one-step-away satellite self-sufficiency. Its proud Essex history. Its everybody-went-to-the-same-school community spirit. And its telltale working-class heart: from market trader to fisherman to builder to gas-worker to Cortina-basher, Barking’s always been good with its hands.

  At the turn of the century, the railway revolution completely refocused the town and turned it on its arse. Barking Station was built as far back as 1854, but was rebuilt in 1889 and again in 1905, as the London–Tilbury–Southend Railway became a fast-track to Southend; an apex for low-cost holiday-hungry Londoners. A large chunk of bricks-and-mortar Barking went up in the 1890s – the schools, the law courts, the swimming baths, Barking Park – and gradually the town’s natural centre moved away from the quay to the station. As a result, the former municipal spine, Barking Broadway, is ‘miles away from anywhere’, down near the quayside and the Abbey. Trams arrived in 1905.

  In 1932, you could hop on a number 67 tram at Barking Broadway and travel in to Aldgate for 5½d one way, 9d return, via Barking Road, East India Dock Road and Commercial Road East. The timetable promised a 48-minute journey time.

  It’s easy to forget that the A13 goes back the other way as well. Billy says he finds it easy to relate to London’s heavily mythologised Westway, that section of the A40 that rises high above The Clash’s West London and off towards Oxford. Why? Because ‘it’s like the A13 going in the opposite direction’. It’s funny how you imagine familiar roads to be one-way.

  For now, the A13 goes east from the City of London to the suburbs, from A to B, Aldgate East to Bragg. And just round that corner is Park Avenue, the street where freckle-faced Stephen William was raised and where his mother still lives (if her car’s outside, she’s in). The street where ‘you could find out the history of World War Two if you ask the right people’.

  Well, it’s December 1957. Happy Christmas; war is over. And Billy Bragg is preparing to enter the world. One-two, one-two …

  2. ALICE IS BENT

  Childhood, 1957–1973

  Got ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ by The New Seekers – good riddance to ‘Ernie’! I have been banned from receiving any pocket money until I get a haircut!

  Diary of Stephen Bragg, aged fourteen

  STEPHEN BRAGG WAS born in Upney Hospital (nowadays Barking Hospital). In the same year, Bill Haley and his Comets came to Britain; ‘Supermac’ became Prime Minister; Humphrey Bogart died of throat cancer and the Russians sent a dog into space.

  Five years later, Stephen’s brother David was born. They grew up in a very matriarchal family with ‘an infinitesimal number of aunties’ and, as a result, cousins galore. Though Dennis Bragg, from Protestant stock, was an only child, marrying Marie gained him five sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law. Dennis worked as a chargehand in a warehouse; Marie was a cookery technician at night classes at the polytechnic. She later delivered leaflets and samples around the East End for ‘a bit of extra money’, and then worked a
t the Nat West sorting house in Aldgate.

  In the spirit of clarity, I will refer to Billy as Billy from day one, even though he was Stephen or Steve throughout his school years, and adopted Billy only for the purposes of punk. Bizarrely, he was known by some as ‘Doog’, short for Dougal, after he changed schools in 1969, a nickname he cleverly gave himself to prevent the old epithet of ‘Big Nose’ plaguing him there. His name was Stephen, and he shall be called Billy.

  Despite the East End Catholic background on his mother’s side, there was little religion in Billy’s early life outside Cub Scout church parade (which was a strictly Methodist affair, i.e. very few laughs). Marie never went to mass, due to the stigma of having married a Protestant (‘a bit like becoming a Satanist’); although when Dennis died of cancer in October 1976, she drew a lot of strength from her faith and it helped her through a supremely difficult patch.

  Marie’s sister Pat and her husband Don had a farm in Warwickshire, and this is where the Braggs would regularly spend their holidays. Dennis helped with the harvest, driving the tractor, while the kids pitched in by trailing the combine harvester, stacking hay bales. A ride on top of the bales aboard the cart was their reward, before hopping off and unstacking them again. As a real treat, they were given a can of petrol and allowed to ‘burn off’ the stubble. Brilliant! ‘All my best holiday memories as a kid are from up there.’

  Back home, in the stained glass above the front door of the Bragg house, it said ‘Stanley’. (It still does, actually.) Next door it said ‘Livingstone’, and further down ‘Park’ – the houses were all named after great explorers. Mungo Park followed the River Niger and wrote Travels In The Interior Of Africa in 1799. Sir Henry Morton Stanley traced the Congo to the sea almost a century later, and was famously sent by the New York Herald to find missionary David Livingstone up the Nile in 1871. Exotic gentlemen indeed, but they all started somewhere like Park Avenue.