"The happiness can be
pinpointed" wrote John Braine .
John Braine (1922 - 1986) is usually linked with the literary
movement known as the Angry Young Men of whom the
finest writers were probably
John Osborne, Kingsley
Amis and Allan
Sillitoe
He is a neglected writer these days and justly so say many
implying that he was a man with one book in him who went on to
write many more. In the late 1950s his Room
at the Top sold half a million
copies in three years. It is a drama of social mobility the story
of Joe Lambton who aspires rise through marriage and is prepared
to give up love to do so.
In 1959 it was filmed by Jack Clayton with
Lawrence Harvey and Simone Signoret.
For a while Braine found work on Radio and TV in opinion programmes
such as Any Questions. In the 1960s he moved rightwards
politically and by the 1970s was associated with agroup of people
who preparing to oppose what they fancied was an insurrectionary
situation.
Braine is still remembered in Bradford and he was included in the
local newspaper's survey of Bradford's best 100. The profile
suggested that his materialistic side... loved the
cash, adulation and movie rights (but)
the artistic side of him was irked. (
Telegraph and Argus 29th September 1999)
In the early 1950s Braine wrote a short piece about courting in a
thinley disguised Shipley Glen. This passage comes from the start
of the piece. Number Nine Rock in Ripley Glen is as much part of
the Blackersford district as the textile mills It's
important because it's an aspect of something bigger- happiness.
The happiness can be pinpointed, a line starting at
the top of Edward's Way, the broad avenue that leads into Ripley
Glen, past Ripley memorial Hospital, past the Albert Institute,
with its four stone lions (unsuccessful entrants in the Trafalgar
Square competition), past the fire station which looks like a
Methodist chapel and over the canal to the huge sprawling hulk of
Ripley Mills. Ripley Mills haven't changed much since 1850 when
Seth Ripley first built them. Nor has Ripley, which he designed
as a model industrial village. It's this changelessness, this
sense of the past as nourishing and bland as milk stout, which
soothes and quietens the nerves, which abolishes neurosis; Ripley
is fixed permanently in the Victorian age. But in one of its
bright patches: Ripley, with all its faults, was built for human
beings to live in; it was designed as a village, a living
community; it's not just a sprawl of mean houses, a huddle of rent
books. The happiness isn't an accident, for it doesn't have to
fight for survival here; Ripley holds it like a sponge, it's
cumulative, a kind of benign lead acetate accumulating ever since
1850.
(John Braine Number Nine Rock the
New Statesman and Nation 29th March 1952 reprinted in Edward Hyams (ed) New Statesmanship
an anthology London, Longmans, 1963)
The line of happiness is the route by which the people of
Blackersford reach the Glen which is freedom and
space and where there is Number Nine Rock which is simply
the place where you take your girl; for a hundred years it's been
a joke in Blackersford, the reality behind teasing and blushing
and clock-watching and dreaming at the loom....
As David Hockney remembered in an interview with Jim Greenhalf at
Salts Mill in December 1994
If you were going to the moors as a child you would
walk by this mill. People would take a bus to Saltaire, walk down
here ....You're talking about the 1940s and 1950s when people
didn't have cars. ......So when Jonathan (Silver)
told me he had got this Mill I said 'I know it; I've known it
since I was six years old.'
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