Before Tinder, there was the Monkey Parade…

How our grandparents and their parents found romance.

A phenomenon from eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty years ago; teenagers promenading in towns and cities on Sunday evenings, flirting, cruising. It was dubbed the “monkey parade” or the “monkey run”.

Gotelli’s, Conran St, Harpurhey. 1959.

I was so intrigued when I first researched monkey parades in 1996, and now is a good time to revisit and extend the story. My researches included interviewing a man called Stan Whittaker, who lived in Wythenshawe, south Manchester. He recalled the monkey parades of the 1930s and 40s in Harpurhey, north-east Manchester, where he grew up.

First off, when you’re out and about talking to people about their life, or their work, or both, sitting down with someone who’s never told their story before, someone not versed in the ways of the media, can provide great material. What you’re getting is thoughts unvarnished thoughts. In contrast to an experienced interviewee whose ideas are formulated, memories are losing their sparkle via repetition, and all the narratives neat and tidy.

Stan’s story was published in 1999; embedded in a chapter in my book Manchester, England: the Story of the Pop Cult City. Secondly - and this is the reason why I’d like to revisit the monkey parades - about ten years later, I got a message from one of his close family members telling me had died. He went on to thank me for writing about Stan; apparently he was chuffed to be in the book. So much so, that at his funeral extracts from that chapter were read out. I was so moved to hear this. You might have dozens of reasons to write, but one of my motivations is to document events and people left out of the prevailing narratives, and to give them a voice. There’s something sacred about being included in a book; a validation of a life. Words that will last beyond death.

My monkey parade material has never been online before, so this is for Stan. A part of his life not just in a book, but in the online world too. I’d incorporated his story into a chapter about how the notion of teenagers being rebellious, and resented by their parents pre-dated the Sixties. The chapter is called; ‘If That’s Music, I’m the Shah of Persia’, a phrase used by an bewildered parent hearing jazz for the first time.

In the book I’d talked about streets gangs and random violence in Victorian Manchester. At the sharp and violent end, the scuttlers (and their equivalents in other places, like the ‘peaky blinders’ in Birmingham) had viewed the street as ‘turf’; reflecting and creating a raw and intimidating environment.

But I knew that there would be softer, gentler pleasures to be had out on the streets, especially once the Twentieth Century was unfolding; I knew that for many in Manchester the street has been their playground, the street corner their site for socialising not fighting. This is where the monkey parades come in.

The promenading was ritualised. A cross between loafing and cruising, the monkey parade is mentioned by social reformer and researcher Charles Russell in his book Manchester Boys: Sketches of Manchester Lads at Work and Play published in 1905: “On Sunday evenings there are three main points of attraction for working lads; Oldham Street, Market Street, and Stockport Road. From Hulme, from Ardwick, and from Ancoats they come in, in the main well dressed, and frequently sporting a flower in the button-holes of their jackets.”

The parades had varying, and local codes of behaviour. In that 1905 work, the young made for the city centre for their pleasures, but Manchester also developed strong neighbourhood identities; soon most parts of Manchester had their own parade routes (Regent Road, Cross Lane, Eccles New Road in Salford, for example, and a triangle formed by Rochdale Road, Conran Street and Moston Lane in Harpurhey) – set routes, often with lads parading down one side of the street, while girls went down the other.

Furthermore, there were versions of the monkey run all over the country - from Colne in Lancashire to King’s Lynn in Norfolk - each one with established routes. It was mostly a Sunday evening event. These parades weren’t a solo adventure; groups of boys and girls would promenade in going in different directions up and down a certain street, or round the block, or the market square viewing each other. A boy might make some flirtatious remark or attempt to strike up a conversation with a girl of interest. There might be a date arranged for some time in the future, but it was a ritual that rarely got instant results.

In his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli, HG Wells describes happening on a number of young people “promenading by the light of a row of shops”. And explains they’ve been dubbed Monkeys’ Parades; “Twilight parades of young people - the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends.”

It was a chance to get out of the house, throw off the claustrophobia and control. Wells talks about the appeal of the monkey parades as a “revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if you will…”

The monkey parades described by Charles Russell and HG Wells developed in the last quarter of the 1800s, and continued unabated through the 1930s and beyond. Many of the earliest references to such goings on mark moments when the behaviour of the lads caught the eye of the police. A number of newspapers reported on a court case in London in 1888 when several young men were bound over to keep the peace after being arrested on Sunday night on Bow Rd for various offences including pushing women off the pavement. The police were trying to control what happened every week; “Owing to the continual disorderly scenes enacted every Sunday night in this road it has obtained the title of the Monkeys’ Parade”, one newspaper explained.”

The East End News in 1896 reported the local parish council questioned whether anything “could be done to prevent the scene that takes place of the Bow Rd after dark. On Sunday evenings hobbledehoys and servant girls on the mash infested the thoroughfare and made it impossible for respectable people to take a walk with any degree of comfort”. “On the mash” is a great phrase; used here to mean looking for intimacy.

From more that Charles Russell writes, it’s clear that female participants weren’t passive in all this; the boys “exchange rough salutations with the girls, who seem in no way less vigorous than the boys themselves, and whose chief desire, one would think, was to pluck from the lads’ button-holes, the flowers which many of them wear”.

There’s evidence that the activity began falling off during the restrictions imposed during the Second World War, but Stan Whittaker harbours happy memories of the Harpurhey monkey run in the 1930s and 1940s. He used to meet his friends at Gotelli’s, the local drinks shop. Such places evolved from herbalists, where they’d make sarsaparillas, and dandelion and burdock and sell them in a big glass. Gotelli’s sold ice cream as well. They were an Italian family, says Stan: “The daughter who was of our age bracket was called Rose, and they were a nice couple, although they had a bit of persecution at the beginning of the War because they were Italians. Not real persecution, they just got a few stupid people having a go, but they were as British as us. Anyway, we were called Gotelli’s lot. There was about thirteen of us altogether, one or two characters amongst them. We used to meet more-or-less from about half past six onwards in there and we’d have a Vimto, or whatever you fancied, a packet of crisps, an Eccles cake.”

Gotelli’s was on Conran Street, a long street which changed at its top end to Upper Conran Street. A mile or so up there was a left into Moston Lane, then back down the busy Rochdale Road, which joins back on to Conran Street. Gotelli’s lot would walk the triangle maybe five or six times in a night, although they might cut through the back streets which intersected the main roads to head off other groups: “We might meet somebody and ask, ‘Have you seen such-and-such a body?’ and if it was some girls that we fancied and we’d got to know, they might say, ‘Oh, we’ve seen them near Balf’s [a chemist]’ or somewhere, whatever shop, and depending which way they were going we would turn off the main road and go down the next side-street and head them off so we were waiting for them. Of course, you got to know everybody, although you stuck to your own group. It was a way of meeting people. It was something we enjoyed doing.”

The monkey parade was a way of passing the time, something of a display, a catwalk and courtship ritual in one. The chat-up lines were no less unsophisticated than those from our current era; “The conversational gambits were generally uninspired, consisting of the kind of clicking sounds that are used to encourage a horse to go faster, or remarks like “Going far?” or “Fancy a walk?”“, remembers the Salford-raised musician and radical songwriter Ewan MacColl.

Elsewhere, there would be young people out and about in Lancaster, Todmorden, New Mills, York. In Ashton in the 1950s, the monkey run route was round the market hall - lads went one way, girls the other. In Portsmouth, the monkey parade was centred around the northern end of London Rd. In Birmingham, young people were accused of turning the Museum and Art Gallery into a monkey run in 1931.

Some years back, Granville Wild, from Accrington, contributed his memories to an oral history project called The Peoples War, recalling how some of his older friends were called up for military service “but I wasn’t quite old enough. To be honest life was fun and I remember the blackout on a Sunday night when lots of us young people would walk what we used to call the monkey run. It was a section of the main road between the railway bridge and the bottom of little Blackburn Rd in Accrington. It was a way of meeting the opposite sex and all done in the pitch dark.”

The parades attracted dedicated followers of fashion, among them many too poor to do much more than customise their work clothes. Others missed a week or two if their best suit was at the pawnshop. Stan Whittaker was an apprentice plumber, a reserved occupation on call for vital war work, so he avoided being called up into the forces. He wasn’t one to worry about the way he looked: “With clothes being rationed, if you had two shirts you were very lucky. You always had a best shirt which you’d wash and iron when you needed to put it on, so you might change into that, or a decent pullover. But we didn’t have a lot of clothes because you couldn’t get them even if you could afford them.”

One way to maintain the parading habit despite a lack of money was to improvise. Decades later the practice of customising clothes was to become an important part of many eras - the tie-dye T-shirts of the 1960s and the safety pins of the punk era - but this is one woman quoted by academic Andrew Davies, in his book Leisure, Gender & Poverty, talking about the parade at Boggart Hole Clough in north Manchester: “You know the toreador hats - with the tassels? My friend and I got one of those. It was only about five shillings. Sometimes we hadn’t even money to buy powder. It was a tiny box and it was only about tuppence. So we used to put flour on our face. With those hats on - flour on our face! We did that for years, every Sunday night. Two hours of walking up and down. And you hadn’t two ha’pennies for a penny in your purse.”

The monkey run maintained close contact with your mates, provided a chance of romance, and was free. It was a potent, improvised courtship ritual with only one big drawback; it was not well suited to the traditional Manchester climate. Caught in the rain, groups would take refuge in shop doorways or nip into Turner’s temperance bar or Gotelli’s ice-cream shop for a drink of hot Vimto at 2p a shot. The chance to pair off was key to it all, though. One woman remembers the monkey run in Salford: “All up Regent Road on either side there were lads and girls... till they got to Cross Lane, the Eccles New Road, that’s where they picked these lads up. My mother copped me once with a lad, and I got a damn good hiding.”

The authorities have always looked unfavourably at unregulated gatherings of youths. In Colne, Lancashire, the local paper, the Barnoldswick & Earby Times, carried a number of stories complaining about the monkey parade crowds every Sunday along Church Street and Market Street, with reports of a “surging, jostling crowd, coming in waves of six or seven youngsters arm in arm”. In 1939 a correspondent complained “Shrieking laughter from undignified lads and lassies can be heard in the darkness, and the older people are often forced off the pavement. I think a few cases of Obstructing the Footpath would act as a warning”. The only other hope was that the Municipal Hall would open for dances and provide a distraction from the monkey parade.

In nearby Burnley, in 1938, Salem School began opening its doors on a Sunday evening to try to attract youngsters away from the local monkey parade, offering singing, a film show and “a brief chat” about religion from the Revd N.W Calvin. This initiative is not thought to have been successful.

You can feel a sense of joy and freedom that the monkey parades brought, and as HG Wells said “romance”. Despite my gentle suggestions to Stan Whittaker that perhaps a monkey run wasn’t always an innocent as he made out, he tells me that his intentions, at least, were honourable.

He has a story to illustrate this. On one occasion the monkey run dispersed when an air-raid warning siren sounded and one of the girls requested that he should walk her home: “She was a bit forward for her age this girl, as you might say. And I got talking to her stood in the entry near where she lived and she says to me - this shows how naive I was at this time, and I must have been seventeen, easily - she says to me, ‘If you could have anything you like, now, right at this moment, what would you have?’ She was a big girl, big bust and every- thing, and I said, ‘Oh, I think I’d like a nice car’, and she said, ‘No, right now, at this moment’, and I said everything bar what she wanted me to say. She says to me ‘Wouldn’t you like to introduce me to fagan?’ Now, to this day, this isn’t a phrase I’m familiar with, but what she was suggesting was sex, like. But I said, ‘What do you mean?’, and she just looked at me and said ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid’ and walked off.”

It appears that the word “fagan” was mid-20^th century Irish slang for “penis”. Another phrase similar to “introduce me to fagan” is “bury old fagan”. The word is used by Brendan Behan in his autobiographical work Borstal Boy – in the context of waiting for too long for sex; “They’d be there till the Lord would call them before he’d get down to introducing fagan.”

Some of the older generation found it hard to differentiate high spirits from low intentions; hence the campaign against the monkey parade in Colne. Or perhaps they were just jealous of the young creating a small window of freedom every Sunday.

In March 1924 the Salford City Reporter reported testimony from the local police that the Salford parades had become rowdy, the youths walking abreast on the footway singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, jostling passers-by off the pavement and into the roadway.

But these groups of lads usually weren’t gangs in any accepted anti-social sense; Stan Whittaker is most insistent on this point. According to his testimony, the lads in those days were a harmless bunch; “Amongst our lot, our gang, there’d perhaps be ten lads and six girls. We never swore in front of these girls and we never heard them swear and they never smoked in the street. That’s a difference I’ve noticed a lot now. Even though we came from a so-called ‘low area’, Collyhurst, Harpurhey, where it’s supposed to be a bit rough, we was quite well mannered, you might say.”

The new twin pleasures of the dance hall and the cinema began to attract huge interest in the 1920s and 30s. Before the Second World War licensing laws did not allow dancing or film shows on a Sunday (although these restrictions could be lifted by local authorities); the lack of other opportunities for teenage leisure pursuits on a Sunday contributed to the popularity of the monkey parade.

A hundred years ago the street was the limits of your world. Entertainments for teenagers in the home were few – until the spread of television and the Dansette record player in the 1950s and 1960s. The young took to the streets, having no more alternatives than they had bananas.

Monkey runs had almost died out by the end of the 1950s, including the well-mannered monkey run in Harpurhey frequented by Gotelli’s lot. From 1947, Sunday cinema was allowed in Manchester.

A strong further reason for the decline of the monkey runs was the break-up of the old neighbourhoods and the communities and rituals that they were home to. In the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, hundreds of Harpurhey residents were relocated to large overspill estates like Langley and Wythenshawe. Acres of homes in Harpurhey have been demolished. Gotelli’s has gone.

Soon after the war Stan Whittaker married Edna, the sister of one of his friends, and together they moved to Wythenshawe. Edna joined us when I went round to reminisce. I asked her if they really walked for hours. “Yes”, she replied. “You could look in all the shop windows. We didn’t have much. You couldn’t do that now, though, could you? They’re all shuttered up.”

Further reading;

A brilliant photograph, Moss Side 1972

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