Shelagh Delaney; Salford/Manchester 1965
Arthur Lowe, a story, a film, the Aaben cinema.
Salford-born Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey, but I’m focussing on The White Bus, a story that she wrote several years later that was adapted into a film featuring a rum selection of characters, locations throughout inner city Manchester and Salford, an alienated heroine, and a message about how out of touch those in authority are.
The White Bus was first a short story, written by Shelagh Delaney in or around 1962. It was published alongside some of her other stories in a volume called Sweetly Sings the Donkey. The film adaptation runs to forty-seven minutes. Scripted by Shelagh Delaney in 1965, it’s directed by Lindsay Anderson. The cast includes a very young Anthony Hopkins, and Arthur Lowe who had already played a role in Coronation Street but would go on to star as Captain Mainwaring in the hit TV series Dad’s Army.
A Taste of Honey had knocked the theatre world off its axis when it was staged in 1958 and has endured through the subsequent decades. I recently contributed to an episode of the acclaimed Blacklisted podcast, discussing A Taste of Honey. You can find the link at the end of this post; it’s a lovely hour of Delaney-related chatter.
A Taste of Honey made its mark when it was first staged, but critics were divided (in the podcast there’s a clip in which a man from ITV calls it “sordid”). The most critical voice turned out to be the Salford City Reporter. The initial coverage of Shelagh’s play being staged in London was very much along the lines of “Local girl makes good”. However, once word reached the local paper of the content of the play - Jo, a working-class teenager, daughter of single mother Helen (who has a sleazebag boyfriend), becomes pregnant after meeting a black sailor Jimmy, and is supported in her predicament by gay art student Geof - the editor switched the angle. Now Shelagh was considered to have besmirched the name of Salford by putting such characters on the stage. And the letters pages of the newspaper buzzed with the controversy.
Some of Shelagh’s unease, and even contempt for the views of those who would only countenance shining praise for a cosy-culture view of Salford feed into a couple of the short stories collected in Sweetly Sings the Donkey, including the short story The White Bus.
Despite the film being lively, sarcastic, imaginatively filmed and chock-full of ideas, scripted by the author of one of the great plays of post-War British drama, and a cast of actors including a future double Oscar winner, The White Bus is unfairly barely-known.
The film makes several changes and multiple additions to the original story. In both, though, there’s a strong sense of Delaney’s own life and experiences. We’re in some borderline world between fantasy and autobiography, and experiencing both a sardonic social satire, and a discombobulating allegorical dream.
In the original short story, an unnamed female narrator travels back up North after a one-night stay in London, finding herself on a train in amongst England football supporters disappointed by their country’s team after a poor display at Wembley.
On arrival at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station and waiting for a bus, she climbs onto a white double-decker. It’s on some sort of tour of the city (not named, but, on the evidence, an amalgamation of Manchester and Salford). The local Lord Mayor is onboard, and treats us to a long-winded monologue extolling the merits of the city. He’s at pains to stress his excitement at programme to demolish “miserable slum dwellings” and to building new homes in their place.
The tour in The White Bus – the commentary by the guide through the tannoy, and the words of the Mayor – are all enthusiastic about the progress of Salford. But Shelagh Delaney loads it with satire and ridicule. There’s a superbly revealing moment in the story when the Mayor sits next to the young woman; he’s recognised her. “Aren’t you that girl – the one who writes?” he says. He chides her for “writing all this sexy stuff about this city. Unmarried mothers and things and homosexuals”, and tells her she’s given the city “a bad reputation in the eyes of the country”. He talks to her some more and offers to take her out for supper and give her some advice and tell her about his life which he claims would be “good material for a book”.
Her reply? “That’s very kind. Would you stop feeling my leg, please?”.
I so love Shelagh Delaney when she’s being droll.
For most of the tour on the bus, there’s a guide explaining and extolling what we’re seeing; including parks, a factory, a school, Hope Hospital, the gas works, and Manchester’s Central Library. When they stop at a café, the narrator makes her escape and walks home.
The walk takes her through a part of the city being demolished. We’re in the years after A Taste of Honey, inner city Manchester and Salford are changing. “Part of the demolition had been done but whole rows of evacuated houses had been left standing waiting for the bulldozers” we’re told. The young woman walks on, through wastelands, empty buildings, smashed windows, a solitary chip shop on the corner displaying a poster announcing its imminent demolition. “All round this deserted place the new city sheered up higher than ever before”. She looks up from the smashed-up street and there’s a jet plane coming into land at Manchester airport. We’re encouraged to see how disconcerting, even traumatic, the environment is, and to question the notions of modernisation and progress being talked-up by the Lord Mayor.
And what of the film adaptation?
Lindsay Anderson had made his name directing the film This Sporting Life (1963). Oscar Lewenstein talked to Anderson in June 1964 about making a trilogy of short films based on stories by Shelagh Delaney (in the end only The White Bus was made). Nothing much happened until the end of February 1965.
Anderson’s diaries give a very vivid and pissed-off sense of endless meetings about nothing. They’re full of exasperation at being given the run around by people, and the incompetence of production staff (according to at least one source, Anderson wanted his epitaph to read, "Surrounded by fucking idiots"). Despite Anderson's general disdain for the human race, and abrasive personality, when he met Shelagh Delaney on the 15th March 1965 he was instantly taken with her and vowed to progress The White Bus; “She is sympathetic, direct, and I feel creative… We agree to do it” he wrote.
At the end of July, Shelagh is still trying to bring the script to completion. The basic structure of the original story is pretty much intact – the young woman leaves London on a train full of football fans, the bulk of the film features a civic tour on a white bus, ending with a walk home via the chippy.
Around this time, and during the making of his next film, If…. Lindsay Anderson had a view at this time about cinema going beyond surface realities; “It is enjoyable to work naturalistically. In fact, it’s easier to do. But I think the most important challenge is to escape from or get beyond pure naturalism, into poetry. Some people may call this fantasy.”
Anderson’s desire to go beyond naturalistic film-making suited Shelagh Delaney. She appears to have made a conscious effort not to repeat A Taste of Honey, her instincts were not to limit herself, and, instead, to embrace artistic freedom. Working with Anderson to create a satirical, episodic, random piece of cinema moved her away the dirty realism of the “kitchen sink” films her hit play had been connected to. I’ve written before how stifling “sticking to your lane” can be (here https://davehaslam.substack.com/p/sticking-to-your-lane). Shelagh Delaney wasn’t sticking to the straight and narrow.
Selina Todd - whose book Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution I would very much recommend – writes that Shelagh Delaney’s work in this period was “ridiculing the social conventions still widely upheld in much of Britain”; I like the fact that The White Bus also takes steps away from film-making conventions.
Shelagh Delaney was often active in the search for locations in her films. In September Anderson travelled up to Manchester to meet her on location hunts a couple of times. Anderson loves the Northern urban landscape; “Everywhere we go one thinks – why has none of this been on film?” he writes in his diary. This is a post-industrial landscape now, not the North as it had been through the earlier decades of the Twentieth Century - the North, say, of photographer Bill Brandt, back-to-back houses as far as the eye can see, factory chimneys pouring out smoke. We are now an era of slum clearances, pubs and churches the last remaining buildings as streets are cleared, areas turned into dead wastelands, just the occasional condemned row of houses and outcrops of new build tower blocks. The North, in fact, so memorably captured by Shirley Baker, who grew up in Kersal, Salford; one of the first areas to be transformed from terraces to tower blocks.
Slum clearances had been continuing in the three years or so between the story being written and the film being made, and, through the second half of the Sixties, would pick up pace. It was beginning to become clear that the destruction of the Victorian housing, the relocation of the residents, and the building of tower blocks would be a defining working class experience in Britain in that era – more so than Swinging London or the Vietnam War – affecting hundreds of thousands of families.
Talking once to Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order, we had a discussion about the roots of some of the darkness of Joy Division. He’d had experiences of illness and death in his family, and there was a reservoir of sadness he was drawing on in the band; “What also had a big effect on me was that I lived in Salford and the whole community at one stage was just devastated by the council – the council just bought the area and moved everyone out into high rise flats and just broke the community up. So the whole community that I had grown up with since I was twelve years old had all just been basically wiped out, so there was a sense of loss there”.
Slum clearances in Moss Side and Hulme and elsewhere broke up informal networks, families, streets and scenes older people had grown up with, the corner shops, the schools. That was one thing. The other was that decisions were made over the heads of the inhabitants. People need a sense of agency in their lives. It’s this gulf between the decision makers in authority, and the people losing their roots which gives The White Bus a polemical edge.
In one of their location visits, Shelagh Delaney takes Lindsay Anderson into Hulme, to the York Cinema on York Street, and a nearby burnt-out old church (St. Michael's Church on Lavender Street). Anderson also visits the Proctor and Gamble factory in Trafford Park, watching women packing soap into cartons, and the scrap-steel yards and furnaces at the nearby Metropolitan-Vickers plant.
Anderson recruited cameraman Miroslav Ondříček , having become a fan of his work with the director Milos Forman, particularly the film Loves Of a Blonde. After their first proper meeting, Anderson describes him as “dynamic, clean, sensitive”. They end up working well together, although on their first journey up to Manchester, when they stop over in a shopping centre in Birmingham, Ondříček develops a severe headache in the Fine Fare Supermarket.
19th October 1965 was the first day of filming, at the York Cinema in Hulme, a building sitting in isolation, surrounded by semi-demolished streets. The cinema would survive the bulldozers in the 1960s, becoming a four-screen cinema under the name Unit 4, later renamed the Aaben. As the Aaben, it was independent “art house” cinema through the 1980s.
In the film of the story, the central character is again a young woman - played by Patricia Healey - but she’s a more impassive, less lively character than the narrator of the short story (in the story, the Delaney-ish character shares some stolen gin with one of the football fans, but in the film, Patricia Healey’s character remains at one remove from the shenanigans on the train). And while still being Delaney-ish, the young woman is not a writer but a typist living in London fed up with her job.
Patricia Healey looks a little like Delaney but even more like someone who stepped out on a French nouvelle vague film, with her Anna Karina haircut. Cut off from the world in some way, in her alienation she’s a witness not a participant in the world, and she maintains an impassive demeanour in the film; her blankness adds to the bleakness.
For people who like to pick up on these things, in the film she arrives and walks down the platform at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station but actually exits Central Station (later turned into G-Mex). She walks through city streets before seeing the bus. As she walks, a runner passes her on St Peter’s Square, and in a random, unexplained sequence typical of The White Bus, she sees a young woman chased and bundled into a car on Albert Square near where the Armenian Taverna is now. It's one of several new episodes added to the film, although we soon realise that there’s a fantasy and fantastical element to many of them.
The Mayor on the white bus is played by Arthur Lowe. Lowe, Wikipedia tells me, had spent some of his childhood years living in Levenshulme, Manchester. His Wikipedia entry makes no mention of his role in The White Bus, however, despite the fact that as he expounds on the joy of the city and the recent progress and future plans, he looms large in the film and carries off the self-satisfied pomposity of the Mayor beyond perfectly.
The tour moves through Kersal flats, another exemplar of the modern world; this was the new look urban housing plan. Salford was quick to construct such towers (in fact, Manchester, for a while, resisted building them). There were twelve tower blocks on the Kersal estate. Completed in 1960, and officially opened two years later by Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. The blocks were named after famous poets, including Shakespeare, Keats and Milton
A little later in the decade, Manchester Council built huge crescent-shaped blocks of flats in Hulme. The Crescents were named after four big name architects from our country’s past; Robert Adam, John Nash, Charles Barry, and William Kent. Honestly, the satire writes itself…
In Salford, the honeymoon period for the Kersal flats was soon over. In 1967, the year The White Bus was released, our friends at the Salford City Reporter were among those who had turned against the Kersal tower blocks and similar housing projects; "Salford has been wrong in practically everything it has done by way of municipal housing in recent years", the newspaper declared.
Less than thirty years later after being built, the Kersal flats and the Hulme Crescents were demolished.
Back in 1965, in the film, the white bus moves on to visit factories, Manchester’s Central Library, and Pendleton High School for Girls in Salford where the young woman imagines herself with sitting among the pupils during a rendition of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Let us Now Praise Famous Men.
The surreal and hallucinatory moments include a visit to a park where various classic paintings come alive, including Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe. The bus passengers also witness a young Anthony Hopkins sing a Brecht song, a surreal interlude in a way, but Brecht’s a dramaturgy interested Lindsay Anderson. Perhaps for Shelagh Delaney it also springs from her knowledge that Salford culture has always included activity of the radical variety, and still does today; from the theatre group Red Megaphones in the 1930s to the poetry of John Cooper Clarke and onwards.
Near the end of the film; the young woman, at dusk, closer to home, finds herself in terraced streets. Kids play in the school playground, a couple arguing, a view into a front room where a young girl is playing a piano and other scenes of authentic human activity, although, still, the girl is an observer, quiet, at one remove. The day is ending, she crosses the road and gets a bag of chips, just as the chippy is closing.
The White Bus has never had a general release. Into the 1970s, it was still getting only occasional screenings, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in June 1973. At a later showing in New York, a reviewer the White Bus “a surreal, funny examination of postwar England in the form of a guided tour of a dreary English industrial city”.
When Lindsay Anderson made his next feature, If…. He again worked with Ondricek. The two films share the cinematic device of cutting episodes using colour film into the predominantly black-and-white work. But they have much else in common, most importantly the notion that British institutions; schools, the mainstream media, those in authority are out of touch with everyday lives and perpetuate privilege and oppression, and some cases with malevolent intent. The Mayor’s pontificating in The White Bus has an echo in If…, in the claims that “Britain today is a powerhouse of ideas, experiment, imagination”.
After The White Bus, Shelagh Delaney’s next cinema adventure was scripting Charlie Bubbles, which starred, and was directed by, her Salford-born pal Albert Finney. Again, there’s a thematic link; a lead character’s journey back up North from London becomes some sort of unresolved spiritual search.
The White Bus doesn’t appear in the Wikipedia entries for either Arthur Lowe, or Anthony Hopkins. I think it’s fair to say it’s a semi-forgotten film and for many years it was inaccessible. Since 2018 the BFI have championed it, though, and a version is uploaded online (see below for link). However, the book Sweetly Sings the Donkey which includes Shelagh Delaney’s original story, remains out of print.
As well as with Lindsay Anderson, Miroslav Ondricek also continued to work with Milos Forman, including on Ragtime (1981) set in New York. His credits also include Silkwood, and The World According to Garp.
I had an inkling I’d seen Ragtime when it was released. For his camerawork on that film, Ondricek was nominated for an Academy Award. It’s incredible to think his first assignment outside of Czechoslovakia was working on The White Bus, and his first day of filming was spent outside a cinema in the middle of half-derelict Hulme. Checking an old diary, it turns out I saw the film in October 1982 one afternoon at that very same cinema, when it had been renamed the Aaben.
To be precise, my diary tells me it was October 4th 1982 that I went to the Aaben to see Ragtime. That day I ate bean & mint pate & salad at the vegetarian café On the Eighth Day, and in the evening went to the Haçienda to see William Burroughs do a reading. That day pretty much sums up my life in Manchester in 1982. That, and no girlfriend.
The irony of my visit to the Aaben in 1982 is that once again the cinema was sitting in an environment of semi-dereliction, just as it had been in 1965 when Shelagh Delaney, Lindsay Anderson, and the film crew arrived. Back then, the Victorian terraces were being destroyed and replaced by the Crescents, tower blocks and deck access housing. In 1982, just seventeen years later, the future had failed. The Crescents and the deck access blocks in the Hulme estate were being abandoned. The Council had already stopped housing families there; I was living the other side of Hulme over the Joy Division bridge, and on the edge of Moss Side.
1982 was during an era in Hulme notable for music, drugs, cockroaches, breakdancers, arson, empty properties, heavy pubs, boarded-up shops. I can understand outsiders finding it squalid - it wasn’t a great advert for the joys of Manchester or the talents of the Council - but it was a community of sorts, and for us young ‘uns it was fun and an opportunity, and we weren’t paying rent.
Yes, the future had failed. It was left to us to try to create something in its place. It was also a lesson in the perspicacity of Shelagh Delaney’s scepticism about bombastic Council claims, local media’s delusions, and out-of-touch authorities in The White Bus. That she and then Lindsay Anderson melded this alienation with creativity, boundary-pushing, humour and hallucinations, makes the work even more interesting.
The White Bus film is here https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9bd9gw
A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the making of The White Bus https://archive.org/details/about-the-white-bus
The recent Backlisted podcast about Shelagh Delaney https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/245-a-taste-of-honey-by-shelagh-delaney
Further reading
Must check out the film! Not sticking to your lane recalls Neil Young's comment about the massive success of 'Heart of Gold' in 1972: “'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people…”
'The White Bus' is an anti-Magical Mystery Tour....