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When we grow up, most of us are shaped by our families, of course, but also by the language, landscape, and culture of our classes and communities. Accrington is in the northwestern part of England, a region around Manchester, described by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1838 as “the workshop of the world.”³⁸ Barely a mile away from our house, James Hargreaves (no traceable ancestral connection) invented the spinning jenny—an innovation for rapidly winding fibre that revolutionized the cotton industry by replacing weavers with machines. Indeed, so revolutionary was Hargreaves’s invention that it brought a visit from a gang of Luddites, who placed a hammer in his hand and forced him to destroy his own technology.³⁹

Accrington is a small former textile town of around forty thousand people in ranks of slate-roofed terraced houses that march up the hillsides to the moors. On my way to secondary school, I used to walk past hundreds of factory workers, standing outside in their navy-blue boiler suits, drinking hot tea from their pint pots on their union-required tea break. In its heyday, the town was booming.

The mills and the engineering factories are all gone now. So, too, are the Nori brickworks (Nori is iron in reverse) that, amongst other things, provided the foundations for the Empire State Building in New York and for Blackpool Tower—England’s diminutive facsimile of Paris’s La Tour Eiffel.⁴⁰

Accrington’s singular and somewhat dubious claim to national fame is its football team. Accrington was one of the twelve clubs that founded the English Football League in 1888, the first such league in the world. In 1962, it was also the first club to be expelled from the league because of bankruptcy (it eventually reformed in 1968 and re-entered the football league in 2006, where it sat in the bottom division until its improbable promotion to the division above in 2018). I vividly remember my dad taking me to games as a child, where he stood me on top of an upturned brass shoebox so I could see. I might not have been raised in a shoebox, but once a fortnight, I was raised up by one!

In the 1980s, the club’s misfortunes were parodied in a TV advertisement for the Milk Marketing Board. It shows a boy being teased by his friend, who says that the then famous Liverpool Football Club striker Ian Rush told him that if he didn’t drink all his milk, he would only be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley. “Accrington Stanley? Who are they?” the boy asks. “Exactly” is his friend’s riposte!⁴¹

Accrington is a subject of national derision, an old musical hall joke, a place that nobody ever goes to without a very good reason. In 2018, Express, the digital extension of the right-wing tabloid Daily Express, judged it to be the eighth-worst town in England (amongst a list of ten that mainly consisted of other towns from the Northwest).⁴² Even Mum said that the only good thing about Accrington was that you could get out of it easily.

“Leave as soon as you can,” she used to say to us boys. “There’s nothing here for you.” She probably overstated her case because, eventually, one by one, we all did leave—for Canada.

In their own way, though, the people of Accrington were, and still are, fiercely proud, warm, and welcoming. The Northwest is built on forthright men and feisty women whose families once worked in the ear-splitting atmospheres of engineering factories and weaving sheds. My mother, grandmother, uncles, and brothers all had jobs there at one time or another. A few hours spent on Ancestry.com reveals no hidden British aristocracy in our family tree. The only alleged claim to fame is that of Kenneth Wolstenholme, the TV commentator for England’s victory over Germany in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final and creator of that memorable phrase that accompanied England’s final goal, “They think it’s all over. It is now!” He was reputedly the distant cousin of my grandma, whose maiden name was Wolstenholme too.⁴³

Going back several generations, a scan of family occupations brings up weaver, weaver, weaver, with repetitive regularity. The noise of the weaving sheds was deafening. In secondary school, at the end of the school day, I used to visit my brother Colin’s velvet mill, where he repaired the looms. Our conversations were conducted in improvised sign language amidst a lung-scouring fog of white cotton fluff. After years of doing this kind of work, my grandma became a quick and skilled user of official sign language when a deaf couple moved in as her next-door neighbours. There’s a reason we all still shout sometimes, men and women alike, why we sound like foghorns, especially after a few drinks. It also explains why many of us talk with our hands and wave our arms about—something that has stayed with me as an ineradicably eccentric part of my public-speaking style.

In Accrington and the Northwest generally, people’s voices are loud. Their style is direct. They have no side, or pretentiousness, to them. They speak as they find. Like female Manchester TV detectives Scott and Bailey (the 21st century northern-English reinvention of America’s Cagney and Lacey), they are bold as brass and matter of fact.⁴⁴ They know how to bear up when things are hard and laugh raucously at themselves and each other when they cock things up. Modesty is not a quiet expression of pious humility. It’s about bringing each other down a peg or two when the moment requires it, about not getting too big for your boots, and about genuinely applauding each other’s triumphs as well. If ever I got to be top of the class or did well in an exam, my granddad would joke, “We’ll have to widen t’door so tha’ can get tha’s ’ead through!”

Living rooms, pub lounges, market stalls, football terraces, corporation buses, and backyards where the washing was being pegged out—all of them were places of endless bantering, gossiping, joking, and piss-taking; complaining about menfolk and womenfolk, officialdom, and authority; and cataloguing of a vast assortment of ailments, including, amongst middle-aged women, mysterious conditions “down there!” Talk would overlap; mild swearing such as “daft bugger,” “bloody hell,” and, later, “stupid wanker”—but never the f-word—was mandatory; and broad Lancashire dialect prevailed.

“If thah wants summat doin’, tha mun do it thissen” (“if you want something doing, you should do it yourself”), my mum would often say. “Earning a wage” was “gerrin summat aggled,” in my grandad’s words. “Something or nothing” was “summat and nowt.” And if someone was “agait this and agait that,” he or she would be “doing one thing then another.” Most of the thick dialect has gone now, but strong accents remain and are even making a bit of a comeback. These days, “the internet” is “t’internet”! When you walk down the streets of Accrington, or get on one of its buses, you’ll still be greeted with “Alreet” or “Hiya” by practically anyone you meet.

Grit, determination, courage in the face of adversity, and scant respect for the repressed emotionality and southern affectations of elite English authority were and still are core characteristics of Northwest cultural life. Northwesterners are collectively proud of their efforts and industry but also feel that, like anyone else, they are really “nothing special.”

This working-class childhood and adolescence of the 1950s through the mid-1960s, it needs to be said, was, in racial terms, almost completely white. Immigrants from Pakistan who came to work in the town’s cotton mills didn’t arrive in large numbers until I was reaching the end of secondary school. There was no visible diversity at all in my primary school. At grammar school, the diversity extended only to the four or five Jewish boys who mysteriously disappeared before our daily morning prayers and returned just as mysteriously afterwards.

Underneath the railway viaduct was the town’s only Indian restaurant, where young working-class men, like my eldest brother, tested their virility with excoriating vindaloo curries after a few beers on a Friday or Saturday night. The lone Chinese takeaway was the only other local opportunity for any culinary diversity. Apart from these exceptions, Accrington and the towns around it were almost completely white working class, through and through.

A harbinger of what was to come, though, occurred in a local workingmen’s club that made national news. Accrington’s Old Band Club was the last workingmen’s club in England to impose a “colour bar,” voting by a two-thirds majority in 1964 to exclude an applicant who was a Sikh. Commenting on the judgement, the club’s president stated that the “time is not ripe for social intercourse between ourselves and the coloured people.”⁴⁵ I’d like to think my dad, who had been one of its members, had he still been alive, would have voted to oppose this ruling, but, of course, we’ll never know. Although traditional northerners were and are deeply loyal to their own historic communities, they could show themselves to be deeply mistrustful of newcomers and outsiders—a pattern that has persisted right up to the days of Brexit Britain.

In general, traditional northerners love being underdogs and are defiant in the face of condescension and petty bureaucracy. Six miles to the north of Accrington is Burnley. It’s the smallest town ever to enter the English Premier League of football. The entire population of Burnley can easily fit into the stadium for Manchester United. Burnley Football Club got to the Premier League and has played in its upper reaches, just below Chelsea and the like, with prudent local ownership rather than the lavish expenditure of overseas investors. When I interviewed former chairman Barry Kilby for a book I coauthored, Uplifting Leadership, he pointed out that Burnley constantly “punches above its weight.” It relies a lot on local investment and community pride. He smiled at the thought of overseas billionaires from the United States, Russia, or the Middle East, who have no such long-standing loyalties and “have to get out a route map” to locate the club they are buying. “I can’t bet the ranch” on overseas playing stars, he said, and risk plunging the club into debt.⁴⁶

So Burnley takes journeymen players that other clubs have discarded, or faces that haven’t fit; selects them on the basis of a strong work ethic; and forms them into an organized team. The resulting play is rarely easy on the eye. There are few flashes of creative brilliance. And on “Match of the Day” TV highlights, Burnley performances often come on last, after the glamorous big-city clubs, and receive only the most grudging praise for the team’s dour efforts. But the chant of the crowd at Burnley’s matches epitomizes the defiance of the town’s population more generally:

We are Burnley, super Burnley.

We are Burnley, from the North.

No one likes us. No one likes us. No one likes us.

We don’t care.

This could just as easily be a chant for Brexit Britain (Burnley, which voted 67 per cent in favour of leaving Europe in the 2016 referendum, was selected by the BBC as one of the most pro-Brexit towns in the nation).⁴⁷ It could also be an anthem for Trump supporters in the former manufacturing towns of the United States and for the Ford Nation voters (named after Premier Doug Ford) in Ontario, Canada. Indeed, it could be the theme tune of the white working class and lower-middle class in many countries who have come to feel ignored by political and intellectual elites or treated by them as objects of derision and figures of fun.