Читать книгу Tony Wilson - You're Entitled to an Opinion But. . . - David Nolan - Страница 8

What does education do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook

– HENRY DAVID THOREAU

In an opening flourish of contrariness that would become a constant throughout his 57-and-a-half years, the man who became known as ‘Mr Manchester’ wasn’t from Manchester at all. Anthony Howard Wilson was born in Hope Hospital, Salford on 20 February 1950. The fact that he was actually born in the city next door to the one with which he is associated was something he never tired of pointing out to those unfortunate enough to make the mistake. Leaning forward – surprisingly tall and broad – Wilson would fix you with a firm dose of eye contact across the top of the discreetly expensive glasses on the tip of his nose. ‘Actually, darling… I’m from Salford.’ In 1978 he introduced viewers of his regional arts slot on Granada Television to a new band. They were called Joy Division. He explained they were from Manchester, apart from the guitarist, who was from Salford: ‘Very important difference.’

Plonked directly to the west of Manchester, Salford gets very uppity if you overlook the fact that it is a city. It’s been one since 1926 yet in over 80 years no one has managed to provide it with a city centre. It’s never had one and there are no plans to get one. It’s a contrary place is Salford and it breeds contrary people.

Salford is a multi-skiller. Its many and varied districts offer a different facet of the city depending on which area you go to. There’s the streetwise, unorthodox Ordsall and Weaste, the leafily genteel Worsley and Boothstown, and the shiny, envy-inducing Quays. Just looking at one and accepting it as being representative would not do the place justice. Today, as you cross the border into the city, gaudy pink signs erected by the council inform you that you are now ‘IN SALFORD’. The signs manage the difficult trick of being informative, attention-grabbing, slightly incongruous and rather camp all at the same time.

Tony Wilson’s forbears were busy folk; European of stock and shopkeepers by nature. ‘My grandfather was German,’ Tony told Eyewitness in Manchester in 1998. ‘He came here in 1901. First he went to America, then came back to Salford. We’re the great immigrant city – foreigners are welcomed, it’s so hospitable to outsiders, they thrive and do so well, they become part of the city.’

Tony’s grandfather, Herman Maximillian Knupfer, married four times after he arrived in Britain from Freiberg. Three times he was made a widower; he was in his late seventies when he married for the final time on the Isle of Man, where he’d moved for tax reasons. He had seven children through his life: Karl, Edgar, Doris, John, Lilly, Herman and Rose. The children of Herman’s first and second marriages were to form the unusual family unit that surrounded the young Tony Wilson. Karl came from the first marriage and Edgar and Doris from the second.

Herman Knupfer was apprenticed to a Salford jeweller and watchmaker called Mr Ranks, with premises at 238 Regent Road, the main drag from Manchester city centre into Salford. When Ranks died, Herman got the money together to take over the business.

Salford wasn’t such a welcoming city for German immigrants after the outbreak of World War I and the windows of Herman Knupfer’s jewellery store were smashed in. Karl had joined the British army and a picture of him in uniform was swiftly displayed in the repaired window. The attacks stopped as quickly as they had begun.

The mini-business empire of the Knupfers expanded. To this day, the name is a familiar one to older Salford residents who recall the entrepreneurial family and the service they provided to the people of the city. Karl took over the shop and Edgar opened another jeweller’s at nearby Cadishead before shifting nearer the other Knupfers to a shop at 80 Church Street, Eccles. Both stores were upmarket and they would answer phone calls to the shops with the words: ‘Knupfer Brothers… Salford’s leading jewellers…’

Doris was more than a match for the male Knupfers and opened up a tobacconist at 448 Regent Road. She’d married a man named Tom McNulty and the shop bore his surname. McNulty died – it’s believed in a motorbike crash – and Doris was left a widow. By this stage, Karl had also lost his wife. Edgar would never marry.

The three decided to buy a house together at Sorrell Bank in Pendleton, a plan scuppered by Karl’s decision to remarry. Doris also decided – in haste – that she too would remarry. The man in question was Sydney Wilson, more than 20 years her junior. The family knew only that he’d lived in India and had been part of ENSA (Entertainments National Services Association, the organisation set up to put on shows for the armed services during World War II). He had been married while overseas, but it was never spoken of. Shortly after he wed Doris, she became pregnant and gave birth at 46 to Tony. Or Anthony, as she insisted on calling him. The birth was traumatic – most likely due to Doris’s age – and Sydney was taken to one side and told that there should be no more children.

Later described by Tony as a ‘very good-looking failed actor’, Sydney Wilson would always retain a raffish, theatrical swagger with his bow ties, waistcoats and plummy tones, but he put aside his dreams of a life in show business to work in the shop. He’d bristle when customers called him Mr McNulty, not unreasonable as the name of Doris’s first husband stayed over the shop window. But there was another issue that caused consternation in the life of Sydney Wilson. He was gay.

‘He was very, very theatrical,’ remembers Geoff Knupfer, Tony’s cousin and the son of Karl Knupfer. ‘Charming guy, good fun to be with, the life and soul of the party – but as camp as Christmas. He loved amateur dramatics and was very good at it. He was always well turned out. Sydney always looked the dog’s balls when you walked into the shop with the dickie bow and the waistcoat. Very, very extrovert. You weren’t left in any great doubt. As kids we thought he was a hoot. Half-day closing was Wednesday in Salford in those days. Sydney always disappeared into Manchester on a Wednesday afternoon. You can draw whatever conclusion you wish to draw from that.’

Geoff Knupfer also paints a vivid picture of Tony’s mother, Doris. ‘She was sharp, to the point of being bad news. She wanted what she wanted and stuff the rest. She was a very strong personality. Mum ruled the roost. She made sure Tony got everything. She ruined him. So did Edgar. Spoilt him. He was never short of anything. Whatever he wanted he got. He was born to parents who were that bit older and were relatively affluent. The tobacconist’s shop was quite a reasonable business and the brothers were doing quite well. You got this mix in Tony of Doris – who was a very calculating, very assertive, very shrewd woman – and Sydney, who was the theatrical. I think Tony had the combination of the two.’

‘The family used to say, “Sydney’s theatrical”,’ confirms Pat Dilibero, formerly Pat Knupfer, another of Tony’s cousins. ‘Sydney was lovely, so nice and kind. He adored Doris: the way he used to just sit and look at her. Sydney dressed her: hat, shoes and gloves that matched. You never saw her without hat and gloves. It was Sydney who chose all her clothes for her. Doris wasn’t a likeable person. You wouldn’t come away from meeting her thinking, Oh, what a lovely lady. She was very kind, a lovely person but a very strong woman. She would never be swayed. She had certain views and that was it.’

Sydney and Doris, along with Tony’s bachelor uncle Edgar, lived above the Regent Street shop. Tony’s childhood was filled with the noise of the busy shopping street outside his window and the exotic smells from the shop; musky wafts of tobacco and snuff filled the air. He would retain vivid memories of seeing visiting seamen – some from Africa – in the shop, as the port of Manchester was nearby. He basked in the warmth of the adults’ attention and like a seed serviced by three bright suns, his confidence grew. ‘I am very much an only child,’ he later told London’s Evening Standard. ‘Meaning I am self-reliant, egocentric, sociable. I had my mother, father and an uncle who lived with us, all doting on me. So I’ve got a lot of self-confidence. Badly placed, some might say.’

Not surprisingly, Tony’s education was a priority. Monton House School was the first destination, chiefly because it was the pre-prep feeder school for Salford’s premier educational establishment, De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ grammar. But Doris was dissatisfied with living in the Salford flat. She wanted the best of both worlds: a fine education for her son but better surroundings to suit the family’s social standing. So the Wilsons moved to Marple in Cheshire, some 17 miles away.

Marple sits southeast of Manchester. It’s where the suburbs begin to spread out comfortably and rub up alongside the Peak District national park, the rolling hills of Derbyshire that have long been the favoured weekend destination for Salfordians and Mancunians. It’s the sort of place that is often given the epithet ‘leafy’ and has become a byword for a certain brand of aspirant living – coasters and Hostess Trolleys, Jags and doilies. In fact it’s a mixed community with fine town houses and pseudo-country residences as well as a fairly tasty housing estate. In 1955, the Wilsons and Edgar Knupfer moved to a brand new house on Ladythorn Avenue, a quiet cul-de-sac set back off Strines Road, the twisting route out of Marple that heads across the Derbyshire border. The house was given a German twist, named Oberlinden after Herman Knupfer’s family home in the old country. Tucked into the corner, it had commanding views over the countryside that led to the villages of Marple Bridge and Mellor and on a clear day, the moorland plateau of Kinder Scout could be seen. The driveways are long on Ladythorn Avenue and have a reassuringly gravelly crunch when walked on. It’s an avenue for the well-heeled, make no mistake.

The Wilsons soon settled into their new community. The fact that Edgar had moved with Sydney and Doris created an extra frisson of curiosity among the family. Flamboyant Sydney and bachelor Edgar under the same roof… well, people will talk. But the implication, that Sydney and Edgar were involved with each other, was never proven – nor was it openly discussed. Sydney became heavily involved with the local drama society based at the Carver Theatre and the family were connected with the local church.

‘Doris was very religious,’ says Pat Dilibero. ‘They all went to mass every week. She was never frivolous. She was quite parsimonious. Very much so. Tony always had holes in his vest and she would darn them. He always had money, though. She lavished money on him but she never lavished praise. Sydney did, though. I can never remember her cuddling him. She wasn’t the most affectionate person.’

The detached home was a marked difference from the flat in Salford and Tony revelled in the sights, sounds and smells of rural Marple. To the rear of the house was the icy tumble of the River Goyt, making its way from the edge of Buxton to the centre of Stockport to join the River Tame to form the Mersey. Alongside the river, the single-line railway track heading for Sheffield and beyond that, the moss-covered ruins of a nearby mill. ‘A muddy forest of wonders,’ Tony would later write, describing the sorties he and other boys made from the new housing development down to a playground of rubble and remains from an earlier age. ‘Beneath the ferns and trees, the remnants of old stone buildings would lie, wet, lichen-covered, mossy and inviting to a curious bunch of pre-teens.’ These were the remnants of Mellor Mill, built by industrial entrepreneur Samuel Oldknow in 1793. Next to them were the Roman lakes – actually built at the turn of the 19th century to service the mill. They became a popular attraction and they’re still there today.

Despite their business interests taking them from Marple to Salford every day, the Wilsons thought that growing up in the countryside would be good for young Tony. ‘All my relatives said this was a dreadful mistake,’ Tony told The Independent in 2003. ‘“You’ve ruined his life! You’ve taken him away from a school that could have got him into De La Salle.”’

Instead Tony went to St Mary’s Catholic primary in neighbouring Marple Bridge, a community actually slightly leafier than Marple. There had been a school on the site since 1860 and had initially provided education for the children of Irish Catholics who’d moved to the North West to work on the railways and canals. Tony was one of 300 pupils, largely drawn from Marple, Mellor and Compstall. Doris and Sydney took a keen interest in Tony’s education and were regular visitors, checking on their son’s progress. But Tony didn’t take to the school, later saying he didn’t see eye to eye with the teachers.

He dawdled at seventh or eighth in class until his parents paid for a tutor to help him with his studies and to coach him towards passing the 11-plus examination, along with an additional entrance examination for De La Salle. It gave him the place his parents had yearned for and Wilson always took great pleasure in relating how he came first out of the thousand entrants in that year. It demonstrated to him something that would become a recurring theme in his life: not only was he clever but if he put his mind to it, he could be the cleverest person in the room.

The Wilsons were loath to up sticks and move back to Salford, so in 1961, aged 11, Anthony Howard Wilson began commuting twice a day – a round trip of some 35 miles. Looking slightly higgledy-piggledy in a bold red De La Salle blazer over mend-and-make-do clothes, he would be ready and on the platform by 7.30am to get the train into Manchester. Plenty of time to devour a book and admire the magnificent views from the Marple viaduct that carries the railway more than 120 feet over the River Goyt, then on through Bredbury and Reddish towards Manchester. Then he would walk down Piccadilly Approach to Piccadilly Gardens to get a bus to De La Salle Catholic Grammar School for Boys.

‘It was what you would call today a grant-maintained school,’ recalls Tony’s school friend Tadeusz Kasa. ‘You passed your 11-plus, but then you still had to take an entrance exam before they let you in. Within our catchment area there were only three Catholic grammar schools and De La Salle was by far regarded as the most serious. And the most scary. We were sent there because it had high academic standards, but also strict discipline. It was considered a good school but it wouldn’t be scary if you behaved. It had a fantastic reputation at that time – it was run by the De La Salle Christian Brothers who lived on site.’

The De La Salle teaching order, founded by St John Baptist De La Salle, was initially established as a means of helping and educating the children of the poor. By the 1960s the Salford school had become a byword for high standards of education and behaviour and was a beacon for parents with aspirations for their upper-working class and lower-middle class children. The De La Salle Christian Brothers are still going strong; they’re often confused with the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers, though their Irish counterparts ran an even less liberal regime than the De La Salle order.

‘There was a culture of discipline,’ continues Tadeusz Kasa. ‘The strap, the cane, the slipper. But most of the corporal punishment was carried out by the lay teachers. I don’t think that excuses the order, because most of that stuff was carried out under their auspices. But it isn’t right to say that the De La Salle order was made up of vicious individuals. Far from it. They were mostly decent blokes.’

Head teacher at the time was Brother Columba. His regime was a tough one with strict rules on everything down to the width of trousers and the length of pupils’ hair. Brother Columba carried a cane in the sleeve of his cassock which he could produce, Derringer-like, to administer instant justice. In 1962 there was a change at the top and Brother Terrence took charge. Rules were relaxed. Slightly.

Another De La Salle pupil was Kevin Cummins, who went on to be the photographer-in-residence to the Manchester music scene. He had moved to Salford aged nine and went to the school on a scholarship. ‘Nothing prepared me for it,’ says Cummins. ‘I didn’t know we weren’t allowed to play football. I didn’t know we had to wear short trousers and caps until the fourth year. I didn’t understand just how draconian the place was. We thought people must be stupid to pay to go to there. We had a religious knowledge teacher who was also a woodwork teacher. At the start of the woodwork lesson we had to make the sign of the cross. But we had to say “pencils, rulers, saws and squares” instead of “in the name of the Father…” and so on. I spent four years making a stool. It was like a borstal. I know it’s fashionable to knock your old school, but I was terrified. The bullying came from the top. The teachers would choose people like themselves to be prefects and the prefects would then bully us. You just had to keep your head down.

‘Tony was bright, but we were all bright. They hot-housed you for Oxbridge. If you weren’t in the top five or six in class, they lost interest in you. You could be a swot or you could fuck about. Tony was older than me. We looked up to the older pupils but they didn’t know who we were. It’s a massive gap at that age – half a life away. I was an outsider. I was a Man City fan.’

In a conscious aping of public school rituals, rugby was De La Salle’s game – and football was not on the syllabus. It was permitted in the school yard and Tony was an enthusiastic, albeit ungainly player, his loping gait getting in the way of any abilities he possessed.

Science was initially Tony’s passion and he excelled at De La Salle. After being placed in the A stream – the top tier of his year – he would come top of his class for the first three terms. ‘Tony didn’t have a problem because he was academically brilliant, a high flyer,’ says Tadeusz Kasa. ‘He was young. He’d jumped a year and would eventually take his O Levels and A Levels a year earlier than anyone else. He didn’t have a problem with that side of things. If he got into trouble it would be because the whole class would get in trouble and beaten. Sometimes 28 of us would get whacked for talking in the corridor. We’d all get slippered – the euphemism for being hit with a plimsoll. If he got into trouble it would be because he had a smirk on his face.’

‘He was conspicuous because he was larger than life,’ says Peter McNamara, another contemporary at De La Salle. ‘Sweeping down the corridors, you’d notice him. He seemed a cut above. He had quite a posh voice – that probably came from Sydney. He was seen as a posh lad.

‘He was well liked by the teachers, he worked hard and he was a conformist. I remember going into a classroom once before the teacher came in and Tony was testing the other lads on their Latin before the teacher arrived. I thought, what a swot! But he was a good lad. A high flyer. Flamboyant. Different. Extremely confident. Serious self-belief. I can’t imagine him ever doubting himself unless he did that in privacy.’

The city that Tony walked through to get to his school was brash, noisy and in your face. Manchester would make a deep impression on him. He’d had a taste of what it had to offer through the frequent trips he’d make to Salford with his parents as they maintained their businesses interests. As he got older and his already considerable confidence grew, he began to linger after school, expanding his knowledge with heavy texts at the magnificent Central Library. He also got regular secondary whiffs of the heady glamour available in the city centre.

‘I remember Manchester as a very groovy city, a club city,’ he later recalled to writer and photographer Aidan O’Rourke. ‘I remember my mum and dad coming home with the programme of West Side Story. We were the pre-run of the West End of London in those days. My mother used to go into Manchester, go for a coffee, meet friends, go to the Midland Hotel.’

Aged 14, Tony’s scientific intentions were placed on the back Bunsen burner. A trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Peter Hall’s production of Hamlet knocked him sideways. It starred Manchester-born David Warner in the title role and Glenda Jackson as Ophelia. Warner – then aged 24 – was the first rock’n’roll Hamlet. His prince was a louche, studenty radical with a studied air of fuck-you nonchalance. Despised by critics, Warner’s Hamlet became highly attractive to youthful theatre audiences disenfranchised from Shakespeare as the 1960s began to swing oh-so-gently. During one performance, Warner gleefully incorporated audience heckles into the text. Water off a duck’s back. Here was a man who didn’t care what people said about him, he was going to do things his way. It made a deep impression on Tony and he decided there and then that he must read English at university.

His interests at De La Salle began to reflect his more artistic leanings. He took to strumming a guitar and wandering around school with lofty, impressive books. ‘He would have been a target for piss-taking,’ says Tadeusz Kasa, ‘because he used to walk around with Chaucer and TS Eliot under his arm. I mean he really did. He did the drama and the theatre stuff. He was very noticeable to the macho crowd. Aesthetic is a good word for Wilson. That’s exactly what he was. A sort of weakling aesthetic person. He would have been pushed around by the rugby crowd because he had a lot to say and he walked around with books under his arm and he was a target.’ To the further annoyance of the rugger buggers, Tony’s actorly leanings became pronounced too. He appeared in a De La Salle production –The Lark by Jean Anouilh and he played Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

‘Looking back it’s a bit typecast in a way,’ says Peter McNamara. ‘Playing the buffoon, the loud brash role.’ When Sydney Wilson, actorly and fruity of voice, came to school to pick Tony up on one occasion, one pupil cried: ‘Don’t tell me – Wilson’s dad!’

There was always a party after shows and the girls from the nearby Adelphi school – who featured in the cast – went to these parties, providing a further reason for taking up the theatrical life. ‘There was quite a lot of social life associated with it,’ recalls Peter McNamara. ‘The strong reasons for joining were being a thespian or that you were interested in meeting girls. We used to hire a hall in Worsley and we’d all pile in with wine and beer. And girls. And smoking. Although Tony was never a big drinker. He didn’t seem to need it. When you were a kid you’d have a few pints to chat up girls to give you Dutch courage. Tony didn’t need that. He had self-confidence. He wasn’t shy with girls despite being in an all boys’ school. Tony used to fall in love and write poems for girls. He used to see himself as a romantic. I think he was romantic.’ His swooning Variations On A Theme was published in the school magazine The LaSallian:

Does such gaiety evade

Those who search for,

This firm sensuality

Has alloyed the golden ore

To baser metal; enduring

Steel; strength in a dual role.

Like two burst dams, our lips pour

Fluent libations of wine

Into the fertile valley

That narrows with each torrent

Of passion, yet restoring

Balance in the spirit, by

Simple joys of the body.

With a Tiggerish enthusiasm familiar to those who knew him in later life, Tony scattered himself across a range of interests and activities. He was secretary of the English Society. He wrote loftily of the society in the school magazine: ‘The great renaissance philosopher Pico Mirandola once said: “It profiteth a man more to discuss one hour with his equals than to study one day on his own.”’

A fondness for an erudite quote was clearly well formed by this stage. He was also a leading light in the debating society, though even his own team mates admitted that his florid, bombastic style alienated audiences and judges alike when they entered debate competitions. The school magazine even noted that one problem the society had to contend with was ‘Mr Wilson’s proclivity for tabling provocative motions.’ However, he did manage to curtail these to help the society win the Demosthenes trophy in the Salford public speaking competition of 1966. ‘It’s a great gift to be able to speak in public,’ says Peter McNamara today. ‘He was quite a presence. It certainly impressed me, having the balls to stand up and do that.’

Tony also became a master of ceremonies for school entertainments. There’s a fascinating glimpse of the future in this aspect of his persona. Lunchtime and evening concerts were regular events at the school. Cheese and wine plus some discreet jazz. Tony’s forte was to compere such events. Essentially he would take to the stage and tell people how utterly fantastic everything they were about to hear really and truly was. ‘He was always the guy who came on and did the talking,’ Tadeusz Kasa recalls. ‘He never did any actual playing.’ So Tony’s favoured role at school was that of a ringmaster, hyping up expectation in the performances of others; the very thing he would essentially make a career of.

In January 1966, Karl Knupfer died. By the summer, Edgar Knupfer had also passed away. Doris drew Tony even closer to her. They even holidayed together in Paris, leaving Sydney literally minding the shop. All three, however, would regularly holiday together in Ireland. It was there that the teenage Tony picked up a habit that he would never shake off and one that would – nearly 40 years later – get him into big trouble: swearing. ‘He was running round the house saying, “This is feckin’ ridiculous” – feckin’ this and feckin’ that,’ recalls Geoff Knupfer of Tony’s return from one summer holiday in Ireland. ‘Clearly done to impress. He’d picked it up in Ireland and obviously thought it sounded good. That was Tony to a T really. So he was feckin’ everything. Doris and Sydney just let it happen.’

Doris and Sydney’s relationship with their son remained one of barely-disguised indulgence and generosity. He was the centre of Doris’s universe. But the gifts and the attention may have been a substitute for something more meaningful. This seeming gap in Tony’s life is summed up by this memory from Geoff Knupfer of a Christmas morning when Tony stayed over at his cousin’s house in Salford.

‘Christmas morning he got up at our house,’ says Geoff today. ‘I was very close to my mum as my dad died when I was 17. Tony made some comment to his mother which got back to my mother about how warm and close we seemed and the wonderful way we celebrated Christmas – because I had lots of presents to unwrap. His parents just gave him money. It obviously hit home. They’d spoiled him but they just threw money at him. He was obviously quite shocked at the way we celebrated Christmas in our house as opposed to just throwing money at him, as they did at their house.’

As he entered his final terms at De La Salle, Tony expanded his socialising. He developed what turned into a lifelong love of flinging out quotations left, right and centre. He went to sixth-form parties, where he could play his beloved Beatles on a Dansette record player, but he didn’t like nightclubs – places with names like The Twisted Wheel and The Oasis. Not Tony’s thing. He also stayed away from Marple, keen on fraternising with the Salford locals and especially drinking in the Cross Keys pub in Eccles. A dimpled half-pint mug of bitter in one hand, Tony would hold forth on matters of art and literature, in an attempt to impress the girls from the Adelphi school.

‘The Cross Keys was a favourite,’ remembers Peter McNamara. ‘It was olde worlde, but it was one of those places that would serve you if you were underage.’

The end result of his seven years at De La Salle would be eight O Levels – his lowest mark was a grade four in English – and three A Levels. His highest A Level mark was a grade A in English. Skipping a year meant Tony came out of De La Salle in 1968 with time on his hands before starting university. So he thought he’d try his hand at teaching.

Blue Coat School in Oldham was an imposing Church of England establishment with a firm religious brief; for many years it refused entry to non-Christians. During the spring and summer terms, 17-year-old Tony made the even longer trip from Marple to Oldham, approaching the task with a soon-to-be-familiar swagger. ‘I thought I was God’s gift to teaching,’ he told the Manchester Evening News in 1976. ‘I knew the other teachers didn’t like me. I probably knew nothing.’ He might have been saddened to learn that there is only one reference to him in the school records. In a summary of the 1967/68 Blue Coat academic year it reads: ‘Mr Wilson, a student, arrived to help with English’. And that’s it.

On his 18th birthday, Tony was given an impressive gift by his parents, an act of indulgence unheard of among his peers. ‘His mother gave him a brand-spanking-new Sunbeam Stiletto,’ says cousin Geoff. Tony took the car to show the regulars at the Cross Keys pub. The gift came at a time when his penchant for making bold pronouncements – and his taste for left wing politics – was coming to the fore. ‘We were in the Cross Keys,’ recalls Geoff, ‘and Tony says, “I wish I had been born in a terraced slum down by the docks. So that I could experience it first hand.”

‘Someone said: “If you feel that strongly about it, Tony, why don’t you give your Sunbeam Stiletto away?” He was a bit of a champagne-socialist type. He’d got older parents and an older uncle who all doted on him and he benefited from that. He was perceived as a bit of a prat in those days. He was very loud and he had views. He wasn’t really one of the lads.’

After toying with Manchester University, Tony opted for Cambridge. How proud Doris must have been. ‘She was over the moon,’ remembers Geoff. ‘She spoilt him even more.’

In an interview with journalist Jonathan Sale in 2003 about his educational life, Tony explained how he still felt torn about what to do with his academic abilities. ‘In my first term I suddenly thought: all I want to be is a nuclear physicist. What am I doing reading English? What job will I do? I decided I would be a television journalist and joined the student paper.’ In fact, by his second term Tony would be editing Varsity, putting in 40 hours a week. By his own admission, this would rise to ‘something like 100’ hours a week.

But as would happen again in the future, Tony found himself constantly drawn back to the North West. He attended social gatherings for De La Salle old boys. ‘Tony was persuaded to perform in an old boys’ troupe called the LaSallian players,’ says Peter McNamara. It was at the insistence of flamboyant head of history Kevin Conroy, one of those teachers seemingly pulled from the pages of an Alan Bennett play. After a show he would invite current and former pupils round to his for drinkies. He was one of the few people who were louder and more more theatrical than Tony Wilson himself.

‘We were round at Kevin Conroy’s house in Eccles after one of these plays once, enjoying ourselves, having a few drinks. Kevin was a bit like Tony’s dad. He fancied himself as quite the director. He liked to provoke Tony. He said, “Tony, how are you? Are you still in your International Marxist phase or is it some other radical grouping that you belong to?” He was setting Tony up for his punchline: “And tell me – how is your portfolio of investments?”

‘Tony would respond with a, “Fuck off, Conroy…”’

Tony spread himself typically thin between return trips to home: Varsity, his studies at Jesus College and a new-found enthusiasm for dope-smoking and psychedelics. (He also contracted hepatitis in the second term of his third year.) He would later develop particular turns of phrase that he returned to virtually word for word whenever interviewed. A favourite which encapsulated growing up was: ‘I’m very lucky. I was 13 in the school playground when The Beatles happened, I was 18 and went to university when the revolution in drugs happened, and I was 26 and a TV presenter with my own show when punk happened. And then it was when I was 38 that acid house happened. Because it’s a 13 year cycle: 1950, 1963, 1976 and 1989. I was too young for the Teddy Boys in 1950. My big ambition is to be around for 2002 when the next thing happens.’

Tony’s pride at having gone to Cambridge remained undimmed. He would mention it often. Then get cross if people mentioned that he’d mentioned it. He got a 2:2 in his finals, something that irked him for the rest of his days. ‘Cambridge was a place I loved,’ he later told Manchester writer Winn Walsh. “In the 60s it was the best university in Europe. It was the intellectual side of Cambridge which grabbed me rather than the bourgeois May Ball scene. It was the place to go for one’s brain. I have always been very fond of my brain.’

Twenty-five years after he had left, Tony would show his daughter Isabel around Jesus College, hoping she too would feel what he felt. ‘It was a big deal for me to get in,’ Isabel told the Manchester Evening News in 2008. ‘It was his dream for me as well. When I was 13 he took me round to take a look. He just said I would love you to come here. If you work hard enough you have got the brains to do it. It was his dream for me to follow in his footsteps.’ A year after her father died, Isabel Wilson got four straight As in her A Levels and went to Cambridge to study medicine.