John Freeborn, 27 Broomfield Crescent

WW1 and WW2 hold particular attention historically. Not only were ordinary people conscripted en masse but literacy was newly widespread, so they could communicate what they experienced. For the first time it wasn’t just the preserve of the upper classes and official historians.

In 1940 nations had fallen to the Nazis all across Europe, and Britain, standing alone without American support at that time, faced imminent invasion. The German air force and army were far superior to the British. We were expecting invasion, road signs had been taken down so the invaders wouldn’t easily find their way around. One of the great unsung stories, the British Resistance, were readied. The coin was flipped and it came down in its edge, teetering.

The Battle of Britain – aircraft fighting over the skies of Southern and Eastern England flown by young men, mostly in their late teens and early twenties - decided it.

Once Battle of Britain was over, invasion wasn’t going to happen, the US and Soviet Union came in, the Nazis were eventually going to lose, fate was sealed. The defeat of the Nazis - and beyond that government fascism in Europe and the disintegration of its deep-rooted militarism - begins there.

But at that point in mid-1940, the Nazis were still very much on the ascendant. Not only was it ordinary people fighting but in this case it wasn’t a mass action, it came down to a very small band of people, so few that you read a list of their names. That makes it a unique event in history.

Churchill nailed it at the time. For all the evil deeds in his career before the war and the abhorrence of many of his views, his clarity in the build-up to war and during wartime was crucial. He clearly saw, in the immediate aftermath, what had happened in the Battle of Britain. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’.

Twenty year old John Freeborn, of 27 Broomfield Crescent, Leeds 6, flew more operational hours in the Battle of Britain than any other pilot. Even among such an elite and respected band as The Few, John Freeborn stood out.

Born in 1919 in Middleton - an area that was then open farmland rather than today's housing estates near the ring road - the family moved to Broomfield Crescent when John was a boy. To this day he's a proud Northerner and frequently asserts that Yorkshire supplied more pilots to the Battle of Britain than any other county.

He attended Leeds Grammar School beside Woodhouse Moor on the corner of Moorland Road and Clarendon Road (the building is now the University of Leeds Business School). Once he was an air ace he came back to the school in and did a display of aerobatics before landing on the cricket pitch. It amused him that in a few short years the masters had gone from thrashing the crap out of him to fawning over him at lunch.

John was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross twice. For the first one, in recognition of his service during the Battle of Britain, his parents accompanied him to the investiture. The first biography of him, A Tiger's Tale: The Story of Battle of Britain Fighter Ace Wg. Cdr. John Connell Freeborn, has pictures of the invitation.



Here's John with his mother Jean in Leeds shortly after receiving his DFC.



Most of his comrades have died, but John is one of the few of The Few who is still alive. He has co-authored a new biography, Tiger Cub: The Story of John Freeborn DFC*.

Henry Rollins, 52 Harold Mount

I'm determined that this project won't just celebrate dusty old feted figures. Henry Rollins deserves his place alongside Orwell, Gawthorpe and the rest.

He's best known for his music, but he also does spoken word gigs that are pithy, incisive, funny and bold. He has an outspoken and original social conscience.

And he was in Leeds at a formative time. After the split of his first band Black Flag he could have simply faded away. His time in Leeds at that crucial point in his life galvanised his resolve to continue.

Sleeve note to 1999 reissue of Hot Animal Machine by Henry Rollins:

===========

From 1981 to 1986 I was in a band called Black Flag. In late summer of 1986, the band broke up and I had to decide whether to stop or try to keep making music. Years before, Chris Haskett, an old friend of mine, and I promised each other that some day we would record together. We were both in DC at the time so I called him and told him that my schedule was suddenly extremely open. Without missing a beat, Chris went right to work and assembled a band: Bernie Wandell on bass and Mick Green on drums.

At the time Chris was living in Leeds UK and he headed back there because his gear and Mick were there. Bernie and I were to fly out when he got things set. It was a strange time in my life. I had grown used to being in a band, going on tour and being handed a schedule telling me where I was going all the time. I couldn't see ever making another record. Chris would have none of it. There was no doubt in his mind that things were going to go great and he really picked me up. In October I flew to London and took a bus up to Leeds and went to 52 Harold Mount where Chris lived. I had never met Bernie or Mick so it was strange at first but we hung out that night and it was cool.

We had practice time booked and both Chris and I had some song ideas. We went in the next day and started work. I thikn one of the first things we played together was Suicide's "Ghost Rider." From there we worked on covers that I had wanted to do and Chris showed us some of the riffs he had written,

From practice we would go back to 52 Harold Mount and eat. After that, Chris and I would work on song writing. Perhaps it was a grand combination of new association, excitement and a good dose of fear of failure, but whatever it was, we wrote like men possessed and came up with a lot songs in a short time.

Days later we were in Off Beat Studios and met what proved to be one righteous man, the studio engineer, Geoff Clout. He was basically assigned to us. At first he regarded us from quite a distance and a bit of altitude. He thought we were nuts I imagine. Not hard to come to that conclusion. The four of us were very intense in our own lovable way. Nonetheless, we got right to work and managed to record seventeen tracks in a few days. There was no one around, so Chris and I produced and mixed the record with Geoff.

Days later I was flying back to America in a jet lagged daze with the quarter inch tapes under my arm. The master multi-tracks of these songs no longer exist as I could not afford the tape and had to rent it from the studio. Days later, it was no doubt taped over.

Chris is the reason this record happened and it should be mentioned here that it was his hard work and relentless energy that put this thing over the wall. I was so confused and depressed after Black Flag broke up that I didn't know which end was up. Fortunately, Chris did and we ended up with this cool record.

The following April, he and I were in Trenton, NJ working with two people had had never met before, Sim and Andrew. The result was the Rollins Band, hundreds of shows and many, many miles under the wheels.

--Henry Rollins

[ This line-up released two records: Hot Animal Machine (credited as a Rollins solo record) and Drive by Shooting (credited to "Henrieta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhaters") ]

Arthur Ransome, 6 Ash Grove

He's certainly not under-appreciated, with extensive sites such as All Things Ransome and the Arthur Ransome Society.

There's a blue plaque on the house he was born in at 6 Ash Grove (Google map), but it is rubbish. 'Arthur Ransome author of Swallows and Amazons was born here'.



I mean, if someone's so obscure that you have to tell people why they're notable it's bad enough, but to tie it to a single deed means that they're probably not worth commemoration.

And with Ransome, while the book is the main thing he's known for, it was actually written in semi-retirement after a much more interesting early life around some of the world's major radical politics.

He was taught to ice skate when he was 12 on a frozen lake up at the Ford's house by none other than the great anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin!

In his early 30s he went to Russia to write a travel book but ended up as a witness to the Revolution. He covered it for the British press, writing from a pro-revolutionary perspective.

When the October revolution came he approved of that too. Within a few months he'd interviewed all the senior figures, was living with Trotsky's deputy and was going out with the woman who would become his wife, Trotsky's private secretary Evgenia Shelepina.

In August 1918 he was recruited as an MI6 agent. Yet he still smuggled out a load of jewels to fund communist causes when he left Russia. Double agent? Or just a sort of sneaky journalist diplomat? Either way, it's a hell of a lot more exciting, intriguing and relevant than childrens books.

In the introduction to his book Russia in 1919 he asserted

I got, I think I may say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist could get to what was going on.

He was at Kropotkin's funeral in Moscow in 1920. He finally returned, with Evgenia, to England in 1924, and after settling in the Lake District he wrote the children's books that made his name.

In recent years, though, as official documents have been released or leaked, this earlier, wilder, more political aspect of him has come to the fore. It appears the main guy doing the work is Roland Chambers who wrote this article for the Guardian in 2005, and his proper book on all this stuff, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, has just been published.

The Statues of Woodhouse Moor

Four statues stand on Woodhouse Moor, but none of them were originally placed there.

At the corner of Moorland Road and Clarendon Road stands the Duke of Wellington, always with his boots creatively repainted, and as I write he's currently sporting a Homer Simpson mask.



Homer with a poncey hat and that puffed up pomposity of 18th century aristocrats. Great.

At the opposite side of the park by Hyde Park Corner stands Robert Peel. He too has been reinterpreted. For the Euro 2004 football tournament he got England flag facepaint, and after the death of John Peel the inscription 'Peel 1852' was painted to say 'John Peel 1939-2004'.



The miserablist council scrubbed it off, but it returned. By my count, it's been redone eleven times. And if you stood there and asked the citizens of the creative haven of Leeds 6 who they'd prefer - the inventor of the Conservative party and the police, or the man who brought us Jimi Henrix and The Clash - I know what answer you'd get.

Disrespect of statues is nothing new, nor is it limited to Woodhouse Moor. There was a great hoo-hah about disrespect when a Mayday demo gave London's Churchill statue a grass mohican, but that was anomalous. It goes off all the time without comment. It's seems like more common to see Cardiff's statue of NHS godfather Aneurin Bevan with a traffic cone on his head than without.

And frankly, I suspect that we subconsciously know that the people we erect statues to - largely our overwealthy and brutal ancestors - need taking down a peg or two, so we have them publicly shat on in effigy by pigeons.

But anyway, collectively the four statues of Woodhouse Moor spell out another form of disrespect. Wellington, Victoria and Robert Peel originally stood in Victoria Square outside the town hall, but were moved in 1937 to make way for a car park.

The fourth is the only native of the city, the Victorian industrialist and mayor of Leeds Henry Marsden.



His statue gives the name to Monument Moor, the area of Woodhouse Moor on the other side of the A660 from Victoria.

It was called Swing Moor prior to Marsden's arrival in 1952, when he was moved there from the city centre road junction of Merrion Street and Albion Street as he was deemed to be a hindrance to the increasing amount of motor traffic.

So, we used to venerate these folks in the city centre, but we've sidelined them to a peripheral park in order to make way for increased traffic. Collectively, then, they stand as a monument to the motor car.

Their moving is not a sign that we've stopped venerating things, just a physical acknowledgement of the change in what we worship.

More Mary Gawthorpe pictures

When I said that the WSPU postcards showed the second picture I'd found of Mary, I was unwittingly wrong.

For years I've had a postcard on my wall of Christabel Pankhurst in Manchester, with posters advertising her meeting at the Free Trade Hall, the scene of the 1905 arrest that got her imprisoned and kicked the suffrage movement up a gear.

In January 1909 when this was taken, Mary Gawthorpe was well established as the WSPU's organiser, running their Manchester office.

That's Christabel apparently holding a box file on her head by means of bedclothes. Who's that stood to the left of her?



Let's have a closer look.



And here's another one I've found, clearly taken the same day.

In search of Melville Street

I just about remember the Silver Jubilee of 1977. It was 25 years since the Queen's accession to the throne, and the country went nuts for it. I know people who grew up in ardent Welsh Nationalist families who had street parties with red white and blue bunting.

It is gratifying to note that nobody did anything much for the Golden Jubilee and most people here won't even have noticed it or be able to recall when it was without doing the maths in their head. I don't know how we can call ourselves democratic whilst giving power, wealth and respect to people because they're the vague descendants of thieves and murderers. I'm glad we're making them pay a bit of tax whilst we ignore them all the more.

I always assumed that the Jubilee Social Club in Woodhouse got its name from being built in 1977. It certainly looks like a chunk of unimaginative functional 70s architecture. But now I'm guessing that it's a nod to Jubilee road, Street, Mount and Terrace that used to stand nearby, where the Elthams now stand.

The Jubilee Social Club is built on the site of several stumpy rows of terraces perpendicular to Melville Place; the end of Melville Street, and Viscount Street, Viscount Place and Viscount Terrace. So it would have been more accurate to call it the Viscount Social Club, but I suspect so aristocratic a name sat uneasily with working mens' club sensibilities.

For those unfamiliar, the bits of Leeds built in the 19th century tend to have groups of street names. You'll get Brudenell Road, Street, Mount, Avenue, View and Grove all adjacent.

This method has it's pros and cons. It's awful if you're trying to remember it, (did they say it was Brudenell Mount? Or Grove? er...), but it also makes a neat subdivision of areas, so you refer to someone living in 'The Brudenells' and because you've seen so many streets you get the idea without having to have a precise knowledge.

Incidentally, 'Brudenell' always sounds like mild or archaic swearing to me, as in 'what the brudenell do you think you're doing?'

There is another Leeds convention, cross streets. So you'll get Louis Street and then a narrower street perpendicular to it is called Cross Louis Street.

The main road from Hyde Park Corner through Woodhouse down to Meanwood Road is called Woodhouse Street at the start, for obvious reasons. But as it passes the Chemic it becomes Melville Road, then for the last bit after the junction with Melville Place it becomes Cross Chancellor Street. Makes me picture Alistair Darling with a real mardy face.

That's because the sharp right turn at the Chemic is the rest of Woodhouse Street. The road as we know it today is the result of the demolition and remodelling of that lower part of Woodhouse. We still have Cross Speedwell Street, even though Speedwell Street has gone.

The new houses built on the Melvilles were given names in the series - Melville Close and Gardens, as is the case with the new Marian Terrace on the site of the Marians.

The Chemic on Johnston Street gets its name from Johnston's Chemical Works that stood on the street. It was demolished in about 1890 according to one source, though I'm sure I read somewhere else it was 1920 (using 'I'm sure' in that sense that means 'I'm not sure'). The Marians were subsequently built on the site. This is why the Marians are newer than the surrounding terraces.

A picture from 1959 shows houses on Johnston Street looking like the same sort of sandstone buildings as the Chemic. The older buildings all along the Meanwood valley are easily distinguished by their sandstone, presumably from the sandstone quarries that were on either side of the valley in the early 19th century.

This whole area between Woodhouse Street and Meanwood Road, around the Melvilles and Marians, is marked on the mid 19th century map as open land called Woodhouse Carr (a carr being marshy or boggy moor). The name is still on modern maps, though I've never heard anybody use it.

It seems as if the majority - literally - of Woodhouse is not the original buildings. Much of it appears to have been demolished and redeveloped in the 60s and 70s. The fabulous Leodis archive has that picture of the house Mary Gawthorpe was born and brought up in, but it is not at all easy to locate it on the ground. A few streets are in the same place, others have had their course changed and a great many have been erased entirely.

I've done a bit of a rudimentary calculation (looking at the 1908 Ordnance Survey map whilst having Google Earth up on screen with a ruler!), and it appears that 5 Melville Street was just inside the entrance to Melville Gardens. Walk in from Melville Place on the right, and as the pavement starts to curve right for the first cul-de-sac, you're stood on 5 Melville Street. I think.

The 10 Rillington Place site has some thunderously impressive research. It faces the same sort of problem, ie that the whole area has been remodelled and bears no relation to the original. But with diligence, maps and Photoshop they figured it out.

I'll scan a modern map of Woodhouse Carr and do an overlay of it with the 1908 one so we can see it clearly.

21 Estcourt Avenue photos

The house George Orwell stayed in is a through terrace.

Front:



Back:

7 March 1936

Staying till next Wed. with M[arjorie] and H[umphrey] at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley. Conscious all the while of difference in atmosphere between middle-class home even of this kind and working-class home. The essential difference is here there is elbow room, in spite of there being 5 adults and 3 children, besides animals, at present in the house.