faces of the diners, who were greasy-chopped and fiery-eared and dressed in drab austerity suits and broken-nebbed caps and, in the case of the women, serviceable aprons and knotted Aertex turbans and other garb associated with the impoverished working class.
Bottles of white wine at Bobby’s, on Monday nights as on everynight, were brought to the table in handsome Edwardian chamber pots replete with gilding and transfer prints of the old King and Queen and the Royal Standards, and traditional old-rose patterns. Wine and beer were kept cooling behind the bar in pot-bellied zinc poss-tubs packed with ice. The heavy-headed wooden possers that would have been used to pound the dirty washing in the tubs, in dark backyards and poky sculleries, were also in evidence as part of the decor at Bobby’s, along with three-legged crackets and clippy mats and several sets of heavy mangles.
None of this had been done, however, in an excessively knowing or cynical way, or in a spirit of mean parody. Ronnie Cornish, Ray’s principal financial backer in the club, had had his own mother’s well-worn mangle stripped down and reconditioned and installed in pride of place in the drawing room of the pilastered country mansion which his business success had bought him. The mangle – at which he had watched his mother toil, bringing her full body weight to bear on the broad wooden handle in order to inch leaden sheets all the way through the rollers, which over the years began to bear the imprint of this struggle, becoming withered and indented in the middle – this back-breaking washday aid, framed now by lofty casement windows and many metres of bunched and swagged William Morris fabric, had become the emblem of how far Ronnie Cornish had travelled: from respectable poverty to a home helipad, a Bentley Azure, local eminence and a quote he claimed was from Rudyard Kipling that always tripped easily off his tongue: ‘Like he said, “You can play among princes, but always keep your feet on the ground.” I don’t forget where I came from.’
In this, Ronnie Cornish was no different from the hundreds who came to Bobby’s every week to be reminded, when the circumstances of their lives sometimes seemed to be conspiring to make them forget it – the ninety-five channels, the call-waiting,the multi-tasking, the compound interest accruing on the credit-card bill – that they came from a specific place with a long history and a unique identity and were not in fact unrooted particulate individuals free-floating in infinite space.
It was the great rush to rediscover roots and the sedulous piecing together, in local libraries and over the Internet, of family trees that had originally given Ray the idea for a club that would celebrate a communal identity and a frankly romanticized Geordie past. The aim – in addition of course to getting the tills ringing and the profits flowing – had been to provide a place dripping with the texture and particularity that had been largely drained out of the modern world, and to allow the paying customers to reconnect with a missing vital part of themselves. People were no longer embarrassed about their humble origins, as they once were (as Ray had once been), but boastful of any connection they were able to make between themselves and their rough, long-disappeared proletarian backgrounds. ‘My great-grandfather committed a murder on the Shields Road,’ a man (admittedly well in his cups) had recently told Ray: well-dressed and well-spoken, he had tears in his eyes as he spoke.
In an unlooked-for development, which had caught the public imagination and garnered a good deal of valuable coverage on television and in the local press, the walls at the club had turned into a gallery of ancestor portraits brought in to be hung there by the clientele. Instead of the wall enamels advertising meat extracts and ointments, shoe blackings and hair oil that had been put up originally, the walls at Bobby’s were now
Bottles of white wine at Bobby’s, on Monday nights as on everynight, were brought to the table in handsome Edwardian chamber pots replete with gilding and transfer prints of the old King and Queen and the Royal Standards, and traditional old-rose patterns. Wine and beer were kept cooling behind the bar in pot-bellied zinc poss-tubs packed with ice. The heavy-headed wooden possers that would have been used to pound the dirty washing in the tubs, in dark backyards and poky sculleries, were also in evidence as part of the decor at Bobby’s, along with three-legged crackets and clippy mats and several sets of heavy mangles.
None of this had been done, however, in an excessively knowing or cynical way, or in a spirit of mean parody. Ronnie Cornish, Ray’s principal financial backer in the club, had had his own mother’s well-worn mangle stripped down and reconditioned and installed in pride of place in the drawing room of the pilastered country mansion which his business success had bought him. The mangle – at which he had watched his mother toil, bringing her full body weight to bear on the broad wooden handle in order to inch leaden sheets all the way through the rollers, which over the years began to bear the imprint of this struggle, becoming withered and indented in the middle – this back-breaking washday aid, framed now by lofty casement windows and many metres of bunched and swagged William Morris fabric, had become the emblem of how far Ronnie Cornish had travelled: from respectable poverty to a home helipad, a Bentley Azure, local eminence and a quote he claimed was from Rudyard Kipling that always tripped easily off his tongue: ‘Like he said, “You can play among princes, but always keep your feet on the ground.” I don’t forget where I came from.’
In this, Ronnie Cornish was no different from the hundreds who came to Bobby’s every week to be reminded, when the circumstances of their lives sometimes seemed to be conspiring to make them forget it – the ninety-five channels, the call-waiting,the multi-tasking, the compound interest accruing on the credit-card bill – that they came from a specific place with a long history and a unique identity and were not in fact unrooted particulate individuals free-floating in infinite space.
It was the great rush to rediscover roots and the sedulous piecing together, in local libraries and over the Internet, of family trees that had originally given Ray the idea for a club that would celebrate a communal identity and a frankly romanticized Geordie past. The aim – in addition of course to getting the tills ringing and the profits flowing – had been to provide a place dripping with the texture and particularity that had been largely drained out of the modern world, and to allow the paying customers to reconnect with a missing vital part of themselves. People were no longer embarrassed about their humble origins, as they once were (as Ray had once been), but boastful of any connection they were able to make between themselves and their rough, long-disappeared proletarian backgrounds. ‘My great-grandfather committed a murder on the Shields Road,’ a man (admittedly well in his cups) had recently told Ray: well-dressed and well-spoken, he had tears in his eyes as he spoke.
In an unlooked-for development, which had caught the public imagination and garnered a good deal of valuable coverage on television and in the local press, the walls at the club had turned into a gallery of ancestor portraits brought in to be hung there by the clientele. Instead of the wall enamels advertising meat extracts and ointments, shoe blackings and hair oil that had been put up originally, the walls at Bobby’s were now
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