1980
Personal Copy by Ray Gosling (1980)
Ray Gosling was a man of the people. For years he never left
home without his red notebook, ready to record his observations. This need to
keep records, along with an encyclopaedic memory, helped Gosling produce the
second of his memoirs Personal Copy. The book captured Nottingham as it was in
the early ‘60s, a city divided by class and boosted by immigration. Typically,
Gosling was politically active at the time, leading the campaign to save and
improve the area of St Ann’s.
I was a people’s leader and these are my memories of what
happened. (from Personal Copy)
Nottingham Forest completed back-to-back European Cup
success in this year, defeating a strong Hamburg SV team in the Madrid final.
It followed an incredible turnaround in the club’s history under the leadership
of Brian Clough. This remarkable period is captured in the 2003 book Forest
Giants: The Story of Nottingham Forest 1975-80 by John McGovern and Rob
Jovanovic, with a foreword from Cloughie himself.
1981
Nottingham: A Place of Execution From 1201 To 1928 by Terry Lambley (1981)
This short collection of interesting facts concerns all
recorded executions in Nottinghamshire. Terry Lambley has sold over 11,000
copies of the book, no doubt helped by his public appearances on the speakers’
circuit and the publicity he achieved after acquiring a genuine gallows
assembled in the back garden of his Wilford home. ‘Gallows Hill’, at the top of
Mansfield Road (where it crosses Forest Road), was where many of the executed
were hanged, a process that wasn’t always swift in nature. Friends and
relatives were known to attach themselves to the dying in order to shorten
their agony. It’s said that the phrases ‘pulling one’s leg’ and ‘hangers on’
originated from such action.
Jimmy Sirrel led Notts County to promotion to Division One.
This completed the Magpies transformation from the bottom of the Fourth
Division to the top flight in just over a decade. They kicked off the season
with a win at reigning league champions – and would-be European Champs - Aston
Villa. Sirrel would keep Notts in Division One for three years. Colin Slater, a
friend of Sirrel’s and Radio Nottingham’s man at the Lane, includes his own
memories of these glory years in his book Tied Up With Notts (2012).
1982
Portrait of Nottingham by Emrys Bryson (revised edition 1982)
‘Mr Bryson has put Nottingham in print, and between covers,
so that whoever carries this book about will have the soul of the city as an
intimate companion,’ wrote Alan Sillitoe in his foreword to the 1982 edition of
Portrait of Nottingham, first published in 1974.
Bryson came to Nottingham as a teenager. Working at
Nottingham Evening Post and Nottingham Guardian he got to know the city and wrote
about it in an amusing manner that also cut to the heart of the city and its
people. His Nottingham was an inventive, paradox of a community on the river
Trent, a feminine town with a tough masculine soul, a place where controversy
rages.
His other Nottingham book, 'Owd Yer Tight from 1967, was
performed at the Playhouse.
If Nottingham happened to be in Texas, there would be no
holding it. (from Portrait of Nottingham)
Work on the Royal Concert Hall was completed in this year.
Nottingham’s contemporary 2,499-seater, state-of-the-art, air-conditioned
auditorium first played host to Elton John. In the afternoon before his
concert, the singer had watched his Watford side beat Forest 4-2, a result he
reminded his audience of later that evening. Elton John - cousin of Forest’s
cup final hero Roy Dwight - met his fans before the show and switched on the
concert hall's £40,000 neon sculpture, the cause of much controversy. Elton
described the sculpture as ‘great’ but many locals thought it resembled
colourful scaffolding.
Other stars to appear within the first year of its opening
included Dire Straits, The Kinks, Haircut 100, Elvis Costello, Leo Sayer, The
Stranglers and Ultravox.
1983
Jobey by Leslie Williamson (1983)
Billed as ‘A time of struggle, a time of love, a time of
tragedy’, Jobey is set during the General and then Miners' Strike of 1926. Like
his hero D H Lawrence, Leslie Williamson was born in Eastwood; unlike Lawrence,
he stayed there.
Jobey’s love is for the daughter of the local colliery's
boss, his community's biggest employer. Like many stories of strikes, the
protagonist is conflicted and his allegiances are tested. The plot features an
underground explosion, the plight of the miners stuck below ground powerfully
told. Throughout the novel, the working-class characters and their dialect are
authentically depicted and the book came out at a prescient time with the
miners' strike of 1984-5 just around the corner.
Richard (Dick) Iliffe, a local photographer and film maker,
died in this year. Richard and his colleague Wilf Baguley set up the Nottingham
Historical Film Unit that housed a large collection of old Nottingham photographs
from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Many of these images were published in a
series of books. The stories in pictures that Nottingham Historical film Unit
published included Victorian Nottingham, and Edwardian Nottingham. Both books
are worth a look.
1984
Look Back in Anger, The Miners' Strike in Nottinghamshire by Harry Paterson (2014)
Thirty years after the Great Strike for Jobs,
Nottinghamshire in still in recovery. Look Back in Anger, by Notts author Harry
Paterson, reflects on the events of the strike year and its aftermath, and
provides a history of the Nottinghamshire coalfields through the twentieth
century. With the use of memorabilia and personal letters from the period,
together with interviews with striking and working miners, Coal Board officials,
women active in opposing the pit closures, and Council officials, it’s an
attempt to tell the real story. Paul Mason contributes the Afterword.
From the vantage point of thirty years later, it must be
difficult for younger people to fully grasp the significance of the 1984/5
miners’ strike. Equally, it must be difficult to understand that impact that
this, the most bitterly-charged industrial dispute in British history, had on
everything that followed. (from Look Back in Anger)
It was in this year that Jonathan Emmett came to live in
Nottingham, initially to study architecture. It wasn't until 1999 that the
children’s author and illustrator’s first book was published but his picture
books have gone on to become hugely popular, placing him on the libraries’ list
of most borrowed authors. The award-winning author has produced over sixty
children’s books and his work has been translated into over 30 different
languages. Dinosaurs After Dark is based on Nottingham’s city centre, a city in
which the author still lives.
1985
Life Goes On by Alan Sillitoe (1985)
Michael Cullen, a rogue from the streets of working-class
Nottingham, returns in the pages of Life Goes On. Previously seen in A Start In
Life (1970), Cullen, a former gold-smuggler, discovers that his old boss’s
memoirs are being ghosted by his own randy father. That boss is Claude
Moggerhanger, now an eminent peer, supplying the Soviet Union with heroin.
Moggerhanger makes Cullen an offer he can’t refuse and adventure ensues. Cullen
ducks and dives as he drives around England unable to stay on the straight and
narrow. A hard-boiled womaniser with a caring side Cullen is good fun.
I, Michael Cullen, King Bastard the First, dodged the
traffic like a London pigeon in its prime. (from Life Goes On)
It was in 1985 that a memorial stone to D H Lawrence was
unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, to mark the centenary of the
great writer's birth. The black granite stone, designed by David Parsley,
features a phoenix arising from a log fire. The stone adjoins memorials to Lord
Byron, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Nottingham Playhouse marked Lawrence’s
centenary with a performance of Phoenix Rising, written by Nottingham’s
Campbell Kay. Set in France in 1928 Phoenix Rising has an ill Lawrence
reminiscing about his early life.
The experimental poet Alan Baker moved to Nottingham in 1985
and has lived here ever since. Baker has been the editor of the poetry
publisher Leafe Press since 2000, and he’s the editor of the online magazine
Litter.
1986
Creative Writing by Julia Casterton (1986)
Julia Casterton was born in Nottingham. A studious head girl
at Arnold County High School she went on to become a prize-winning poet and
published novelist, and was known to provide much-in-demand writing workshops.
A great believer in the therapeutic value of writing poetry and fiction,
Casterton focused on encouragement and participation. With advice on how to get
published, Creative Writing was her written practical guide, providing advice
on style and form, with help on developing work to be read or heard. Drawing on
interviews with other writers, and the author’s own experience as a poet and
tutor, Casterton attends to many forms including autobiography, poetry,
dialogue, short stories and writing for the screen.
The myth of the ‘natural’ writer, who spins vast,
architectural webs of vast exalted verse or prose is a treacherous lie which
many writers have done their best to rub out, only to watch it appear again,
healthy as ever, in literary columns, popular films about literary ‘giants’,
even in the biographies of writers. (from Creative Writing)
It was in 1985 that Stephen Booth arrived in
Nottinghamshire. The former newspaper and magazine journalist still lives here,
near Retford, in a Georgian dower house. By the end of the last century Booth
was creating his crime-fighting duo DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry, the stars
of his 18 book (and counting) series mostly set in Derbyshire’s atmospheric
Peak District.
1987
Lost Time by Catharine Arnold (1987)
The current Sheriff of Nottingham, Catharine Arnold, is
better-known for her non-fiction but in 1987 she won The Betty Trask Prize for
Lost Time, an award for first novels written by authors under the age of 35. In
the story, Miles Tattershall is a shy, thirty-three-year-old professor at
Cambridge. A virgin, he is first seduced by Benjamin Underwood, a student, and
then by Olivia, Benjamin's sinister sister. The action moves to Manhattan where
Miles' own sister Francesca is on tour as a concert pianist.
Subtle and graceful, this first novel treats blooming
sexuality and the growth of love with a sensitivity untinged by sentiment.
(Publishers Weekly review of Lost Time)
It was in 1987 that the Nottingham Writers’ Club began its
long association with The Nottingham Mechanics, first moving into the card room
at Birbeck House in Trinity Square, and later relocating to their current
meeting place on North Sherwood Street.
1988
A Flight of Angels by Geoffrey Trease (1988)
Set in the network of caves beneath Nottingham, A Flight of
Angels tells of a group of school friends and how their class project became an
attempt to solve a 400-year-old mystery. Trease’s knowledge of Nottingham and
the castle area are in evidence with the story of Mortimer’s Hole making an
early appearance in the story.
All this part of Nottingham lies on sandstone. It’s very
porous, the rainwater soaks through, so you get natural caves – and the rock is
very easy to cut if you need to. (from A Flight of Angels)
Helen Cresswell’s novel Moondial makes its debut on
television in this year, with a repeat showing two years later. The six-part
serial, also written by Helen Cresswell, focuses on a young girl called Minty,
played by Siri Neal. After her mother is involved in a car accident Minty is
placed with her aunt, and is soon drawn to a time-travel-enabling moon dial in
the grounds of a mansion. Nottinghamshire’s Helen Cresswell scripted other onscreen
children's series including Lizzie Dripping and The Bagthorpe Saga.
1989
Lonely Hearts by John Harvey (1989)
Named by The Times as one of the best 100 crime novels of
the 20th Century, Lonely Hearts is the first of John Harvey’s twelve-book
Charlie Resnick series. Set on Nottingham’s meaner streets, Lonely Hearts has
Detective Inspector Resnick on the case of a sadistic killer. The jazz-loving,
Notts County fan (write what you know) is John Harvey’s best-known and
most-loved character.
Londoner Harvey had moved to Nottingham in 1965 to teach
English and Drama to the secondary school students of a small mining town.
After teaching took him elsewhere he moved back here in the '70s to take a
Master’s degree in American Studies, and has yo-yoed between Nottingham and
London for most of his adult life.
It was several moments before Resnick realized that one of
the cats was sitting on his head. The radio was turned to Four and a woman’s
voice was trying to tell him something about the price of Maris Piper potatoes.
(from Lonely Hearts)
Nottingham writer Michael Eaton’s Fellow Traveller won Best
Screenplay at the British Film Awards in 1989.
Set in the mid-50s, Fellow Traveller follows a blacklisted
Hollywood screenwriter as he travels to London to work anonymously on 'Robin
Hood', a new TV series. Unable to return home the screenwriter is soon
confronted by the devastating news of his best friend’s suicide, another target
of the McCarthy-period witch hunts. Stars of the film include Ron Silver,
Imogen Stubbs, Julian Fellowes and Richard Wilson.
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