This provides a historical introduction to Part I of the book, focusing on Manchester as the quintessential city of industrial modernity, and how its economic and cultural elites, and its religious diversity, shaped the kinds of higher education institutions that were formed in the nineteenth century.
In 1891 Sheridan Delépine became the University’s first Professor of Pathology and Morbid Anatomy. He developed his department's work to become a national leader in applying the new bacteriology to public health, primarily through training medical officers of health and providing diagnostic and testing services for local authorities across the Manchester region. In a decade, his enterprise had expanded to support 60 councils. As well as routine work, his laboratory investigated specific issues, notably arsenic in beer, summer diarrhoea, anthrax, tubercular milk, disinfection and water filtration. The novel model of university-municipal cooperation was mutually beneficial. It brought income to the University and a favourable regional profile.
This chapter chiefly profiles Stephen Pearce, better known as Stevo, an illiterate teenager from Dagenham who was to become Soft Cell’s manager, and how his eccentricities and extreme approach to the music industry belied a considerable wiliness when it came to operating within its confines. It argues that his Some Bizzare compilation album, which featured future stars such as Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, The The and Blancmange, was one of the most seminal releases of its time, because it provided the first coherent gathering of the British acts at the vanguard of early synth pop. It explores how Stevo managed to strongarm the label Phonogram into offering Soft Cell a deal, which was on the brink of collapse until the surprise success of ‘Memorabilia’, recorded with Daniel Miller.
The book tells the story of Soft Cell’s evolution from the strange and crumbling environs of north-west British seaside towns, through a radical art school education, the burgeoning independent music industry of the late 1970s and early 1980s, their exposure to the thriving club scene of New York, the seediness of the Soho sex industry, prolific drug use and increasingly esoteric influences from avant-garde artists. It explores how all these factors, many of which pulled the band in opposing directions, caused both a brief period of extraordinary musical output and a rapid implosion under the strain. Simultaneously, the book delves into the wider social history of the many environments in which the musicians Marc Almond and Dave Ball found themselves. Through interviews not only with the band, their friends and collaborators, but also historians, writers and other key cultural figures, it explores the social, historical and political factors that made these scenes just so influential when Soft Cell crossed their paths, and profiles the extraordinary and strange characters who were at their hearts.
This provides a historical introduction to Part 2 of the book, tracing how the fortunes of the city of Manchester interacted with those of its universities. In the first half of the twentieth century Manchester remained economically and culturally vibrant and the idea of the civic university thrived. It was in the era of the city’s economic decline after 1945 that the sense of the distinctive mission of civic universities was eroded.
This chapter tells the story of ‘Tainted Love’, by far Soft Cell’s biggest hit, and the factors that made it both so phenomenally successful and ultimately a curse for the band who were desperate to escape its shadow. It argues that the song combined two crucial elements: the innovative electronic music of Kraftwerk, and the raw energy of the Northern Soul scene, both of which Dave Ball was exposed to simultaneously during his formative years in Blackpool. It tells the story of just why his home city had emerged as the epicentre of that scene, chiefly a divide between the cultural sensitives of youth from the north and south of England, respectively. It also examines how Soft Cell’s live show was developing, and the addition of key players Josephine Warden and Brian Moss into their live setup.
Dorothy Emmet (1904–2000) came to Manchester as a lecturer in philosophy just before the outbreak of the Second World War. She wrote her methodological treatise, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945), while fire-watching on the University rooftops. Emmet’s philosophy envisages ‘the world as a theatre of activities’. Human beings are both personas (role-players) and persons (creative individuals), and their activity within an unfolding administrative and institutional process can variously ‘form, dissolve, re-form, and sometimes produce a new kind with capabilities for new kinds of activity’. This chapter explores the way in which Emmet’s own creative (and quietly anarchistic) philosophical activity found expression at Manchester among a group of brilliant social scientists and philosophers (including Max Gluckman, Michael Polanyi, W. J. M. Mackenzie and Alistair MacIntyre). Her career shows how much is gained when a creative individual with imagination and intelligence finds herself in the right institutional setting.
Enriqueta Rylands (1843–1908), widow of the cotton magnate John Rylands, was an independent woman who founded Manchester’s John Rylands Library as an independent institution. This chapter demonstrates that the library, its collections, its architecture and its governance were very much the product of her vision, which was rooted in her allegiance to a non-denominational Protestant nonconformity. Theology, and biblical scholarship in particular, was central to her conception of the library, and she was also instrumental in the creation of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Manchester in 1904, notably by endowing the first two non-denominational chairs of theology in a British university.
The book’s epilogue argues that Soft Cell’s story could have turned out differently in a number of ways. They might have arrived at a point where culture was less hostile to queerness, or where synth pop was more easily understood by the public. Or, they might have benefitted from more sensible management and a more harmonious relationship with their record label. And yet, it points out that Soft Cell’s defining qualities were restlessness and curiosity and that ultimately it was their pursuit of these aspects despite any obstacle that made their music so engaging.
Gilbert Gadoffre’s life encompassed a wartime role as Resistance hero and his postwar reinvention as a champion of civilised transnational intellectual exchange at the Institut Collégial Européen, which he founded in 1947. But his most enduring institutional connection, building on a youthful anglophilia, was with the University of Manchester, as lecturer (1938–40), senior lecturer (1954–63) and professor (1966–78). The contribution will focus on his ideas about the dissemination of culture in diverse institutional contexts – the French Resistance, the Institut Collégial, and Manchester – and consider the validity of his conviction that the humanism articulated in France during the reign of François I (1494–1547) should be the model for a modern, universal humanism.