`The announcement that the current Salford City Mayor, Ian Stewart, is jumping on her cultural bandwagon would surely make Shelagh Delaney spin in her grave, if she wasn't too busy laughing at the sheer hypocrisy…'
Do Salford Council and Salford City Mayor, Ian Stewart, know the city's own history? In an amazing act of hypocrisy, yesterday Mayor Ian Stewart announced that 25th November is to be an annual Shelagh Delaney Day in Salford…
"It's only right that her home city should officially celebrate and recognise Shelagh's work in this way – she is one of Salford's most famous daughters" he cooed "Her work captured and celebrated the spirit of Salford. I'm delighted new audiences will get a chance to see her work here at the Lowry and look forward to celebrating her contribution to British theatre and her home city."
Perhaps the Mayor and Salford Council would like to make a full public apology for the way Shelagh Delaney was treated by Salford's `great and good' at the time when A Taste of Honey and its portrayal of working class life took the country by storm.
Indeed, a new book by John Harding called Sweetly Sings Delaney, documents the witch hunt against the writer by Salford Council, its Mayor and the Salford City Reporter (now Salford Advertiser).
The author notes, from 1960, that "When the City Art Gallery asked Delaney if it could have the original script for A Taste of Honey she `expressed her surprise that the Council should want the manuscript of a play about which so many of them were rude'".
The Salford Mayor at the time was said to be "disgusted" with Delaney, and Lindsay Anderson's subsequent cult film, The White Bus, was an answer back to the Council – which, in reality, actually sponsored a white bus to try and show Salford in a different light to the city portrayed by Delaney…
"When her play A Taste of Honey had been produced in London, she found herself reviled and attacked in her home town…and Shelagh's frankness with speech and emotion shocked the local dignitaries, who also felt that she had presented an unworthy picture of the city to the world" said Anderson "Outraged statements were made in speeches and in newspapers, and the local Council even went so far as to sponsor tours of Salford in special buses, to show off the beauties and advantages of the locality."
The White Bus, with Arthur Lowe playing the fictional Mayor of Salford, is a direct cultural answer to the loathing that was heaped on Delaney for daring to portray some sort of truth.
In the film, the Mayor sits next to the Delaney character and asks "Aren't you that girl – the one who writes?....You've given us a bad reputation in the eyes of the country, you know…" - and then the creep puts his hand on her knee.
John Harding writes: "By juxtaposing the bigotry, philistinism and `boosterism' of a municipal politician with the brutal past and present of the town over which he rules, Delaney had sought, through exaggeration and gentle parody, to expose some of the pomposity and hypocrisy of local Salford dignitaries…
"There was also the fact that she had made an attempt to establish a community theatre…only to be thwarted by politicians just like him."
Shelagh Delaney would have nothing to do with any Salford Council project and shunned the authority for years. Indeed, the only time she got involved with the city was a campaign in 2001 to save to the Ambassador Cinema which Salford Council subsequently flattened.
The very last paragraph of John Harding's excellent book references the campaign…
"It was as if the Salford Council of Shelagh Delaney's past had risen one last time to deliver a final slap in the face to an artist whom they had never understood" he writes "and one whom they had certainly never deserved…"
The announcement that the current Salford City Mayor, Ian Stewart, is jumping on her cultural bandwagon would surely make Shelagh Delaney spin in her grave, if she wasn't too busy laughing at the sheer hypocrisy.
Before anyone takes the Mayor and his Shelagh Delaney Day seriously he and Salford Council should make a formal public apology for the way one of Salford's greatest ever cultural icons was treated and reviled by those very authorities.
Sweetly Sings Delaney
A Study of Shelagh Delaney's Work 1958-68
By John Harding
Published by Greenwich Exchange
Full book review to follow…
See also previous Salford Star tribute to Shelagh Delaney, written by Nigel Pivaro – click here
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