St Cuthbert's Village I

Apologies, for the version of this article I posted earlier, for some unknown reason an previous draft was published ,and not the finished article.  Mea culpa.

     I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead.  (I really can't show you the scene in question, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.)  It serves as a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis.  It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.

     St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council, and was opened by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970.  It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council that the Prime minister should give his support in such a way.
    What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War.  Grey and hulking.  It had neither church nor green, nor school.  Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents.  There was no traditional urbanism.  It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it.  A sort of ghetto.

     The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry.  He talked of a 'village community', but all that actually meant in practice is that, like a good many architects and planners of the period, he wanted the strict segregation of pedestrians and motor vehicles.  The site was a steep slope on the south bank of the Tyne, opposite Newcastle city centre, between between Bensham Rd and Askew Rd..  The estate overlooked a rail marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that carried the East Coast Mainline into the midst of the city.  Historically, the area had been known as Windmill Hills, and before slum clearance in the mid 60s, the site had contained a dense network of terraced housing.

     The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd.  The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short).  The estate consisted of a single tower, or point, block and a dense checker board of four, six & eight storey maisonettes, everything connected by a series of aerial walkways.  It was designed to house 3,500 people. Construction began in 1967, and the cost all in, was, I believe, £3,700,000.  At the time it won a government award for 'Good Design in Housing'.

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Court and six-storey blocks
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

   1987 View of St. Cuthbert's Village
   The University of Edinburgh Tower Block Project

     However there were problems almost immediately - flats were damp and roofs leaked, and it was difficult to heat the flats.  The project limped on for some 25 years, waxing in problems both structural and social, before it was demolished.  Its fate matched that of another council estate of the period, the nearby Clasper Village.

Get Carter

Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.

     Saturday afternoon, I'm on the sofa, and in search of a film.  The television has nothing to offer me, so I turn to BBC iplayer, and my eyes light upon 'Get Carter'.  Mike Hodges' brilliant, brutal film of 1971.

     I have watched this film plenty of times.  I'm slightly surprised I haven't blogged about the film before.  It is a hard and uncompromising film.  Brutal and cynical, that has, I think rightly, been likened to a Jacobean Tragedy.  And tragedy it is.  There is a very high body count.

     'Get Carter' was, as far as I can remember, a bit of a cause celebre, when it first came out.  The critic Pauline Kael said of it, 'sadism-for-the-connoisseur [] so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuosic viscousness.' It has since then become a cult movie, and also a shorthand for the excesses of early 1970s British films.  It is also a paradox also for being simultaneously a product of the then past decade - the depiction sex, drugs, and pornography - and a criticism of it.  'Get Carter  is, along with two films I have reviewed before on this blog - 'The Ballad of Tam Lin' and 'Straight on till Morning', a prime example of the 'Sixties Hangover Film'.  A rather niche genre, but interesting. And may be important.

     The Carter in question, Jack, works for London organised crime, in the shape of Gerald Fletcher.  He is, as you might reasonably expect, a man of violence.  In an inspired title sequence we travel with Carter back home, to an British unnamed city somewhere in the North of England, to bury his brother Ted.  Carter is already suspicious of his brother's dead, and events confirm his doubts.  The funeral is perfunctory and sparsely attended; Ted's girlfriend, Doreen, arrives late, leaves hurriedly and when confronted by Carter is reluctant to speak.  Jack begins his enquiries.  And this film, in its curious way becomes a detective film, perhaps a dark satire on the English murder mystery, with Jack as amateur sleuth.  He re-enters the dark pit of local organised crime, and then suddenly the film reaches a hinge moment (which, I believe Hodges saw as a 'political' epiphany) and it becomes a revenge movie as Carter, as a destroying angel, goes on a very public campaign of retribution, wreaking havoc upon his enemies.  Though, it has to be said, he seems to be the least qualified person, morally, to do so. 

     The cast is superlative: Michael Caine, as the eponymous Carter, Brit Ekland, John Osbourne, Geraldine Moffat, Ian Hendry, and Kika Markham.  Director Mike Hodges (at his best), Producer Michael Klinger.  Excellent cinematography by Wolfgang Suschitsky, who worked in the British Documentary Movement, and brings an element of reportage to the proceedings.  And then there is score by Roy Budd.  I've heard it said that 'Get Carter' was the the last hurrah of the British arm of MGM.  There a sense that those involved what things to go out with a bang.  And they certainly did.

     Hodges also wrote the screenplay.  It is an adaptation of Ted Lewis's 1970 novel 'Jack's Return Home'.  (Klinger presented it to Hodges in Jan of that year, I believe a month or so before the book was published.)  Ted Lewis (1940-1982) had set the novel in north Lincolnshire where he grew up, in particular in the steel making town of Scunthorpe.  Hodges changed the location to Newcastle upon Tyne.

     I think there may be something in the choice of Newcastle over the less visually exciting Scunthorpe.  The city Hodges chooses to  depict is a wreck, decaying and corrupt.  Filthy and shoddy.  A place of turpitude. There is little glamour and that there is is connected to criminality.  Perhaps some subtle moralising.  The background to this is the then scandal of T Dan Smith, leader of Newcastle city council 1958-65.  A charismatic individual, and a man with fingers in many pies.  The sort of man, who to quote, yet again, the novelist Frank Herbert, 'ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: "May be dangerous to your health."  He was arrested in January 1970 and charged with 'receiving payments to influence local government contracts'.  He was tried in July 1971 and found not guilty.  In 1974 was brought to trial again, and that time pleaded guilty to corruption.  Smith was sentenced to 6 years at Her Majesty's pleasure.

     Hodges indeed saw this film in terms of 'the state of the nation', and he came came to see corruption beneath everything. In a 2016 interview with Adam Scovell he even sounded somewhat like Mary Whitehouse.  I'm stuck thinking that nothing quite fits, that there is something of a gap between Hodges intentions/rhetoric and the finished piece, good as it.  I am put in mind of work of Kurosawa who, for all his talk of being a pacifist, choreographed violence so beautifully.

Get Garter

1971

Producer:               Michael Klinger

Director:                 Mike Hodges

Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitsky

Reading.....

     I'm re-reading 'Get Carter', or to give the novel it's original title: 'Jack's Return Home.' It's to say the least 'gritty'. Written at a time when censorship was loosening in Britain there is an almost 'throw-eveything-you-have-at-it' quality. It is incredibly brutal - does any character have an reasonably functional relationship with any other? What you may not know is that the novel is set in Scunthorpe, the industrial town in the top north-west of Lincolnshire, and all the other action happens in the north of the county. (The film was set on Tyneside) Knowing how disliked D H Lawrence is in Bestwood, I wonder what the good people of Scunthorpe think to Ted Lewis? Ted was a sort of local boy, in that he grew on the south bank of the Humber in Barton-upon-Humber, and went to art college in Hull, taking the ferry from New Holland every day. (A friend of mine was a contemporary of Ted's in Hull)

     Have also started 'Hackney, that rose red empire' by Ian Sinclair. More of that later. As I'm tired and haven't slept well for days....tiredness certainly spoilt my day in London on Tuesday.