Autodidacts of the North-West: 40 Miles of Self-Taught Genius

David Turner
11 minutes ago
10 min read

"The American writer Hunter S. Thompson has this great line about how if you stand on a hilltop outside Las Vegas and look west, you can see the very point at which the tide of the 60s finally stopped, and began to ebb backwards. If you stand on this hill outside Runcorn, and look north, you can see the very point at which the thrill, and the vigour of late 80s British youth culture reached its watermark, before ebbing backwards into the flotsam of Britpop and fizzy pop. You can see Spike Island, Widnes."

(Tony Wilson, Granada TV - 2001)

Stand on a hilltop in the Peak District outside Macclesfield and look west, and you see the watermark of a culture whose flood-tide re-invented engineering, music, painting, writing and sport across the world, over a span of two centuries. You can see North-West autodidactism.

Across the 40 miles between Shutlingsloe and the Irish Sea, lie the cities of Manchester, Salford and Liverpool. Nestled below the hill is Macclesfield. Dotted around the Cheshire plain, the Manchester basin and the hills of Lancashire are Wigan, Bolton, Stockport and Altrincham. The huge radio telescope of Jodrell Bank sits in the centre, sunlight glinting off its bright white surface. Behind you are the malevolent hills and moors of the Dark Peak, where Jacobite graves and Second World War crash sites coexist with the native gritstone and peat.

Those 40 miles have given birth variously to: the first passenger railway, Rolls-Royce, the first codification of the rules of football, the first computers with electronic memory storage, Manchester code, the world's first industrial city, the largest docks of the British empire, the Manchester Ship Canal, the Communist Manifesto, the Suffragette movement, modern Atomic theory and the first splitting of the atom, Polythene, carbonated water, the Thermionic vacuum tube, the first mass-produced jet engine, the cradle of the co-operative movement, the first organised trade union structure, the first electric overhead railway, the first school of tropical medicine, the Beatles, the La’s, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Stone Roses, the Smiths, the Fall, Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, Oasis, the Buzzcocks, LS Lowry, Theodore Major, Helen Bradley, Adolphe Valette, Alan Lowndes, Factory Records, and much, much more.

The truly remarkable thing is that the majority of this was achieved by autodidacts. They were accomplished in spite of authority, academia, finance and establishment, not because of it.

Other regions of the UK and indeed the world have had their great moments of creativity and influence, and for that matter have also had their own autodidacts. Think of John Harrison from Yorkshire, who solved the problem of calculating longitudinal positioning at sea with his marine chronometers. Another brilliant horologist was George Daniels, a largely self-taught Londoner who learned how to produce every single component of a watch by hand, and went on to invent the coaxial escapement still in use by Omega today.

Scotland invented about half of the modern world alone, yet did it firmly within the spheres of academia and establishment. London for that matter was (and is) the establishment - no need to be an autodidact when so much opportunity is on your doorstep. The West Midlands maybe gets closest - it gave us heavy metal, large parts of Industrial-era innovation such as the world's first iron bridge, Ted Chippington, the Nightingales and Stewart Lee. But nothing on the scale of the North West when it comes to duration, domains and international reach.

Even Silicon Valley today is fundamentally concerned with technology above all else, and does so with huge concentrations of VC funding. And it's only been around a few decades. The UK's Silicon Roundabout and Oxbridge spin-offs are pure establishment, rooted in academia and The City. Maybe the strongest contender culturally is New York, although that's a city built around the vast wealth of Wall Street.

Then why did this 40-mile stretch of rainy provincial England prove so enduring, across so many domains, and with such global impact?

It’s not genetic of course, and there’s nothing in the water, let alone a pint of Boddingtons. Rather it’s down to a heady mix of international influences, irreverent attitudes, oppression, mistrust of authority, rugged geography and terrible weather.

For a kick-off, the weather is cold and wet for over half the year. You end up indoors, become a little bored, and so you learn things and make things to pass the time. And if you have to go somewhere, you don’t hang around - you go direct, with intent, to your destination. Otherwise you get soaked.

Then there’s the geography. You have the Irish sea on one side, and the hills of the Peak District, Wales and Lancashire on the others. So to go anywhere pre-M6, you had to get on a boat or climb over the gritstone moors, with steep valley inclines shaped by the torrent of melting glaciers 30,000 years previously. Builds resilience that sort of stuff.

And the sea of course means ports, and that in turn means you’re in an outward facing part of the world. Where the rest of provincial England faced inwards, the docks of Liverpool and Chester, and later Salford exposed the region to the rest of the planet. This is why Caribbean, Chinese, American, Scandinavian and most of all Irish influence found their way into the North West long before many other parts of Britain. It’s why Ancoats had a little Italy - the tradition of drinking high quality coffee predates the gentrification of that part of Manchester by at least a century. It’s why South Manchester had a little Germany, bringing in the likes of Engels, who later invited his friend Karl up from London for some reading at Chetham’s library (incidentally the oldest public library in the English-speaking world). It’s why Liverpool got its signature dish of Scouse, the Norwegian name for a stew. It’s also why the Merseybeat groups had heard Rock and Roll, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Country, Skiffle and Jazz years before their contemporaries elsewhere. The Cunard Yanks and merchant seamen injected a constant stream of American vinyl directly into the veins of the vast network of docks (the first enclosed commercial wet docks in the world at that).

The Celtic influence can’t be overlooked either. When Manchester and Liverpool industrialised, large numbers of people from Wales, Ireland and Scotland came to work in the factories, mills, warehouses and railways. Bill Shankly and Matt Busby came south from Scotland later to establish the modern eras and guiding principles of the two biggest, most successful football clubs in the country - no accident they fitted in and were accepted so openly by the people of their respective cities. Culturally this Celtic immigration brought traditions of the storytelling of the bards, wordplay, modal-scale based musicality and a healthy cynicism of establishment. When the Jacobites launched their 1745 rising and invasion of England, it was only Manchester that raised a regiment in their support. When the rest of the country wasn’t allowed to go for a walk across the local gentry’s land, the hikers of the North-West donned their anoraks, trespassed across Kinder Scout and had a scuffle with the gamekeepers - the UK's first national park was the result.

On the subject of independence from establishment and authority, we should also recognise the Dissenting Academies; self-funded educational organisations founded by non-conformists, barred from Oxford and Cambridge on account of their religion. They were responsible for inventions such as carbonated water and modern atomic theory.

Being the first Industrial region in the world was maybe the largest influence of all though. Anyone who’s worked in heavy industry knows that it breeds specific types of culture and people. When a machine works, it works, and when it doesn’t you’d better fix it. There’s no option of scheduling an alignment call with stakeholders to review a KPI or draft some PR comms. A 1:1 or a catch-up over coffee isn’t going to help. You just have to fix it. And machines are noisy and relentless. You have to either shout, or shut up. So if you’ve got nothing interesting, or at least witty to say, you save your voice. Better to use your energy to figure out the internal workings of the engine or loom; try to improve it, repair it, make it faster or more reliable. Or at least understand how it works. Since there were no sabbaticals or continuous improvement training courses in those days, the only choice was to figure it out for yourself. Theorists were treated with suspicion, usually accompanied by a dry, sarcastic put-down. Practicality was valued above all.

Without realising it, these people were living out a raw, northern existentialism. In a world where no authority or cosmic plan was coming to save them, they instinctively understood Sartre’s premise: that existence precedes essence. You aren't defined by what society tells you that you 'should' be, but by what you actually build through concrete action - through pure praxis.

Out of that culture grew the informal mechanics societies, the libraries, bookshops, home draftsmen and self-taught engineers. There were no universities for those people, and Oxbridge wasn’t an option back then. That’s the culture that gave us the likes of Fred Dibnah, a man who’d sink 5 pints of Guinness and climb a 300ft chimney without ropes by day, and build a steam traction engine by night in his Victorian backyard workshop. In a roundabout way it also gave us Alfred Wainwright, a man who spent 13 years hand drawing and writing the definitive guides to the Lake District. It even gave us Rolls-Royce, the brand synonymous with over-engineered luxury that had origins in a garage in Hulme, prior to Rolls meeting Royce at the Midland Hotel on Peter Street.

But interests weren’t limited to steam engines and pistons. The young Mark E. Smith worked as a docker in Salford, picking up the literature of HP Lovecraft and Norman Mailer in his spare time - he went on to become one of the most acclaimed lyricists in music. Down the road at Salford Tech, John Cooper-Clarke was a technician in the college metalwork shop, handing out steel rules and cutting oil prior to becoming the definitive punk poet and flat-sharing with Nico from the Velvet Underground. Meanwhile on the borders of Manchester and Cheshire, Chris Sievey was developing his chaotic polymath skills. He coded early computer games released on the B-side of a 45rpm vinyl single, set up his own record label and released ‘I’m in love with the girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore checkout desk’, recorded a demo at Apple Corp's Savile Row Studios, before launching the papier-mâché clad eccentricity of Frank Sidebottom onto the world. It took GCHQ 30 years to crack the codes he'd hidden within the borders of records and books. The word ‘Genius’ doesn’t do him justice, and he never spent a day in University education.

In the world of art, LS Lowry went about his work as a rent collector, sketching and painting and memorising scenes on his rounds. The establishment initially called him an amateur, a hobbyist, before admitting they were wrong. Wigan’s Theodore Major is maybe less well known than Lowry, but was another self-taught man who painted in vivid colours to create visceral, grimy industrial pictures. And famously refused to sell them to establishment galleries or collectors, especially those from London, preferring to store hundreds of them in his house than deal with anyone he deemed undeserving. Down in Macclesfield meanwhile was Charles Tunnicliffe, who became maybe the quintessential artist when it came to depicting the English countryside and its wildlife.

Musically you could (and people have) written entire volumes about the north west. Paul McCartney, the greatest melodic composer of modern times, never wrote a note of sheet music. John Lennon didn't even know that guitars were supposed to have four strings until George Harrison told him. The same George Harrison who taught himself to play sitar in time to record Norwegian Wood.

Ian Curtis created the dark, atmospheric dystopia of Joy Division while working as a civil servant, reading House of Dolls and JG Ballard on his lunch hour. His bandmates Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris were soldering their own Powertran synths together, before later programming drum machines and subsonic bass pulses to create 'Blue Monday', the biggest selling 12" single of all time. Johnny Marr re-invented electric guitar playing by studying African High Life, American Funk, Rory Gallagher and Bert Jansch from his bedroom in Wythenshawe. Lee Mavers wrote the La’s songs while on a YTS unemployment scheme. No theorists or academics amongst them, yet legacies and impact that changed the world.

Things of course have petered out somewhat with the advent of algorithms, social media, gentrification and the resulting flattening of culture. Last December I was stood under grey skies outside Manchester Cathedral for the funeral of Mani, the great bass player of Primal Scream and The Stone Roses. There was a moment towards the end as a line of rock stars filed out the door, where I realised I was looking at the last great generation of North West autodidacts. Peter Hook, John Squire, Reni, Ian Brown, Liam Gallagher, Clint Boon, Aziz Ibrahim, Mike Joyce - all people who picked up an instrument and taught themselves how to make music that changed the world.

The next generation are ghosts of Hauntology, what might have been had social media, smartphones, algorithms, glass towers and Linkedin profiles not flooded the world they grew up in. You can’t write ‘I Am The Resurrection’ in-between scrolling Tik Tok feeds. You can’t convince a tech recruiter's ATS program that having the ability to teach yourself something to a world-class standard is acceptable. You don't split the atom watching Netflix. The second act that Coogan (not Wilson) references in 24 Hour Party People may be over.

But that wouldn’t be a North-Western way to think. By picking up the book, following the thread, creating things you want to create without asking permission or relying on authority or establishment to approve, you follow the tradition and break out. In fact, the autodidacts of today might just be hard to find rather than not there at all. Somewhere algorithms and property developers can't find them. Maybe in garages or sheds in Hoylake, Birkenhead, Skelmersdale or Swinton.

There’s an accepted version of events of June the 4th 1976, where the Sex Pistols played the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and enlightened the locals in the possibilities of three-chord guitar music. However it was Mark Smith who got it right - he was there on the night and thought ‘I could do better than that’. And that’s maybe what autodidactism is really all about.

David Turner is the founder of Kói, an independent technology consultancy advising investors, founders, and boards on product strategy, organisational design, and technology assessment.

You can reach him at: enquiries@dkoi.design