In this latest chapter:
The Dojo as a new project.
The character of the city.
Artistic bohemians.
Student life
(Header image: Mark Harland and I working on kani-basami scissor throw at Leeds YMCA, photo, Chris Shaw).
The Dojo develops.
At the YMCA in the city centre; I started crafting things in my own way (the joy of total control). Everything was based around the little blue book – the UKKW syllabus, a document with only minimal changes since Suzuki Sensei crafted it in the 1960’s. Ironic how it has survived over the decades. If I look on the websites of Wado and ‘Wado-based’ groups today, even now I see the footprint of that particular syllabus. It surprises me how reluctant people have been to depart from the constraints of the set techniques and the designated order of syllabus content. There must be something in it.
Suzuki’s teaching methods and innovations also seem to also appear in the content of European Wado, notably, those under the sway of Sensei’s Kono and Ohgami; I wonder how that came about, osmosis or direct influence? I have no idea.
However, I was also working another agenda… the physicality of the training was very much about ‘project ME’, I wanted to workout, so everyone else had to dance to the tune. In hindsight, we did an awful lot of callisthenics, maybe too much.
The other agenda item was fighting. I was determined to build up a good skill level in sparring. It was my aim to develop a body of fighters who would spark each other off; like we had at Mansfield, but I was starting from such a low base. Local competitions gave us some scope for experience, but it was always a struggle to get the Leeds members to dip their toe in the water; it needed the younger guys to stand up to the mark but it was like pulling teeth with some of them. It wasn’t helped that in those days the individual kumite contest was not given as high a profile as the team event, and you needed five guys to make a team. This picture of the Leeds line-up from one of our earlier competitions says it all.
There was a lot of work put into building up the fighters over the four years I was in Leeds, but I take comfort from the fact that the groundwork had been laid for a fresh hand to take things forward to a very high level of competition success. That fresh hand was Keith Walker, but more about him later in this story.
What was Leeds like back in those days?
None of these things happened in a vacuum; it was the city of Leeds that coloured the setting of this narrative. Leeds was more than a geographical backdrop to events. In the 1970’s and 80’s the city was a social and cultural melting pot. That particular time was marked by a shifting of political and creative forces; as a city it existed on a fault-line of new trends which crashed against traditions like cultural tectonic plates.
Historians, who were either never there or came late to the party are busy writing books about Leeds in those years, they are clearly aware that there was something special going on. (One of the better books is Gavin Butt’s, ‘No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk’).
There is no doubt that each city in the UK has its own unmistakable character. To my mind Leeds was the real capital of the north. Although Bradford as a city was nestled a mere eight miles to the west and that they very nearly blurred into each other, the character of each was so different. It seemed to me that Bradford was a city of under-investment; while Leeds was dangerously close to being a city of over-investment. Bradford had the curry houses and the Art-house cinemas (I went there to see the later Kurosawa movies, ‘Ran’ and ‘Kagemusha’) and Leeds had everything cultural and commercial.
At that time, Leeds was a real city of contrasts. Around the city centre were the glitzy bars, boutiques and restaurants, while the outskirts seemed to be in a state of redevelopment. But it was the type of redevelopment that seemed to have stalled at the stage normally associated with demolition.
Vast swathes of flattened streets, brick-strewn wastelands, sometimes with solitary buildings stubbornly holding on to some kind of life. A cycle repair shop, a family-run cornershop which used to butt up alongside a row of houses; but now left with nothing to lean on; a scarred stump of wobbling brickwork with the remains of a fireplace half way up an end wall and some remnants of sad peeling wallpaper, a hint of lives long gone.
Photographer Pete Mitchell’s iconic photos of Leeds at that time beautifully sums it up in a visual way, https://britishculturearchive.co.uk/leeds-in-the-1970s-1980s-peter-mitchell/
In the east of the city, the notorious Quarry Hill flats, the epitome of modernism and squalor, had been demolished just before I arrived and the whole of that area of the city was now missing an identity.
Not far from there was Millgarth Police Station which squatted defiantly in the middle of that part of town. A brutalist stain, indomitable and grim; even the name ‘Millgarth’ had a certain sourness associated with severity and a very ‘northern’ kind of grime and nastiness. Three years later this was to be the epicentre of the colossal balls-up that was the Yorkshire Ripper investigation.
Some of the names of the areas of Leeds city unintentionally held queasy connotations, for example; Meanwood, Stainbeck, Mabgate, (‘Mab’ was a slang name for a prostitute or a hag).1
But back to Leeds.
The student population in Leeds was huge; the whole of the north side of the city was a student ghetto. This was Hyde Park and Headingly.
Now, I am sure that ‘normal people’ lived in Hyde Park and Headingly, but if they did, I never saw them. The streets in that area were inclined to be leafy and Victorian, but behind the little stained glassed panelled doors lurked student bedsit-land. Landlords, keen to capitalise, converted and divided floors and inserted partitions to make the most out the floorspace and jam as many students in as possible. These same landlords were very cunning in their dealings with the naïve students, suckering them into what were called licence traps, where they weren’t ‘tenants’, they were ‘licensees’ and hence their rights were somewhat limited.
Some of these houses were ‘back to backs’; terraced houses which had no rear aspect because they were butted right up to the houses on the next street. This meant you had a party-wall on three sides and only windows and a door on the front wall.
In my second year I moved into one of these, only, there was no back on it; because the houses behind had been demolished. In a bored moment one afternoon I removed an airbrick in the rear wall and peered through the gap; all I could see was a huge drop into St James hospital carpark. No wonder the house was so cold.
Technically the building of ‘back to back’ houses was banned in Leeds from 1875 onwards, on poverty and sanitation grounds. (I will describe my ‘back to back’ experience in a later chapter).
Pop singer Marc Almond of Soft Cell (who was also in Leeds at that time) wrote a song about his life in such houses, appropriately called ‘Bedsitter’. In his autobiography he says about the song, “it was in my thoughts when I wrote ‘Bedsitter”. For me the song totally smelled of Leeds.
Soft Cell.
Marc Almond was a contemporary of mine at the Leeds Polytechnic; although I was in the Graphic Design area and he was in Fine Art, we were in the same ‘H’ block and used to run into each other quite often. His Soft Cell co-founder Dave Ball was also at the Polytechnic and together they formed the punk-synth combo in 1979. I am sure there are many people who can remember their first hit record, ‘Tainted Love’. Marc Almond couldn’t hold a tune but you have to give him credit for the front and the ambition.
Leeds Poly art department was a hotbed of musical ‘talent’; the year before, Green Gartside formed the post-punk band Scritti-Politti while he was a student in the same Fine Art department.
It has to be remembered that Leeds Polytechnic at that time had a reputation for being wildly avant-garde. One of the chief movers in that area was a Fine Art lecturer called Jeff Nuttall.