‘Thousands of Hobbit fans have the wrong address in the Lancashire town, according to Sir Ian McKellen’
Burnley Evening Telegraph
Ian Murray McKellen was born into a family of professional Northern stock in the Burnley General Hospital, East Lancashire, at 8.30 in the evening of 25 May 1939, just months before the outbreak of the Second World War. His family ancestry was Scottish, Northern Irish and English. The name McKellen goes back a thousand years or more to the Celtic or Medieval English Alan or Alain, meaning harmony or little rock, with McKellen, or son of Allan, being the Scottish variant.
Denis Murray McKellen, his father, was a chartered civil engineer. Photographs show a marked similarity to Ian: a direct, challenging stare, similar height and dark hair. The strong, longish face is unlined, the mouth turned up at each corner, suggesting humour. A dimpled chin and a long jaw, but with nothing sensual implied as in his son. The ears are long and fleshy.
Ian’s mother, Margery Lois Sutcliffe before she married, was a traditional Lancashire housewife. In photographs she has a warm and winning smile. They lived high above the centre of Burnley in the leafy southern suburb of Rose Hill, on the road to Manchester. Their house was right opposite Scott Park, a spacious and wooded area donated by a nineteenth-century philanthropic mayor, where Margery happily walked Ian’s elder sister Jean as an infant.
Number 25 Scott Park Road suited McKellen senior and his family well. With a turreted third storey and four bedrooms, it stood at the end of a respectable, middle-class terrace. Up the road was Burnley Golf Club, and it led to rambles up in the impressive heights above the town, with marvellous and breathtaking views over the Pennines, at the peak of which now stands the tourist attraction of the Singing Ringing Tree, an abstract sculpture of metal tubes, erected in 2006 but with a distinct flavour of Lynn Chadwick and the 1951 Festival of Britain. Appropriate for Ian’s early years, it sings when the wind is against it.
Denis, thirty-three years of age when Ian was born, was a socialist and a committed Nonconformist Christian. He had absorbed the family’s tradition of public service, and worked as a council engineer in the palatial, pale greyish-yellow stone Town Hall. He and his wife were middle class and well-educated and not, as McKellen might sometimes imply, poor or working class. Their status was roughly midway between the Liverpool shipping magnate or cotton-mill owner and the lower-class factory workers, who weaved and spun in the smoky centre among the tall conical brick chimneys and lived in crowded terraces with cobbled streets.
Burnley’s surviving monumental public buildings, such as the Town Hall, the Public Library and a former National Westminster and County Bank with its elaborate marbled walls and high ceilings (now an Italian restaurant), attest to an empire and financial power controlling nearly a quarter of the globe. This, as George Orwell – a writer especially relevant to Ian’s Lancashire roots and outlook – recorded in his wartime essay ‘England Your England’, ‘was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state.’
By the time McKellen was born the Empire no longer held together so well. The aristocracy had declined, the solid hierarchy had faltered and the bureaucratic imperial civil service had imposed its constipated view of life with mounds of paper and red tape. Stagnation and a deterioration of morality had set in. As Orwell put it, ‘The blimps and the half-pay colonel with bull-neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur – and the high brow with domed forehead and stalk-like neck, were both subject to the devastating impact of British foreign policy.’ The ill-prepared country stumbled into war with Germany, the modern, more efficient and better-armed super-state. The McKellens, however, did not believe in war. Ian’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were for religious reasons strongly principled pacifists, and Ian staunchly followed them.
Denis was ambitious for himself and his new-born son, and for his five-year-old daughter, Ian’s sister Jean. But as he took the bus down Manchester Road to his office his mind must have been in turmoil. Call-up and general mobilisation were imminent; the weak and temporising Prime Minister Chamberlain at last declared war on Hitler on 3 September 1939.
In the Second World War the view of conscientious objectors was often misunderstood and scorned, with the result their careers and families suffered. ‘We were called names at school and people in our street wouldn’t speak to us,’ the daughter of one conscientious objector recalls, ‘and the landlord said he wouldn’t repair our house after it was bombed, because my father wouldn’t fight. I’m afraid it always seemed to be my mother who suffered because of it.’
But Denis did not have to put his pacifism to the test, or to the danger of being arrested and imprisoned, because his employment was declared a ‘reserved occupation’ – essential in wartime, and therefore exempt from call-up. So he kept his job. In fact he could have been stopped from joining up even if he had wanted to.
Apart from the cruel arrests and imprisonments a new spirit of tolerance and awareness was coming into play, while Chamberlain introduced tribunals to test the sincerity of genuinely held beliefs. More conscientious objectors were coming forward not afraid to stand up for peace. But it is likely that Denis kept his unpopular pacifism hidden and quiet. We shall never know what would have happened if he had had to make his own stand against the war, just as we don’t know what Margery’s opinions were. There is no reason to believe he would not have stood up for his convictions; the deeper reason he never put on a uniform never became an issue, but it may well have brought some feelings of guilt. Presumably it was not known locally that the borough engineer would refuse to fight for his country. How deep pacifism went was also never to be tested in Ian’s case: after he left school in 1958 he went straight up to Cambridge, electing to go there before his National Service. When he left three years later National Service had been abolished. He says he would have refused to do it. A streak of pacifist fundamentalism similar to his father’s was injected into Ian’s spirit, but possibly also well-guarded by the feeling that it was necessary to cover something up.
Ian’s grandparents were actively proselytising Christians, his mother’s father a Congregationalist minister in Romiley, a village near Stockport. Grandpa Sutcliffe was noted for his mild-mannered approach, while William Henry, Ian’s paternal grandad of fearsome aspect, was a Baptist lay preacher also in Romiley, suggesting a strain of Ulster protestantism in the family. He made extravagant gestures ‘from the shoulders’, according to Ian in a contribution he made to an anthology of essays and poems, Susan Hill’s People, which devotes a section to McKellen. Congregationalists asserted that the only head of the Church is Jesus Christ, implicitly denying the supremacy of the Crown, believing the only statute book was the Word of God. Baptists are closely allied to Congregationalists, holding the Scriptures as the sole standard of faith and practice, with the Holy Spirit the only source of regeneration. Baptists were traditionally anti-gay, and still are in some parts of the globe, for example in the American South.
Denis sought or was given a move to Wigan, for reasons unknown, but probably as a promotion with more responsibility, in the same post of borough engineer. The departure from Burnley was hasty. Only two months after Ian’s birth the family made their move south-west into the Greater Manchester area, to a town-centre dwelling. McKellen’s short-lived stay at 25 Scott Park Road provides something of a mystery. Burnley’s Historical Society put up a blue Heritage plaque with the date of his birth next to the front door in 2003. But on a visit to Burnley McKellen said that though he did live there at one point, ‘I am certain that’s not where I was born.’ This left the civic leaders red-faced.
But this address is on his birth certificate registered only two weeks after his birth, and on the electoral register. When challenged further by the local press, Ian did not reply. Usually such tributes do not get placed on houses until after the demise of the subject; there are no plaques on the homes where he spent the next eighteen years.
Elements or shades of Denis – the sense of responsibility, determined upward mobility, firm connections and honesty – can all be detected through Ian’s life and work. Alice McKellen, née Murray, Ian’s paternal grandmother – known in the family as ‘Mother Mac’ – whose memory and legend were revered, was ‘a real star’ and a ‘wonderful star’ according to her grandson Ian. She had lived just outside Stockport with her husband William McKellen. Both were members of the Christian Endeavour Church at Hatherley and she once sang a solo at its huge celebration at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1902. Ian was baptised in the very same chapel dedicated to his devout grandmother two years after her death on 20 August 1939. An early family activist was his great-great grandfather on Alice’s side who worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week. He successfully campaigned for half-day Saturday working.
Denis, highly qualified as he was, was a man with wide cultural interests. He loved the theatre, as did Margery, and alongside his strong Christian beliefs was a socialist intellectual. In an England full of slums and unemployment, with every British statesman doing the wrong thing with unerring instinct, inevitably left-wing thinkers were polarised by the fixed attitudes and sham feudalism of the public-school-educated leaders. ‘There was no intelligentsia that was not in a sense left … Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual’, writes Orwell, ‘was T. E. Lawrence.’ Denis sowed the seeds of anti-privilege and anti-snobbery in Ian’s character. ‘Since about 1930 everyone describable as an “intellectual” has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order,’ Orwell observed.
Denis and Margery naturally voted Labour in the 1945 election, and when George VI and Elizabeth drove through the cobbled market place, Ian asked his father what the King’s politics were. ‘He’s a good old Tory, I should think,’ was the reply. When asked about his likes and dislikes in 1990, Ian said that his least favourite virtue was ‘patriotism’. But Lancashire had begun again to prosper in the manufacture of munitions, while its young men and women of military- or factory-hand age flocked to the colours or the factories. The atmosphere became more egalitarian. The permanent legacy of this levelling influence were the flat vowels shared by all.
The McKellens were to all appearances a reticent bunch, and certainly uncomfortable about disclosing personal details of their lives; they were broad-stroke Lancastrians, forthright but not ones for private revelations. Margery’s mother had died giving birth to her younger sister Dorothy, and her father, Sutcliffe, married again. One day Dorothy pointed to a photograph of her blood mother and asked her stepmother who it was. The answer was, ‘Oh, that’s a friend of your father’s…’
No one knew there had ever been a professional actor in the McKellen family until 2016, when Ian appeared in an episode of the BBC genealogy documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?. He discovered that Frank Lowe, a Victorian uncle of his maternal grandmother, had been for a while quite famous in melodramas with titles such as The Two Orphans, but then had sunk to ‘illegitimate’ variety shows (as opposed to legitimate theatre) in which he declaimed monologues without any of the glitz and command of Ian’s later one-man shows. He died of tuberculosis in his mid-forties, abandoned by his wife in the workhouse, so he fared rather worse than performing dogs. The revelation that he had acting in his blood heartened Ian, although he found Frank’s demise very saddening.
Margery had the thread or spark of the performer in her make-up. She acted in amateur theatricals, as did her daughter, Ian’s older sister Jean, more frequently than her mother. (Jean, who went on to be a schoolteacher, was an enthusiastic amateur performer, and, like her brother, loved the theatre all her life). In an interview in later life Ian recalled a glimpse of Margery: during the once-weekly bath she gave her son, she performed the story of the radio programme she had heard the night before. Much loved by Ian, she remains a somewhat shadowy, romantic figure for him. The impression is that she was fulfilled in family life. She was thirty-three when he was born, in the prime of life.
Number 17 Parson’s Walk, the four-bedroomed house that Denis and Margery bought in Wigan when Ian was still a baby, was semi-detached, smaller and undeniably less smart than Scott Park Road, on a noisy bus route and walking distance from the industrial, coal-mining centre. Appropriately named for scions of professional preachers, the fact that over the road it faced Mesnes Park (pronounced ‘mains’), with grandstand and duck ponds, an even more spacious and ambling open space than Scott Park, must have been important for Denis and Margery with their two small children. While the larger picture was one of war and devastation, Wigan was spared, situated as it was north of Manchester, beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe. Ian’s early years in this red-brick semi backing onto the grounds of Wigan Cricket Club, to reach which he had to climb over a wall in his garden, would appear settled and serene
When Ian came back to Wigan in 2002 to film a documentary on his life for America’s CBS, in anticipation of him winning a major award for The Lord of the Rings, the broadcaster filmed him in Mesnes Park as he touched the shiny right foot of the statue of the Wigan MP Sir Francis Sharp Powell, supposed to bring luck, and told of the Wigan Little Theatre where he first saw Shakespeare and ‘the seeds of my life as an actor were put down’. Two years earlier he had restored and reopened the rose garden there, dedicating it to the memory of Denis. A concrete star with ‘Ian McKellen’ leading other stars for famous living notables of Wigan is embedded in the new civic centre pavement. But it strikes me as a significant deepening of the McKellen mystery why he is occasionally reticent or full of regret on the subject of Denis. I cannot see that the move and ten years spent in Wigan, much though Ian embraced it in retrospect with imagination and warm identification, could have greatly benefited Margery’s health.
Two years before the McKellen move into Wigan, Orwell published his account of its ‘lunar landscape of slag-heaps and to the north … you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinder and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round … stretched the “flashes” – pools of stagnant water.’ Denis must have been tough, partaking in the existence in England of what Orwell calls the ‘curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Norman snobbishness’. This trait is apparent sometimes in Ian, as when, much later in life, furious at London’s theatre scene and Hollywood’s rejection of him, he went off to act in Leeds.
Denis is hardly touched upon in accounts of McKellen’s life. He was a typical Northerner, a man of ‘grit’, grim, dour, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic. In his deeply felt pacifism and sense of fair play he wanted to put the ‘truth’ of the Gospel message and Jesus’s non-retaliatory mercy into action. Forgiveness was especially evident when the family entertained a German prisoner of war on Christmas Day. There was a kind of sackcloth and ashes fundamentalism about the move to Parson’s Walk with its noise, and on some days its stench and bad air, in spite of Mesnes Park over the road. The family must have been aware, for instance, of the business of robbing the shale or dirt trains, the ‘immense and systematic thieving of coal’ by the unemployed as they lived near the railway line. Their own home must have been warm in winter with coal being as cheap to buy as it was.
We do hear Denis practised at the upright piano downstairs with his clumsy large hands (like Ian’s), playing Chopin, Liszt and Tchaikovsky. The classlessness of the family which Ian underlines is perhaps a bit false, and here a further aperçu of Orwell again carries weight, when he points out that not only socialists but intellectuals in general claim to be outside the class racket and can see through the absurdity of wealth, ranks and titles. ‘“I’m not a snob”,’ he writes, ‘is nowadays a kind of universal credo.‘
From his earliest days onwards Ian embraced Wigan and identified with it. So when, much later, Ian was making his name, the Express headline ‘The Olivier from Wigan’ had a ring of truth about it. But it also gave a false impression, for the McKellens were not far from Orwell’s description of his own family, ‘lower-upper-middle class’, with better education and a different outlook on life. Raised in this smoke-blackened Wigan ‘amid the deprivations of war’, every good, well-brought-up, middle-class boy who had a rigorous primary school education in a faith school, then free grammar school and university, might be tempted – with the hindsight of left-wing political leaning – to put a Dylan Thomas rags-to-riches spin on things when he became famous. In the 1970s, by then much feted and applauded, Ian was tempted, in his imitations of the comedian George Formby, to sing the working-class credential song of Wigan Grammar School:
Oh Wigan is a grand old town;
The Romans knew it well.
It always had its Good King Coal
As long as folks can tell.
But ironically, while he would go on to win a place there, he only briefly attended the school. The family moved out before he could settle down.
Ian, interviewed later, tells how ‘smoke smutted Monday’s wash on the clothes line and blackened the parish church like the faces of miners clogging home from the pits.’ Still, in his pride in belonging to Wigan, McKellen remembers haircuts, 3d ‘for a scalping back and sides, singeing with a wax paper taper and a rub-over with Bronco Lav. paper’. He recalls the Fattest Woman from the twice-yearly fair, glimpsed under her tent flap, and Anita, at 18 inches, ‘Their majesties’ smallest subject, together with showgirls and the Siamese twins pickled in a jar.’
Then there was the accent, not at all the received BBC English spoken in the soft south of London and Sussex. The diphtheria Ian caught when he was three must have been very worrying, for although vaccination against this killer disease was introduced in 1941, it hadn’t yet reached Wigan. Of children who suffered the symptoms, which began with fever and sore throat, 90 to 95 per cent did not die – a good statistic for those years. Ian had to be isolated in hospital, but soon recovered. It created no serious lasting ill-effects. But some claim it did have a long-term effect on his voice, with the distinctive elongation of vowel sounds. Others say the flat Lancashire vowels he heard all around him had more influence.
Discipline ruled in the Wigan Wesleyan school in Dicconson Street, which he attended with its large classes, its free meals, a third of a pint of milk during breaks, and its emphasis on religious instruction and imperial values – just as it did at home, where he was made to work hard. He would walk across Mesnes Park to school every day. ‘I have very fond memories of living in this house. I always regretted that my parents sent me to bed early. I used to kneel before the window and see the children playing in the park and feel really sad.’
The LMS railway lines at the back of Wigan’s cricket club, for which he was the second eleven’s scorer, link Blackpool (where he went only once, for the Illuminations) and London (five hours away by steam). On that line, he excitedly spotted the first diesel engine on its practice run. This was 1944, he was five, and on the train travelled a family called the Levicks (Mrs and two children), evacuated from Middlesex. They stayed with the McKellens, but before this Ian knew the war first-hand only through Mickey Mouse gas-masks, blackout at the windows, and nights under the iron shelter in the back room.
Margery’s presence in his life, mainly undefined by episode or incident, was of a very loving and typical mother at home, provider and unconditional supporter of husband and children. At home there were no sweets, except the Horlicks tablets Denis obtained from his air-raid warden service. They had more than enough sugar from the rationing and swapped it for tea coupons, drinking water with their meals. On Saturdays they blended top-of-the-milk, margarine and some butter to make up for the lack of the real thing. Margery baked twice a week. Ian’s favourite was ginger parkin.
In Wigan, aged nine-and-a-half, he had his first gay kiss. The memory of this must have made him feel different from others. Even so, it was part of the usual kind of playground investigations little boys and girls engage in. These fumbles, which happened after Sunday School, could be described as showing some kind of early defiance of the family religious conventionality. The other boy’s name is entirely forgotten.
Ivor Novello, in those days a gay icon for an underground minority, was a particular enthusiasm of Margery, so she must have innocently responded to the camp and flamboyant aspect of theatricality and shared it with Ian. She bought tickets for Novello playing in King’s Rhapsody at the Manchester Opera House, where one evening Ian was on the edge of his seat watching Novello languorously leaning across a chaise longue with a glass of champagne. It brought on his first erection, nursing it and proud, as he recounted the event later. Ian knew he was gay from this very early age. He did admit to being very taken, when only six years old, with a girl in games of doctors and nurses during playtime. And he did later write love letters to a girlfriend, which she kept but destroyed when the time came for her to be married.
But when, aged twelve, he watched a love scene in the cinema between men and women he could feel, he says, ‘the heat rising in the cinema, and I was getting cooler’. Much later he admitted that he loved being touched by women – and touching them – but not in any deep and lasting sense. At the schools he attended he says he knew no other boy with a similar inclination to love the same sex as he had, and he conveys in his website CV the impression he felt bullied and ashamed, and this kept him alienated from other boys. There is some equivocation about all these feelings, as if there was uncertainty. At puberty, so he told Andrew Billen of the Evening Standard in 1999, he wondered if he were changing sex and waited for breasts to sprout. ‘I fumbled and flirted my way through puberty and no one helped me to understand myself.’
Always Margery was a real, hands-on mother who was there for him. His impression on others of being grounded in reality, his practicality and calm, owe much to her and are evident in the solidness of the older man.
In the early summer of 1949, with little forewarning or explanation, Margery was taken into Wigan Royal Albert Edward Infirmary. It is not in the nature of a ten-year-old to ask what the matter is, so Ian was kept in the dark.
Life went on. With stoic public-minded spirit, Denis had started up a committee to turn the Mesnes Park grass tennis courts site, dug over in the war to grow vegetables, into a rose garden, which opened that August.
After a time in hospital Margery returned home, but there was no mention of what was wrong with her. In the last year at his Wesleyan school, it was time for Ian to move and he took the eleven-plus exam for a place at Wigan Grammar. His report says he had ‘made a good start’ and won a ‘residuary place’, which was then converted into a free place. But now the family were ready to move out of Wigan to Bolton, for Denis had been appointed chief borough engineer there. Ian’s free place was transferred to Bolton School without having to take another exam, but with the provision he took the extra Latin tuition required for entry.