TONY Wilson was only 57 and that was bad enough, she was 55 for god’s sake. They buried Carol Ainscow on Friday under a bright blue sky close to her home in Bolton.
Carol Ainscow had done things differently. She was withdrawn from the property pack of braying men in pinstripes. She was a clubber and an out gay woman
A big Catholic family funeral, full of tears. A lot like Rob Gretton’s back in Wythenshawe in 1999. The maverick music manager of Joy Division and New Order died of a heart attack, age 46.
Carol was a bar and nightclub owner and property developer, similar in so many ways to these co-deceased. In worlds we thought we knew, she shook things up, blew the doors off, lifted the rafters. Nobody did clubs and bars and apartments like Carol, and that was the Manchester (and Bolton) in her.
She’d turned a profit on a big house in Bolton by converting it to a rest home. In 1990 with Peter Dalton, her business partner for the next few years, she bought Unity House at 46 Canal Street. This had been a late nineteenth century reading room for working people, a place for association and self-improvement. Carol and Peter bashed through the roof, raised it a floor, blazed through the full height glass front, threw a balcony across it and opened Manto just in time for Christmas.
Dry Bar and the Hacienda were already operating. The city has had generations of clubs and pubs, but none has changed the game quite like Manto. From day one they needed a bigger bar. So Carol moved in on Factory’s mismanagement, bought their HQ from receivers and opened Paradise Factory in 1993. Generation X on New Wakefield Street did it for bars. She took on the Sackville Street Loft apartments when the London developer got cold feet, swinging into a new phase of her game.
She bought the bit of the Express building in Ancoats that the newspaper didn’t still own and began to develop the bits of Ancoats that Tom Bloxham’s Urban Splash didn’t have an interest in. Her company was Artisan Properties, and it pressed on in Ancoats at a rate even Bloxham couldn’t match. She even developed the mill where Michael Winterbottom had built the Hacienda set for 24 Hour Party People.
September 2008 and Lehman Brothers crashed the world’s economy. Gone. End of an era.
Carol Ainscow had done things differently. She was withdrawn from the property pack of braying men in pinstripes. She was a clubber and an out gay woman who opened up a new place in the world for gay people to be. She and Peter Dalton came together again to restore the Crown & Kettle on Great Ancoats Street. They went on holiday to Ibiza together this summer and when they came back Peter took over the old club for a night to celebrate the Paradise Factory’s twentieth anniversary. Carol wasn’t there. She wasn’t well.
Gretton, Wilson, Ainscow.
What they did came out of fierce individuality and self-belief. And what they did for Manchester was nothing less than to re-present a revitalised city to the world. In business I’ve a feeling Carol took the Alex Ferguson line. She didn’t need to be popular, she just needed to win. And to win in style.
In her eulogy Artisan colleague Lis Phelan read words that Carol had written in appreciation of Tony Wilson for the Manchester Evening News back in August 2007. Hearing her words read over her own coffin was almost unbearable. Except that it was getting towards the end of the church service and the windows were wide open, and it was playtime in St Brendan’s Primary School next door and thin high voices were whooping and screaming in late September sunshine, and life, that perpetual old faker, was most defiantly and joyfully, skeltering on.
I was standing as close to her as I have ever done, pressed against the side of the hearse to read the card on a floral tribute in the shape of a hockey stick, left by the women of the Manto Hockey Club who Carol turned out for every Saturday, and who had just formed her guard of honour. “You will be sadly missed on the pitch and in the pub” it said, and then it quoted her playing motto: “If you can’t stop them, crop them!”
And then she pulled away from me, as she might have done from a conversation upstairs in Manto, or on the Canal Street pavement. And I watched her take her leave in the back of a big, black gleaming Rolls Royce.
