Barry Nuttall was a housing protester like no other. Dressed as a second world war US general, he formed a small army to resist Hull council’s demolition plans. When his home was destroyed, he lived in a camp amid the rubble. Thirty years on, Stephen Walsh goes in search of Nuttall’s legacy

Thirty years ago next month, down a back street in Hull, the war finally came to an end.



The victors didn’t waste any time. No sooner had the defending army – the self-proclaimed Northern Allied Axis Society – vacated its camp on 21 October 1986, than a bulldozer moved in to clear up. A snapper from the local paper captured the moment a small girl, crying, was comforted by the defeated general, who happened to be her dad. And that was that.

Homes had been destroyed and a whole neighbourhood gutted; babies born and at least one person died. But now ‘Major General’ Nuttall was just plain old Barry again: a barrel-chested 38-year-old family man with a wife and seven kids to support. It was as though the previous seven years – the battle of Melbourne Grove, the siege of Wyndham Street – had simply never happened.

Three decades later, on an overcast summer afternoon, I am wheeling my bike down Argyle Street looking for traces of this infamous (in Hull, at least) conflict. I must have been down here hundreds of times before – trudging back on foot after another desperate 90 minutes of football at the KCOM stadium. But besides idly wondering how the burger van on the corner keeps going when it’s not match day, or whose job it is to clear up the rubbish, it’s not an area of Hull I’d ever thought about much.

That changed when I heard about Barry Nuttall. If this man hadn’t existed, you couldn’t make him up. Other protesters may have staged sit-ins to try to stop local authorities from demolishing their homes. But dressed up as a second world war US major general, backed by a contingent of military re-enactment enthusiasts? Not so much.

Nuttall was a jack of all trades; he’d worked in a wood yard, on barges, as a DJ and a bouncer. He had also done a stint as a garage mechanic, which is how he learned the knack of restoring his growing collection of old military vehicles. He drove these jeeps and troop carriers to re-enactment events throughout the north, along with his band of brothers in the Northern Allied-Axis Society.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A member of Nuttall’s army hoists a union flag amid the rubble. Photograph: Jim Holmes

So when the council announced its plans to demolish all the two-up, two-downs in the area without offering what Nuttall considered adequate compensation, he and his army were ready. In 1983, the national press were there to witness their showdown with police and bailiffs on the terraced streets off Spring Bank in central Hull. The battle dragged on and it took a compulsory purchase order for the demolition to go ahead – but even then, the matter was far from settled.

Nuttall retreated, but only as far as nearby Wyndham Street, where he built a fortress in the wreckage of his own home and dug in with his army – for three more years.



Urban legend

It is said that Nuttall only left his makeshift camp twice: to present a petition to the House of Commons, and to marry his second wife, Alyson. This was not just another planning dispute; it’s the stuff of urban legend.

Nuttall’s stand-off had deep roots in Hull’s post-war housing policy – itself a reaction to the squalor of the city’s 19th-century slums and the devastation of second world war bombing. But the events of 30 years ago also have echoes right down to the present day, through Hull’s patchy post-war architecture and even in the city’s recent, overwhelming vote to leave the European Union.

I know next to nothing about how Nuttall survived under canvas for so long, other than that his wife kept him supplied with homemade rock buns. I’d ask the man himself but he died five years ago, and his nearest and dearest won’t talk to me. I’ve been poring through the local newspaper archives at Hull History Centre but since they’re mostly on microfilm, it’s an arduous process. My trek down Argyle Street is an excuse to get out, as much as anything.

One thing I have gleaned from the archives is just how radically this part of Hull has changed over the last half century. A fascinating series of Ordnance Survey maps, drafted at 10-year intervals, shows the dense Victorian streets being swept away to create the open-plan estate of today. But the road names – the larger ones at least – remain the same, and the sign for Wyndham Street soon appears on the right. What was I expecting: a blue plaque? There’d be nowhere to put it.

This was where it all happened then. To be fair to the council, the demolition probably made sense in the early 1980s. Hull’s economy was in dire straits: job losses following the collapse of the fishing industry in the late 70s had been compounded by swingeing cutbacks as Thatcherite economic policies started to bite. You can imagine the panic setting in among councils, desperate to stop the rot. Encouraging small business was one solution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nuttall apparently only left his makeshift camp twice: to present a petition to the House of Commons, and to marry his second wife, Alyson. Photograph: J Mitchell/Northcliffe Media/SWNS

You could say the stand-off on Melbourne Grove pitched one economic hero of the 80s (the home owner) against another (the entrepreneur). For a while afterwards, Nuttall claimed he still held the deeds to the plot of land on which his house had stood. But if he ever tried to make good on the claim, Bob Harding, owner and managing director of Quality Fixing Supplies, knows nothing about it.

Harding sells screws and fixings, mainly to manufacturers of portable buildings and garden furniture. He’s been here for 12 years, has five employees, and says the location is handy for the motorway. Next door, Brad Lake at the Leather Repair Company has just got back from fixing car upholstery over the Humber Bridge in Lincolnshire. He hasn’t heard of Nuttall either.

I ask Harding whether his company has much to do with the local community. “Not really,” he says, “although some of the lads buy their lunch from the burger van on Wyndham Street.”

English eccentric

If I can’t find any direct evidence of Nuttall’s protest, I can at least talk to someone who was there. The media loved him – it probably made a welcome change from covering all those factory closures and job losses. Barry and his men offered some light relief and a chance for reporters to dust down their military metaphors.

I turned up and these two guys dressed as American GIs stopped me with mock rifles Brian Lavery

Brian Lavery encountered the major general not long after the siege on Wyndham Street. Nuttall had moved back in with his wife Alyson and their children, and Lavery, now a successful non-fiction author but then a humble freelance writer, knew a good, saleable story when he saw one.

“It was like meeting a Bedouin chief,” Lavery recalls. “I turned up and these two guys dressed as American GIs stopped me with mock rifles. ‘Identify yourself,’ they said. I told them I’d come to see their major general, and they led me round to the tent at the back where Barry and his wife were sitting behind a trestle table. These two stood to attention either side of me. Then one of them spoke in a mock American accent: ‘Gentleman of the press to see you, sir!’

“It was easy to laugh at but a lot of people in Hull admired him,” Lavery says. “He was seen as an English eccentric standing up to ‘the man’. In Hull, we’re drawn to people who stand up for themselves – it goes back to the time we turned King Charles I away. Barry wasn’t daft though. He provided for himself and his family, and he raised money for charity. He won the war of public opinion.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘They’d put the sofas back and rearranged the bricks, so you could see where the rooms had been.’ Photograph: Jim Holmes

Nuttall certainly kept the papers on side during the siege, with a ready grin for any passing press photographer. There’s the one of him in Yorkshire Telly Savalas mode, relaxing in his “castle”, tin mug raised aloft; or on his wedding day in best dress uniform, after he’d borrowed a Cadillac from local crooner Joe Longthorne to get to the church on time. Then there’s him kissing Alyson under the mistletoe before returning to a lonely Christmas vigil on Wyndham Street. He must have missed the attention when it was over.

But the best image didn’t make it into the papers. Jim Holmes’s colour photo, taken just after the demolition on Melbourne Grove, has more raw power than any of the staged newspapers snaps. Nuttall, cradling a canteen of rum, is surrounded by the mess that was once his home. He looks angry, and a bit lost.

Holmes’s photographs capture this weird war in a cul-de-sac perfectly. Uniformed men hoist Union flags, Iwo Jima-style over the mountain of rubble, while children sit around chatting. But for once, Nuttall is not his usual happy-go-lucky self.

Holmes explains: “I was cycling [past] and saw the flags coming over the bricks. I thought: this is never going to happen again, so I went back home to get my camera. It was just them and the site and the bricks and the chimney pots. They’d put the sofas back, and rearranged the bricks so you could see where the rooms had been. There was a chair there and Barry was drinking a bottle of rum. It was great.”

It was Holmes who first told me Nuttall’s story one night in a pub, so he’s got a lot to answer for. He retells it one afternoon, sitting out in my back garden. It turns out he had deeper connections to the Battle of Melbourne Grove than I’d realised.

In the early 1980s, Holmes was a student at Hull School of Architecture and had bought a house not far from Nuttall’s, on Kimberley Street. He often saw the major general and his men “bombing round on army trucks”, and in the local pub, the Polar Bear. They were, says Holmes, part of a rich street scene that also featured Mrs Allen, who thought herself a “cut above” but wasn’t above dispensing scurrilous gossip; and an “old boy” with rheumy eyes who used to knock on Holmes’s door if he needed an eyelash removing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nuttall surrounded by the rubble that was once his home. Photograph: Jim Holmes

“It was a nice place to live at the time; always interesting,” Holmes says. “Down the road was the depot for the railways. There were still shops: a bakery, a toy shop, a club called the Flamingo which I think was a ‘cat house’. There was a small Italian barber with a nifty moustache who had a salon on Argyle Street and there was a little supermarket. We were there when there were all the power cuts at the end of the Callaghan period – the winter of discontent. One night in the kitchen, I realised Thatcher was going to get in. I remember thinking: the world’s going to change.”

Bad feeling

Change came quicker than anyone expected. In 1979, the council announced its intention to demolish the area. Holmes seemed the obvious choice to lead the “Retain the Houses” campaign: not only was he local but, as an architecture student, he was aware of the pioneering work by future Riba president Rod Hackney to fight slum clearances in Macclesfield.

“There’d been lots of successful schemes for refurbishing Victorian houses, so there was plenty of that stuff going on. [Our houses] were just standard two-up two-downs, so there were perfectly easy ways of making them habitable.”

But the campaign, Holmes says, was doomed from the start. “Hull’s always been a bit behind the times, in its own little bubble. The last high-rise wasn’t built here until 1979. It was the last public high-rise in England.”

With a council seemingly wedded to the idea of “demolish and rebuild”, the residents’ conservation campaign was further weakened by dissent from within.

“A lot of people had moved in [to the area] to get on the council list. People who owned their houses were in favour of keeping them, but those who were in landlord accommodation wanted the houses to come down. So there was a bit of bad feeling.”

The campaign was shot down. The houses were judged to be not compatible with human existence Jim Holmes

At a public inquiry held at Hull Guildhall, the conflict reached its climax. Holmes sat near the Italian barber: “He got up to object, saying, ‘I’ve got a business here’ – but was shouted down. He sat down next to me, then dropped dead on the floor. He’d had a heart attack.

“I was pretty green,” Holmes admits. “I had no experience at all in that kind of stuff, and the campaign was shot down. The houses were judged to be not compatible with human existence.”

These days, Holmes works for an architectural practice that specialises in making 1960s and 70s council homes compliant with today’s much more rigorous energy conservation rules.

“The houses built following the demolitions were thermally inefficient and difficult to bring up to modern standards. Their electric underfloor heating was a disaster. Terraced houses work better from an ecological point of view, because they’re squashed together and they’ve got a limited external area.”

Squashed together; it could apply equally to the lives lived on those old Victorian streets where everyone knew everyone else and, more often than not, shared a surname. It’s the world Barry Nuttall would have known and which Jim Holmes saw the end of; that sense of togetherness, swept away in the great race for urban modernisation after the second world war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cul-de-sac camp was finally forced to leave in 1986, after three years. Photograph: Jim Holmes

Listening to Holmes’s stories about Mrs Allen and the old man with the rheumy eyes reminds me of Douglas Dunn’s Terry Street poems. Written in the late 1960s, they document the comings and goings of life on another old Hull terrace, now demolished.

The best known is probably A Removal From Terry Street. As the narrator watches his neighbour clearing out to a new estate on the edge of town, he notices him pushing a lawnmower down the street – an implement he could have had no use for in Terry Street’s grassless, cramped back yards. The poem ends: That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

It’s an optimistic thought but, for some, relocation to an edge-of-town estate meant dislocation from everything familiar. Was it this fear that drove Nuttall to dig in for so long?

Legacy of war

Hull certainly had to do something about its crumbling Victorian housing stock. At a talk at the History Centre on the origins of the city’s council housing, the speaker, local historian Carol Kerry-Green, tells a packed audience how massive population growth in the 19th century (from 22,000 in 1801 to 239,000 in 1901) created terrible housing conditions for Hull’s poor.

Back then, deaths from building collapses were common and crime was rife, as exploitative landlords squeezed as many families into their unsanitary, unsafe properties as they could. With no running water or toilets, disease was commonplace. In 1849, Hull’s great cholera epidemic killed 1,863 people – one in 43 of the population.



In the first decades of the 20th century, Hull Corporation tried to get a grip on its housing crisis. But many of the new homes remained unaffordable to those who needed them most – and relocation was often traumatic. It was left up to the landlord to inform tenants of a demolition order – something they frequently failed to do. “The first many residents knew about it was when the council wrecking crew turned up on their doorsteps,” Kerry-Green explains.

But the slum clearances were nothing compared with the devastation wreaked by the Luftwaffe. With 1,200 people killed, 95% of houses damaged and 152,000 made homeless, Hull – the anonymous “north-east coast town” of the newsreels – was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain between 1941 and 1945. Kerry-Green says the housing shortage was acute, and the fact the communities were so tight knit was both a strength and a weakness.

“When people got bombed out, a lot of them moved into relatives’ houses. But when an area’s that tightly packed, you’re looking at maybe three or four families who are connected through kinship all bombed out at the same time. It makes it much more difficult for them to find somewhere to live.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 1974, these old properties near Argyle Street in Hull were due for demolition . Photograph: Local World/Rex/Shutterstock

It’s easy to forget this. In a story about one man’s “war” with the council in the 1980s, those same streets had been an actual battleground 40 years earlier. The Hull People’s Memorial is a temporary museum in the city centre set up to raise funds for a permanent commemoration of civilians killed in the war. It has a comprehensive archive relating to Hull’s Blitz, with a detailed breakdown of bombing raids by date and street. I find Kimberley Street, Jim Holmes’s old stomping ground (direct hit: 8 May, 1941) and Argyle Street, targeted throughout the war.

I make a further discovery when a casual inquiry about Nuttall prompts a bizarre exchange between two volunteers.

“You knew him, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“I thought he was your dad.”

“Get away!”

“But you knew of him?”

“Might’ve done.”

Every time one of them left the camp to try and get something, the police would stop them getting back in

Once the issue of paternity is cleared up, I get an account of the siege I’ve not heard before.

“They’d set up the barricade on Wyndham Street pretty well and managed to keep the police out. Trouble was, they couldn’t get out either. They had no water supply, no electricity. Every time one of them left the camp to try and get something, the police would stop them getting back in. In the end, the ones who were left must’ve thought: ‘Sod this.’ And that’s how it ended.”

I’m astounded. I had always assumed Nuttall had surrendered because he’d run out of money, or his family had persuaded him to give up. But if this version of the story is true, the siege was all too real – and the authorities didn’t pull their punches.

The city’s bones

Truth might be the first casualty of war, but nostalgia plays tricks on the memory too. Right now in Hull it’s especially prevalent, which might have something to do with next year’s City of Culture celebrations. Residents are being encouraged to “tell their stories”, and tales of Blitz survival and post-war optimism provide respite from the modern news cycle of crime and social breakdown.

Meanwhile, Hull city centre is being prettified in preparation for the TV cameras. Some of the city’s derelict “eye sores” – the ones in strategic locations such as the New York Hotel, where Barry and Alyson had their wedding reception in 1983 – have been demolished. Exposing the city’s bones – sometimes literally – to daylight has brought a yearning for what might have been. If the Luftwaffe had picked on somewhere else and left the great buildings and thoroughfares of our Victorian city intact, or the city council hadn’t tried its damnedest to sweep away what was left.



As in so many other things, Hull came late to building preservation, and even now concentrates its efforts around particular conservation areas and landmark buildings. Much of our architectural legacy exists only in “fossil” form – as the old walls around car parks or as burial grounds whose churches are long gone.

Often only pictures remain, and it’s little wonder that every fragment now seems worthy of preservation. A series of books, Hull – Then & Now, sums up this mood. Juxtaposing black and white photos of old Hull against modern shots of the same scenes, the message seems clear: we’ll never get back what we’ve lost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Hull resident casts her vote in the recent EU referendum; the city voted two-to-one in favour of Brexit. Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP/Getty Images

I’m susceptible to some of this nostalgia myself. When I started researching Nuttall’s story, part of my motivation was to conjure up the vibrant neighbourhood he knew. I didn’t know much about Spring Bank South – the area that had replaced it. But it had always seemed an anonymous place, built without regard to the character of the surrounding streets.

It’s the layout that confuses me. The houses are in rows, arranged on one side around driveways and on the other, landscaped grassy areas. It’s not exactly clear where the front doors are, or how the streets link together.

This is the Radburn System – an urban pattern beloved of council estate planners of the 1960s and 70s, and hated by postmen ever since. The idea was that by arranging houses in low density, semi-pedestrianised precincts, residents would be spared the noise and inconvenience of through traffic, and children could play safely away from the cars.

Radburn is certainly doing its job: the noise of traffic on Londesborough and Argyle Streets has been reduced to a background rumble. I’ve arranged to meet Frank McConnaghy at the community centre, a resident of the area for 40 years and treasurer of the local Spring Bank Community Association.

When I speak to McConnaghy on the phone before our meeting, one thing crops up again and again: how much more “cosmopolitan” the area has become. By this he means racially diverse, and it is striking how many people out and about are of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European origin.

The people who live in this area – one of the poorest in the country – just think: it can’t get any worse for us Frank McConnaghy

Such an influx would have been unthinkable only 20 years ago, let alone when Nuttall lived here. Back then Spring Bank, like the rest of Hull, was predominantly white British. The wars in the Balkans and Middle East changed all that, bringing refugees “dispersed” from Manchester and London. In the 2000s, the freeing up of labour movement for new EU accession countries brought many more immigrants.

“All the refugees just seem to have been dumped on this estate,” McConnaghy says. “Our neighbours are Poles, Indians and Turks. When the Home Office decided to take so many, there were families already here who were on the waiting list for houses.

“The facilities are overloaded and the people who make the decisions aren’t directly affected. That’s why I voted Brexit.”

McConnaghy wasn’t alone. Hull voted two-to-one in favour of leaving the EU in the June referendum, a shock that many didn’t see coming in this Labour heartland.

McConnaghy adds: “The people that live in this area – one of the poorest areas in the country, in terms of earnings – they just think: it can’t get any worse for us. It’s alright saying jobs’ll go, but we haven’t got any jobs in the first place. It’s a massive protest vote.”

I see a connection between McConnaghy’s opting for Brexit and Nuttall’s protest. Both seem rooted in the impotence that comes from being ignored and pushed around for too long. But while he’s clearly angry, McConnaghy – an affable 70 something – doesn’t sound like a stereotypical Brexiteer. He has the utmost respect for Mohammed Younus, one of the centre’s two managers. “He speaks seven languages,” McConnaghy tells me – useful when trying to juggle the 23 different community groups of all nationalities and religious denominations that regularly use the centre.

The event that brings everyone together is the annual international carnival. I ask McConnaghy what he thinks the Brexit vote will do for this carefully fostered community cohesion. Immigrants were subject to attacks and intimidation when they first turned up in large numbers in Hull in the 1990s. A recent report in the Hull Daily Mail suggests it might be happening again.

McConnaghy shakes his head. “When people say there have been racial tensions on Spring Bank, I’ve got photos from the family fun day that’ll show you Bosnians, Iraqi Kurds, local policemen ... The Kurds have got the bobbies’ helmets on and they’re all dancing round in a circle.”

I hope he’s right. Seeing how McConnaghy and the other volunteers are solving the problems of life on the estate in all its messy, modern complexity might even cure me of my nostalgia. But I still want to have one last go at tracking down Barry Nuttall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nuttall once worked as a garage mechanic, which is how he learned the knack of restoring his growing collection of old military vehicles. Photograph: Hull Daily Mail/SWNS

While I was at the People’s Memorial, someone suggested I go along to the Veterans’ Weekend taking place at East Park a couple of days later. The event flier promises living history displays and re-enactments from the two world wars, as well as British, German and American army camps. There’s bound to be someone who knew Nuttall. If I’m lucky I might even bump into one of his comrades from the Northern Allied Axis Society.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realise the scale of this event, or how popular it would be. East Park is Hull’s biggest green space, and at least a third of it has been given over to displays, exhibits, stalls, fair rides and catering concessions for this annual event. I’m immediately discombobulated by the confusion of sights and sounds. There’s a bunch of Vikings setting up camp under some trees while “Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” floats out from a distant PA.

I’ve been told the living history displays would be a good place to start, so I wander around asking if anyone has heard of Nuttall. No one has, but I do find out something of what makes re-enactors tick. A Wild West dude, cooling his spurs, drawls about the ability to pose being “a pre-requisite”, and I think of Nuttall and his army, and all the press calls they did while they were in the media spotlight. But the Northern Allied Axis Society were about more than that. They were sticklers for rank and order.

Is this common? “Only so far as you need it to put on an effective display,” says David Robinson, of the 16th Lancers First World War Cavalry Display team. “If someone told me to get my hair cut because it looked wrong for the era, I’d do it. You do it because you don’t want to look crap.”

Oil and water

The 30 years since the siege on Wyndham Street haven’t been kind to Hull. As with other left-behind cities in the post-industrial north, the legacy of economic decline isn’t only written in statistics for high unemployment or drug misuse, but also in the poor retention of its everyday architecture.



But this isn’t all the city council’s fault. These days, it’s far more likely to be developers who fail to maintain the old music halls or Methodist chapels in their possession, allowing arsonists and vandals to do their worst until demolition is the only option.

When I ask Brian Lavery whether he thinks the city has suffered from losing so much of its pre-war infrastructure, he says: “Hull’s like oil and water: it always finds its level eventually.”

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Cycling home from East Park, I take a detour through an estate of well maintained brown brick council houses from the 1930s. The road opens out into a broad village green, crowned with a giant beech tree. The effect in the ultra-vivid sunlight of a late summer afternoon is an amazing sense of space.

These were new houses once, I think, but planned well, with an eye to the future. The trouble is, for too many modern developments here, short-term gain appears to be the only consideration. New houses are thrown up wherever developers can find a postage stamp of land to build them on; and they do it with scant regard for neighbourhoods’ wider needs.

Hull might always find its level but, without greater respect for the vital assets that make city life bearable, it won’t be rising any higher. People need parks, shops, pubs, arts venues, safe roads and cycle paths to thrive – and, yes, a few old buildings to remind us where we’ve come from. There is still plenty left in Hull worth protecting – even if we no longer have a made-up major general to man the barricades.

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