Commentary

“2nd Dark Age” (or “Second Dark Age”) is credited to “The Fall” on the Fiery Jack single (1980).

The concept of a second dark age has a number of literary antecedents.

One that MES would certainly have been familiar with is this, from the opening paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu” (first published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, and widely reprinted):

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

First noted by annotatedfall.doomby.com user @Nairng, 26 May 2016, comment #27 (see: https://web.archive.org/web/20240614114616/http://annotatedfall.doomby.com/pages/the-annotated-lyrics/second-dark-age.html).

Footnotes

1. In the British Army, a “glass house” or “glasshouse” is the colloquial name for a military prison. The name derives from the glass roof of the military prison at Aldershot barracks, and came to be applied more generally. The only remaining one is now the Military Corrective Training Centre at Colchester, which the army is keen to emphasise is not a prison but which does have a unit which holds convicts before their transfer to the civilian prison system for sentences over three months. 
   
   Why would “fat conference women” (who?) be applauding their return? 
   
   To answer that we need to go back to 1902, when a youth detention centre – intended to provide places for young offenders who would previously have been sent into prison alongside adults – was opened at Borstal Prison, in a village called Borstal in Kent. The name “Borstal” came to apply to all such institutions until their abolition in 1982 (replaced by “youth custody centres”).
   
   Sentences were indeterminate: youths would be released when deemed “reformed”. To that end, they were supposed to be more about training and remedial treatment than punishment per se, the idea being that young offenders would eventually emerge and be able to get stable jobs, and that reoffending would be low. Whether or not that was true, the Borstals seem to have had problems with bullying, etc.
   
   The Labour government’s Criminal Justice Act, 1948, introduced a range of other institutions to deal with young offending, in particular “Detention Centres”, designed, in language borrowed from The Mikado, to administer a “short, sharp, shock” (see Wikipedia). In The Mikado, it refers to decapitation.
   
   “To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
   In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock
   Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock
   From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.” 
   
   The phrase “There is a type of offender to whom it appears necessary to give a short, but sharp reminder that he is getting into ways that will inevitably land him in disaster,” was used in the parliamentary discussion of the Act.
   
   Unlike Borstals, these Detention Centres were supposed to be all about punishment and deterrence, but convicts would be there only for a limited time compared to a Borstal. The first one opened in 1952. In practice, staff quickly realised that a hardline approach often just would not work, and so the culture softened. They effectively evolved into short-stay Borstals.
   
   The watering down of the “sharp” end of the intended system was objected to particularly on the political right. Hence Margaret Thatcher’s 1961 speech during a parliamentary committee in which she used the phrase “a short, sharp lesson”.
   
   In 1970, a subcommittee of the Advisory Council on the Penal System recommended that detention centres embrace the reforming purposes they had started to pursue in practice. Punishment was satisfied by the removal of liberty; education and training provision should become their main focus. These recommendations were accepted, formalising what was often already happening informally.
   
   But opponents of what they saw as a “soft” approach were never going to be happy with that. They didn’t mind “short” so long as it was “sharp”. Fast forward a few years.
   
   In 1977, during a House of Commons debate on crime, the then Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees said:
   
   “…having read with the greatest interest the report issued by the Conservative Party, I believe that there is no way through on the glasshouse mentality. It is not true, in modern times, that after a quick, short period in the glasshouse with one’s head shaved, one comes out and behaves properly. It is much more complicated than that.”
   
   William Whitelaw, then the opposition Home Affairs spokesman, said:
    
   “It is in connection with custodial sentences that I have proposed short, sharp shock treatment for a small minority of young offenders. The cases I have in mind are those when a magistrate has before him a young man who has been guilty of numerous offences in the past. Clearly, the available sentences, as at present, have not proved successful. The magistrate is reluctant to send such an offender to a long term in prison because he fears that the young man will simply become acclimatised to criminal attitudes there. 
   
   For these cases I have suggested a short sentence at a detention centre run on tough lines. We have had such detention centres in the past, and they have been changed. I compared what I was saying with the Army glasshouse treatment, for one very good reason. Those who experienced treatment there were determined never to return.
    
   This idea has been instantly condemned by some as returning to the dark ages of penal reform. On the other hand, I have had many letters of support, including some from those who experienced such treatment themselves and believe that they benefited from it.”
   
   Whitelaw had been in the Scots Guards during the second world war, hence his use of the military phraseology.
   
   He was still using the phrase “glasshouse” in 1978: 
   
   “I want to go further and have one centre with severer discipline, along the lines of the glasshouse systems in the Services. This would provide a short, sharp, shock sentence under very severe conditions.”
   
   The phrase caught on: the Daily Mirror referred in a headline to “Whiplash Willie’s Glasshouse Justice Plan”. The Times had a headline on 1 March 1978 that referred to “Tory plan for glasshouse regime”. The Guardian printed a critique on 6 March 1978 under the headline “Tory glasshouses don’t make sense”.
   
   The 1979 Conservative Party manifesto stated:
   
   “We need more compulsory attendance centres for hooligans at junior and senior levels. In certain detention centres we will experiment with a tougher regime as a short, sharp shock for young criminals.”
   
   The Conservatives won the election in May 1979.
   
   And so, on 10th October 1979, William Whitelaw spoke to the jubilant Conservative Party conference, as Home Secretary. He confirmed the launch of the new detention centre regime, and was cheered to the rafters.
   
   The Guardian reported on 11 October 1979 (“Tories administer ‘short, sharp shock’ to fight juvenile crime”, by John Hooper, The Guardian, 11 October 1979, p.1):
    
   “Mr Whitelaw said the scheme would be operating by next spring at the latest. He told the Tory party’s annual conference in Blackpool that “from 6.45 a.m. to lights-out at 9.30 p.m. life will be conducted at a brisk tempo.” Which suggests that young offenders will have to carry out tasks “at the double” as in the military “glasshouses.” 
   
   “Much greater emphasis will be put on hard and constructive activities, on discipline and on tidiness, on self-respect and respect for those in authority,” The Home Secretary added. “We will formally introduce drill, parades and inspections. Offenders will have to earn their limited privileges by good behaviour.”
   
   A few weeks later, The Fall debuted “2nd Dark Age” in Derby.  ↩︎
2. At the doomby Annotated Fall, bzfgt was persuaded, following advocacy by user @egg, to change “scooter cabbages” to “pursuit of cabbages”. @egg thought it was a distortion of “the pursuit of happiness”. But it isn’t. It’s “scooter cabbages”. However, I don’t know what “scooter cabbages” are, unless it’s just a disparaging way of referring to scooter riders. ↩︎
3. MES was born at Crumpsall Hospital, subsequently incorporated into North Manchester General Hospital (see Wikipedia). But when he was born, his parents were living at Dorchester Avenue, Prestwich, which is literally just down the road from Sedgley Park and the police training centre (see Google Maps).
   
   On 10 September 1979, Greater Manchester Police officially opened a new training centre at Sedgley Park, Prestwich. It had been operational since August. The 19th century house, set in 11.4 acres of parkland, plus additional teaching and residential blocks, had been the site of a Catholic teacher training college for many years.
   
   I found the followings article in the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide, 7 September 1979, p.8:
   
   
   
   For a report and photograph of the opening event, see Goddard (179). God-bothering chief constable James Anderton (cf. “God’s Cop” by Happy Mondays (1990), and the lines “Cops can’t catch criminals / But what the heck, they’re not too bad, they talk to God” from The Fall’s “Hit the North” (1987)) is quoted by Goddard: “As long as the Greater Manchester Police occupy the building, we will honour and revere the Christian history which has been established in its background.” They are still there.
   
   See prestwich.org.uk for more on the history of Sedgley House and Sedgley Park/Hall. ↩︎
4. This echoes a statement often attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead (but not so far traced to anything she wrote): “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Variations on this go back to the 1960s. Mead died on 15 November 1978, and BBC 2 aired a tribute to her on 6 January 1979 – a repeat of a 1976 Horizon documentary called The World of Margaret Mead.
   
   But “group” also suggests “bands”, and MES may have enjoyed the double meaning ↩︎
5. In early live versions of the song, including its earliest known performance at JB’s, Dudley on 3 November 1979, this line is “Hello, I am Benny out of ABBA.” (i.e. Benny Andersson, see Wikipedia). ↩︎

Sources / Links

• The Annotated Fall: “2nd Dark Age” [Archived]
• Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
• Goddard, Dave (1979). “A dream comes true as police college opens.” Manchester Evening News, 11 September. p.5. [Available online at newspapers.com]
• Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
• Prestwich.org.uk: Sedgley House
• Prestwich.org.uk: Sedgley Park/Hall
• Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
• “Sedgley Police Centre Opens on Monday” (1979). Prestwich and Whitefield Guide, 7 September, p.8.
• Smith, Mark E. (1985). The Fall Lyrik & Texte Von Mark E. Smith. In Deutsch & Englisch. With Drawings by Brix. Berlin: The Lough Press. [AKA The Orange Book. Available online in The Internet Archive]
• Smith, Mark E. (2008). vII. The Lough Press & AMarquisManipulationProductions. [AKA the Blue Lyrics Book]
• Smith Start, Brix (2016). The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise. London: Faber & Faber. [Text available online in archive.org]
• The Track Record: “2nd Dark Age”
• Wikipedia: James Anderton
• Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).