One man's vision is sweet music for Halifax

The two men know one another and HRH, in common with many ordinary

mortals, has been impressed by Hall's flair and drive, his passion for

the value of the arts in enriching everyday working life.

A concert pianist and composer, he bought in 1983 a truly gigantic set

of mills in Halifax, Yorkshire, which had closed, and has transformed

them into the Dean Clough Industrial Park, now home for about 200

ventures employing more than 2500 people. There are paintings on the

walls, string songs

in the corridors of this ''wholly-integrated industrial, educational

and cultural community''. George Melly, the art critic and jazz singer,

was there the other day, opening a new art exhibition.

In a complex of 16 buildings, comprising 1.25 million square feet,

Ernest Hall is working towards his goal of ''Practical Utopia'' -- with

a piano in his office so that he can practise during his spare moments.

Once this was Crossley Carpets. They were supplied to royal palaces,

ocean liners, opera houses and

grand hotels throughout the world. ''Crossley's of Dean Clough'' was a

family firm, seemingly well endowed with a Victorian sense of civic duty

and paternalism. There were brass bands, a choral society and outings to

the dales for retired employees. When it closed seven years ago, the

event was described in a local newspaper as one of the biggest disasters

in Halifax's long industrial history.

Along came Hall, a fresh-faced man almost bewilderingly brimming over

with cultural visions like a new William Morris. After buying the place

and spending what he terms ''a few million pounds'' on it (without

volunteering to say precisely how much) because he would not contemplate

demolition or re-development, he whipped up the support of the local

education authority, businessmen and others for making it a huge

multi-purpose arts and crafts centre. He persuaded the famous Slade

School of Art, London, to establish an ''outstation'' in it. The Open

College of Arts is based there, too.

Next, he hopes to induce the British Council, which promotes British

culture, education and training abroad, to settle there. Alternatively,

he has his sights fixed on another large organisation which would bring

500 people. Only 200,000 square feet of the 1.25 million remain to be

occupied and Hall has no doubts that this will be accomplished fairly

soon. It is a remarkable performance, financed by not a penny of public

money so far.

Within the Dean Clough complex, which has handsomely decorated

interiors, there is to be further exhibition space, a hotel and a

medical centre.

''What makes Dean Clough live is that we have created a place where

artists and craftspeople can create and work with people in business --

in other words, we can learn from them. There is nothing to be learned

from a computer salesman but he and his company's design engineers can

learn from the artists.''

Hall was born the son of a mule-spinner in the Lancashire textile

mills. It was, he recalls, a ''very tough environment''. His parents, in

spite of devoting a great deal to his training in music, were

''basically opposed to education because they thought it would be

divisive and lead to children looking down on their parents''. When he

won a scholarship to grammar school it was with great reluctance that

they let him attend it.

Music was different. Every working-class home at that time, if it had

any money at all, would devote some of it to owning or hiring, for

example, a piano.

He studied piano and composition at the Royal Manchester College of

Music for four years. Later he entered the textile business and in 1961

launched his own, which five years later became a public company. He

continued with his musical interests after he switched to property

development and when he stood down as chairman and joint managing

director of the Mountleigh Group in 1983 it was largely with the

intention of pursuing music even further without being bogged down in

briefings and boardroom decisions. Then he threw himself into the Dean

Clough project for which he has received this year the Guildhall Helping

Hand Award and, just 10 days ago, a special Freedom Award from Aims of

Industry.

Married with five children, he still composes and gives public

recitals. Indeed, over the next 10 years he expects to do more of that

than in the past decade. In his office or at home he likes to take three

hours a day for practice. He favours the concertos of Liszt, Rachmaninov

and Brahms as well as some of his own compositions and those of his

contemporaries. Busoni, the Italian composer of modern, intensely

bravura music, was one of his greatest influences.

Turning to the wider world of business and his ''Practical Utopia'',

he told me that he had been profoundly moved by a remark by Hugh

McDiarmid in a radio programme. ''An interviewer, obviously intent on

trying to trip him up, asked him how he knew there was any connection

between his sometimes obscure poetry and the common man. McDiarmid said

simply: 'My ambition is to eliminate the common man'. I thought that was

magnificent and took it to heart.

''When I started out here at Dean Clough, if I had an ambition, it was

above creating simply commercial success. If you start looking only for

that, you are aiming too low. I wanted to appoint a world that would be

better than the real world -- my view of the Practical Utopia.

''The true answer to people's problems is to lift them above these

problems, to take them beyond anything that informs them with feelings

of personal inadequacy or personal failure, which in the end can destroy

them,'' he says.

Although it has been said before, Hall relentlessly and with a strong

sense of success repeats again and again that art and personal

satisfaction in the means of making a living are inseparable.

Delegations from Western Europe and elsewhere come to see his

incomplete ideal of encouraging ambience. The local authority with pride

welcomes to Halifax the burgomeisters, academics, entrepreneurs and

others, showing off the place he has created where once the old steam

engines cranked and the chimneys belched above the mills.

Mayhap, like, you can almost hear a good brass band give forth with

Parry's setting of Blake's Jerusalem in the deep folds of Calderdale.

Hall, who is supporting a venture by Ken Baynes to bring Children's

Inter-Active Arts Exhibition (to examine how school pupils and young

people have been or are influenced by paintings, sculpture, craftwork,

pop art etc) to Glasgow during European City of Culture 1990 before

setting it up in a children's museum in Halifax, is a director of Sir

Anthony Quayle's touring theatre, Compass. As in everything else, he has

strong views about the worthiness of what should be presented (no West

End farce etc): ''Market values cannot be allowed to reign supreme in

public taste. If you accept that, you decline into the sewers

eventually. You have to fight hard for standards of excellence.''

All in all, that's the gospel according to Hall -- and I can't help

feeling that the late J. B. Priestley would have doted on him, even

though he is a Lancastrian.