PERSPECTIVEuknorth

People of character:

Once, at the beginning of time - or so it now seems -I worked at the Evening Telegraph in Blackburn with a sports editor named Harry Kay. He had a secondary duty: that of writing a column replying to readers' queries. When he ran short of material, he was inclined to take from his drawer an old stand-by: an account of the exploits of a jumper named Jack Higgins.

Nobody ever remarked on this. It was accepted as a ritual. The readers presumably read the account (which was never changed) again and again, and never found the experience wearying. Even the headline was the same -"He was a jumper was Jack Higgins."

I only mention this because I have came across an account of Jack Higgins from another source. Someone gave me a copy of a section from an old book which I shall treasure.

A Mr Oswald North (who he? don't ask) produced a volume in which he wrote about "the champion jumper of the world."

"The curious thing about Mr. Higgins (he said) is that he is considerably below medium stature. being 5ft. 3.in.. in height. He is not yet 26 years of age, and comes from Blackburn, a district famous for the number and variety of athletes it has produced. Higgins's various feats are truly remarkable. whether considered as merely jumps. or as dramatic spectacles, ingeniously contrived and brilliantly executed. Some of Mr. Higgins's feats included -extinguishing a candle on a top hat being worn by a man: jumping over a full size brougham. ringing a bell in flight (which is placed on top of a chair and table) and jumping over 11 cane-bottomed chairs. In this exercise, Higgins remarked that he had to rise five feet and travel 14."

With the piece was a hazy picture which showed Higgins "in the very act of leaping a horse 16 hands high. It will be noticed that the athlete has several inches to spare."

"There are horses and horses." remarked Mr. Higgins to the writer. "Some are so quiet that they to stand there without any attendant at their head. Others, however, are a real source of danger to me. Perhaps just as I am taking off. the brute will rear high into the air: Something like this once laid me up for weeks in Los Angeles. "

I imagine Higgins was on drugs. Everybody drank Fever Cure in those days. And I am still curious to know why it made any difference that the chairs were cane-bottomed. Or is there some double meaning that I'm missing?

Edna the traveller

In the days when life had perks, and the Daily Express doled out free holidays to members of its editorial staff, who then wrote about them, a trip to Italy came my way and there I met Edna Everage. I call her that, although it is not her real name. To be honest, her real name escapes me now, as it did years ago.

The two of us were in a small party of people officially sponsored to write about the glories of such places as Sienna and Florence. We felt quite important being entertained by mayors and bankers and such like. Edna was an Australian lady aged vaguely between 60 and 150. I do not know who employed her, but she was a veteran of the travel-and-tell scene. She was impervious to atmosphere. You could go purple with rage, or froth at the lips at something she said, and she to assume you were suffering from indigestion, or something equally fleeting. A remedy to be rooted from her handbag to revive you.

There we were, then, halfway up the leg of Italy, poised like a human suspender, absorbing culture, and we ended in the foremost musical academy in Europe. Concert pianists came here to brush up their techniques. By coincidence, one of them happened to be Australian, a woman of forbidding talent. She gave us what I thought was an exquisite burst of Chopin and we applauded wildly.

Edna was unmoved. She said, loudly, that it was surprising she had never heard of the pianist, being Australian and that. And the concert pianist, rigid fit to snap, said it was indeed surprising Edna had never heard of her because her music launched Australian television, so there.

Edna did not bat a feather. Our hosts rapidly ushered us out and into a courtyard on the pretext that it had high cultural merit. Yet plainly, there was nothing in this courtyard to interest the millions awaiting our words at home. It was bare of ornament. It was not ancient. It was a courtyard and no more. We had been jailed for Edna's indiscretions.

Edna did not see it in that light. She kept examining the stonework thinking that it must have some historic content, Etruscan, maybe, but we knew better, and thought we might be kept there for ever on her account. Suddenly, from an air vent, came the sound of an adaggic or conta tutti, or whatever they call those things. The pianist had evidently recovered from shock, She was in full flow. Edna raced to this vent, applied her mouth to it, and bellowed, "Bravo! Bravo!" We finally crept away, embarrassed beyond measure.

A couple of the younger lads in our party found a country place which they hoped was a house of doubtful morals and they headed for it, making pleasurable noises, pursued by Edna, who thought they were sneaking off to a restaurant. They ended up smiling thinly at Edna on the car park, hoping she would go away, and she would not. She sat there, in their hired car,looking like their grandmother, chatting about sheep dip and high life in Sardinia, oblivious to hurt, like a piece of Elastoplast.

We had an English guide, a wonderful chap, who had an incredible turn of Italian, none of it useful. He could say, "The cat is in the sewing machine," or, "My wife loves fruit," but he was hopeless if you wanted the post office or bank.
He was not too good an driving, either. Propelling his car along the highway by a tall stone wall, he scraped the side viciously for a distance of at least 20 yards and, upon alighting, refused even to view it. "That was close," he said -his only admission of error.

One night the director of the conservatoire came around and we all drank too much. The director was in tears and singing arias. The guide was on about the cat. Edna kept saying, with total lack of discrimination, "Ah'll ev another of them red ones," when they produced the best wine. As the director was leaving, the guide shook his hand warmly and said in faultless Italian, "I have left my violin in the lavatory". Once more, the director's eyes filled with moisture. It could have been pain.

That same night there was an earthquake and neither the BBC man nor myself went North to cover it. But that is another story and over it, as with Edna, I prefer to draw a veil.

Blaster Bates and the flying fog

In May, I974, a demolition expert named Derek (Blaster) Bates, described on BBC television one of his most memorable experiences... I repeat it here because of cries of nostalgia for Blaster's stuff in one of the news groups. (I have posted it to them.). Here we go:-

I was approached by a large gentleman with moleskin trousers on, with the crossed pockets, leaning well back on the pelvis.

"Here, young fellow," he said. "I want a word with thee."

I said, "What is your trouble, Master?" (That's how they talk round our way.) He said, "It's our septic tank. I've had a very nasty letter from the Council." It was about twice the size of this room and the top of it was like one of those horrible meringues gone wrong, with a six-inch crust on it. I prodded it with a stick and the swine sneered at me.

"Come any closer and I'll have yer!"

My God, it was my duty to destroy it. So we got the big 5Ib sticks of explosive, tied them on the end of the cord and tossed one in. Plunk. It upended. And a big green bubble came up and winked at me. And we heard the most evil chuckle as the swine swallowed it.

I'm sure it thought I was feeding it. There were four and a half thousand tons of effluvient, all of it got to go. We got all the ends together, bit of wire, bit of fuse, detonator. Then the man in moleskins said, "What about him down there?" There's a bloke down the field in a bit of hedge brushing with a blunt hook. I said, "He'll have to shift. He'll get the lot." Twelve seconds later, four and a half thousand tons of effluvient leapt into the air.

It climbed into the sky and, at 300 feet, it mushroomed out, and a shaft of sunlight hit it. You could see all the colours of the starling's wing, the greens and the golds and the browns, light and dark, a lot of bottle-green in it, a lot of pig muck, very sour smell, especially when it's been in there for 82 years.

Then it turned over like an avenging cumulus, and he fled down the field, like Sodom and Gomorrah, very like, and his face went, Ahhh! And he tried to run.

You can't run at 35 mph with clogs on, on wet porridge. He had only made four yards and he was carrying 25Ib on his boots then. Visibly falling, And the second time he came up he got a face full of shite and a double hernia. -The main flight went hissing on its way, then it went to a grey fog and this thing wriggled and writhed on the ground, and then rose up like a phoenix arising from the ashes. The solids had mixed with the liquids and gone into a goo, so he had a pair of multi-coloured gossamer wings.

Fearnley the pearl hunter

Once or twice in life, people come along who are like exotic blooms in a field of buttercups. Such a one was Fearnley Barstow.

He was a spry little man, usually up to his calves in silt, and, at 77, he loved with the passion of the young.

That passion was pearls. All his life, Fearnley had been carrying on a one-sided affair with weeds, snails, leeches, sticklebacks, roach, trout, algae and mussels. Particularly mussels.

Five or six thousand mussels could meet their end in a single day when Fearnley squelched into action with his net and magnifying glass.

And it was this singular application to the aquatic bivalve mollusc of the class Lamellibranchia (not, you understand, his description of it) that made him (yes, these are his words for it) one of the most hunted men in Northern parts.

Pearls. At last we have got around to it. Fearnley Barstow had discovered what he had been seeking all his life: the type of mollusc that, if it really gets down to its art, can provide a pearl worth up to £150 old money. Very old money, in fact, because I came across him in the sixties or early seventies.

It was all secret, Pentagon stuff, of course. He said the mussels were somewhere between five hundred yards, or five hundred miles - he would not be more precise - of his home in Leeds.

Nothing would induce him to say more.

For expeditions to the mussel beds he carried waders, net and magnifying glass and dressed like a tramp. People were inclined to follow him, he said, some of them in cars. Like an aquatic Maigret, he hopped from doorway to doorway, closely pursued, before he disappeared into the fronds and algae of his world. The observers passed by, defeated.

It was not an imposing door that hid Fearnley from prying eyes. But it was one that had more than its share of callers. He forgot many of the names, he said; a luxury he could afford at 77.

"But the other day," he said, "there was a gent from Hatton Gardens, London (where they deal in precious things, indeed) and we had a little chat."

"What happened?" I said. "You can say," declared the old man, "that Mr Barstow would not divulge what was said." I made a careful note of it.

"You are sure," said Fearnley, "that you would not like to talk about ice skating? I teach it. Won the North of England championship in 1920."

"About mussels," I said. "That’s secret," he replied. "But you can say that, in the past, if it grew above, under or around water, I sold it.

"A gentleman once wanted 10,000 baby molluscs to rid his water of algae. I got them all right at £8 per thousand."

"About mussels," I said. "How did it happen?"

"We were on holiday," he said. "We were looking for bulrushes at the time. And there it was, exactly the mussel I had been looking for all my life."

Could there be a fortune in it? No doubt, no doubt, said Fearnley. It is a question of recognising, among all the anonymous mussels, the ones that hide their little treasures like duchesses in Debrett.

We went to a small pond where he demonstrated his techniques - net waving, magnifying glass brandishing, and so forth. A swan hissed at him as he passed and he waved it away imperiously. Then he entered the water for pictures to be taken, holding up his net so that drops were illuminated by the sun as they fell. It was all very poetic. Of course, the pond was one of his choosing - not the mussel bed he had discovered.

I watched, fascinated, as the pictures were taken. I saw that as Fearnley was encouraged to go deeper and wave his net higher, the water came close to the rim of his Wellingtons. Then came a point where the water actually reached the rim and seemed to go above it for a moment without entering, before it sluiced down with the hint of a chuckle.

It was at that point that the awful truth struck him. "This watter," he said, "has gone reight down my bloody boot."

And there the conversation was discontinued for all time.

The North's champion eater

A MUCH-ADMIRED EATER in Lancashire drank on a similar scale and deserved credit on both counts. He had much in common with the bottomless pit. Four or five Amontillados at the premises of the Messrs Yates would be followed by several pints of ale, and at half time (around 9 p.m. on a Saturday night) he would take, for purposes of resuscitation, a pound of tripe before moving on to several more pints of ale. Sometimes, towards the end, that ritualistic time of night when the doors were closing and the lads were shredding each other on the boulevard, he sweated a little, but he never swayed, which is just as well. He was a rotund person. Had he ever fallen on a hill, he would have rolled for miles.

On Friday nights, greens, in the form of radishes, lettuces, spring onions and so forth, floated in his bath, which was half filled with water, and they covered its surface to a depth of six inches or so. He ate them all, on his own, over a week-end. One imagines that in hard times, he would have cropped a small field. I accompanied him on some of his expeditions, a pale shadow attempting to keep pace with this remarkable and portly substance, and not really fit company for someone as accomplished as him. He had done the grand tour of Europe in his early manhood, and by some curious alchemy, this propelled him towards a lifetime of betting,

He used to say that no-one knew what betting was until they had spent time in the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool waiting for the New York cotton spot prices to come in. I seem to recall some dispute at that hotel involving how much tripe my friend could eat. Some might well have suggested that he could speak rather more than he could eat. The argument became heated, so everyone involved went in dark of night to a tripe shop and roused the proprietor. There was a weigh-in before the devouring. At any rate, my friend proved whatever point he was choosing to make,

We were in a pub together once when some stranger arrived who seemed to be the most travelled man in the world. My friend latched on to him and they had an animated, if one-sided conversation. It took in most of,the capitals of Europe together with their most notabl hotels, streets, chefs, claims to fame and so on. My friend not onlv knew each one mentioned, but added bits and pieces of his own information, all of it of an intimate nature. The much-travelled man, who remained virtually wordless throughout, eventually left, and as he disappeared beyond the pub door, my friend shook his head admiringly and said, 'What a character!'

A national newspaper once published a picture of a horse race in progress during a violent and sudden rainstorm, and there they were streaking about in the mud with only one spectator at the rails. It was my rotund friend, of course, recognisable immediately by his shape and general air of absorbed attention. He was some sort of legend, but by no means the greatest legend, and I reckon I saw the best of him before he vanished, quite inexplicably, arriving eventually at Barrow in Furness, that drip on the nose of Britain dedicated to the building of ships in monotonous isolation.

His reputation lived on in East Lancashire, and in Blackburn and Darwen (where he made his home for much of his time) in particular. The great eating days had gone in Darwen when I went to re-awaken memories in the early 'seventies, and he was then the echo rather than the substance. The man who inspired real awe was named Cecil. I had not previously met Cecil though I had, of course, heard of his great devourings. He was serving at his market stall. There were no rivals within reach or sight but now, he said, he was 'troubled with my stomach.' I am not surprised. His stomach had been troubled by Cecil for long enough.

He was seventy-nine, he said, and saw no reason to recall the days when, with a bite and a gulp, he built his massive reputation. So we stood there, awkwardly, Cecil declaring, perhaps out.of modesty, that he would say nothing, a mutual friend and myself prodding gently; and finally, he relented.

'I could eat a hundred oranges as fast as anybody could quarter them with a blade,' he said. I knew that. Everyone within fifty miles knew it. In the last gasps of their lives, Darwen people still held the vision of a hundred oranges on a bar top. I looked suitably surprised, however, to encourage him. An old woman who fingered his lettuces and declared them not up to standard was eyed with disdain by the great devourer and dismissed as an irrelevance. Cecil acknowledged, in full, the magnificence of his stomach and listed its achievements. "A hundred oranges and then I'd go home and have a meal.' 'He did,' my companion confirmed. 'I know that.' Then he added, 'His ripping teeth have gone. He used to rip quarter oranges out of the peel with one movement.'

Someone once challenged Cecil that he would eat a hundred oranges faster, but he never turned up. 'Ten pounds of tripe in ten minutes,' said Cecil. 'I'd eat that.' 'That's a good-sized bucketful,' said my guide, 'but of course, it was seasoned to his palate.'

'-and one day,' said Cecil, 'I went to market and it was raining so I called in a pub and began to play darts. I was drinking stout and got interested in the game, and eventually I said, "I'll just have another." 'No, you won't,' said the landlord.'"Why?' asked Cecil. 'Have I spoken out of turn?'

'No,' said the landlord. 'There isn't any. You've gone through six dozen bottles. I know, because I was carrying them upstairs when you came in.'

'And that,' said my guide later-because we were hushed with respect at the time-'was non-competitive, you understand.'

'I used to bet £2,' said Cecil, 'plus the cost of the food or drink.' The woman at the tripe stall across from Cecil's overhearing all this, said she would not mind someone having a go at her stock, someone like Cecil. Cecil waved his acknowledgement: it was reminiscent of the queen's royal gestures as she proceeds through throngs of her subjects.

'I once saw a chap on a market,' he said, 'and he had a lot of pies left on his stall. I asked him, "Have you had a good day?" and he said, "No - look at all these." I said, "There's nowt there. I could eat the lot." ' He did, too, for a £2 bet. Cecil saw the stallholder again some time later and it was the start of a day, the stall high with pies. 'Do you want to double up?' asked Cecil. 'Four pounds and I'll eat the lot?'

'Not likely,' said the trader. 'You'd eat t'dam'd stall, you would.' Cecil said that in the,old days he had a big stalk of bananas and he would take off a bundle, perhaps eighteen at a time, and eat them between serving customers.

We left the old man eyeing his own mountain of greenery, but the champion's jaws were stilled, the nostrils unflared, the ripping teeth blunted and discarded, the gastric juices in disarray: before us had stood the only man in living memory thereabouts who could eat his own height in meat pies.

'There have been some great bets in these parts,' said my guide, but you know the one bet no eater will take?' I said I did, for my education had not been entirely neglected: pigeon a day for a month.

'That's it,' said my guide. 'I know people who would eat a couple of dozen at a go without trouble, but no-one would eat one a day for a month. Something to do with a pigeon not digesting inside twenty-four hours.'

I said we had better keep that one to ourselves. There's a fortune in knowledge like that if you use it the right way.

Neutered Britain

A national day to promote a stronger sense of British identity was suggested by two government ministers. And by coincidence I have been on the same track - by following the Duke of Wellington's feisty campaign against Napoleon's generals in Spain. It has told me more about this island's spirit past or present than anything in my morning newspapers.

Questions that emerged: Who are we? A nation strong in traditions, an example to others, with a sense of purpose and resolve? Or a nation weakened by handouts, a nation with a youth that has little to commend it; a nation past its best, petrified of causing offence to others, made rigid by political correctness, discredited in the world by an imperial past? We are a chameleon nation, all things to all men, and no thing to many men.

I read (late by more than half a century, I admit) The Age of Elegance, by Arthur Bryant, a man called, by A. L. Rowse, "our best historical landscapist."

"Love of country," he wrote of Britain, "was something that transcended class or rank. Looking at that landscape of splendid properties and at the country's mansions, banks, markets, warehouses and factories, it was easy to account for the patriotism of the upper and middle classes.

"Remarkable was the national pride of the poor, their instinctive belief in the superiority of their country and its ways of life, and their unfailing readiness to die for it.

"Theirs was a deep, sensitive love of its beauty, of its peaceful civilisation and free traditions. At farm feast or in village alehouse, the artless chorus would rise, a warning to foreign tyrants who put their trust in lawless strength:

The race is not always got

By them wot strive and for it run,

Nor the battel to them peopel

Wot's got the longest gun.

"For all its harshness and injustice, such simple folk thought there was no country like their own."

All this, you remember, within sight and sound of the French revolution that destroyed its monarchy, freed its people, and set Napoleon on his trail of conquest.

When I researched a murder of 1863 for a book questioning a conviction, I wrote: "This is an age when, in the darkness of night, people are either leaving work or going to work. Pieces of burning coal are put out on the pit banking to serve as beacons for the colliers arriving for their shift - for how else would they find their place of employment?" Intense patriotism - through all that? Through all that Dickensian land of harsh daily life and deprivation?

Now, throughout this free-wheeling country with its protective employment laws, this country of free medical care and State handouts, there does not appear to be a sense of national pride. It has gone. It is obliterated, out of fashion, or, if it shows itself at all, it is watered down to suit others. National purpose, if it exists, is obscured. We are the neutered products of our own past. In becoming Europeanised we have become neutered. We have lost values.

Conversely, the prides of Scotland and Wales as single entities have been re-ignited. Thus cohesion is lost, and national patriotism is lost. People who died for King and country in two world wars did so with intense patriotism. Monarchy was the centre-point of all we were. God was on our side and no-one else's. Now? They are betrayed by ridicule. Derision is the essence of this age: quasi comedians queue up on TV to mock everything including Church and State, for both are good for a quick sneer and a laugh. And individuals in all this - where do they stand? Not highly at all, alas. Too many fingers in too many tills.

"A man's reputation as a gentleman was looked on as his most valuable possession," wrote Bryant. "Any action, or even association, incompatible with it was regarded as a stain which must be immediately expunged. This accounted for the extreme sensitivity with which public men reacted to any slight on their honour, vindicating it, if necessary, in some dawn encounter with pistols. Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning, Wellington and Peel all risked their lives in this way while holding high office."

Again, there seems little point in defining the difference between individuals then and now: the contrasts are startlingly evident to everyone. There are areas of national life where the word honour is no more than a relic.

People in Regency days were graded. In democratic terms that was a bad thing. In practical terms it is what held society together. Everyone knew his or her place. "The English liked the rich to be splendid, ostentatious and free with their money. it was what, in their view, the rich were for... The ideal of equality which had so intoxicated the French had as yet made little impression on the British mind."

That is a remarkable and surprising fact. The lasting significance of the revolution was in its recognition that power could be held by ordinary citizens, not king or God.

People growing older invariably regret the past because it has become a comfort to the memory and events that have run their course have lost their threat. But it is surely sad that we seem determined to forget those ideals of patriotism that caused our fathers, grandfathers, and great great grandfathers to respect their heritage and, if necessary, die for it: not for some idealistic principle such as "freedom" or "democracy", words banded about today in an international context, and virtually meaningless under examination.

Bryant concluded: "The splendours of Regency society, the power and wealth of early 19th-century Britain, seemed brassy and eternal to the men and women of the time. So did the destitution and degredation that accompanied them. To poor and rich they appeared to be unchangeable - part of a divine, or, as many had begun to suspect, a diabolical ordinance. The poets taught otherwise. They could not change the laws or the harsh economic phenomena of the age, or arrest the cumulative evils to which those phenomena gave rise. But they could make men want to change them."

Change.

There is an over-worked word. What is the word that politicians in America heading, they hope, for the White House most employ? Change.

We must never cease to hope. But forgive a note of cynicism: I think Dr Bryant might agree.

• The Age of Elegance, Arthur Bryant, the Reprint Society, London, 1954.

The soldier

1812, Wellington in Spain, and here, the spirit of a soldier as taken down by a subaltern of the 34th - later, the Border Regiment - from the lips of his laundress, the wife of one of his Irish soldiers.

"Yer honour minds," she said, "how we were all kilt and destroyed on the long march last winter, and the French at our heels, an' all our men droppin' an' dyin' on the roadside, waitin' to be killed over again by them vagabonds comin' after us. Well, I don't know if you seed him, sir, but down drops poor Dan, to be murdered like all the rest, and says he, `Biddy dear, I can't go no furder one yard to save me life.'

'Dan jewel,' sis I, `I'll help you on a bit; tak' a hould av me, an' throw away your knapsack.' `I'll niver part wid my knapsack,' says he, `nor my firelock, while I'm a soger.' `Dogs then,' sis I, `you 'ont live long, for the French are comin' up quick upon us.' Thinkin', ye see, sir, to give him sperret to move, but the poor crather hadn't power to stir a lim'; an' now I heerd the firin' behind, and saw them klllin' Dan, as if it was! So I draws him up on the bank and coaxed him to get on me back, for, sis I, `the French will have ye in half an hour, an' me too, the pagans'; in thruth I was just thinkin' they had hould av us both, when I draws him up on me back, knapsack an' all.

'Throw away your gun,' sis I. `I won't,' says he, `Biddy, I'll shoot the first vagabond lays hould av your tail,' says he. He was always a conthrary crather when anyone invaded his firelock. Well, Sir, I went away wid him on me back, knapsack, firelock, and all, as strong as Samson for the fear I was in; an' fegs, I carried him half a league after the regiment into the bivwack; an' me back was bruck entirely from that time to this, an' it'll never get strait till I go to the Holy Well in Ireland, and have Father McShane's blessin', an' his hands laid over me.'

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

21 May, 2007