Perspective / Retrospective
Accrington Stanley, Alan Bennett, Eddie Braben, My cruel sea, Derek Jamieson, Roy Farran, Charles Lamb, the Sam's Chophouse Gang, Lake District, the Martyrs of Clay Cross. Edmund Spenser - The poet and his hard times; The Nowells of Read Hall. Cecil the Mink. Oh, to be a countryman. Technology rampant, Rosie Boot. The Paslew Saga, Cooks and all that Les at 100, Wellington's England remembered, Pendle Witches
15 October 2006
Like Clint clip-clopping slowly in from the open range, Accrington Stanley rides into town again – lean, hungry, much-ridiculed until now, once a joke, always much loved: the great sun of its resurrection has burst over the place where I learned my journalism.
They are back in the Football League. In the 1950's there was a conversation on an Accrington tram describing a full-back's dalliance with another man's wife. His efforts apparently led to him being shot. “Aye,” said someone discussing this event, “that bullet were t' only thing he ever stopped.”
Stanley departed the league in 1962 and it has been a long wait in the wilderness for this moment. A venerable club. On the afternoon of Monday, 14 September, 1891, before 3,000 spectators at Wolverhampton, another of its full-backs, in an act of desperation, turned himself into a goalkeeper and a new rule was enforced. This, gentlemen, was the very first penalty. In football terms – magic, unbelievable.
I was employed in Accrington in the fifties. The Accrington Observer paid me 12s 6d a week (just over 50p) to read proofs, run errands for the joint managing director, and report on minor matters at week-ends. I never once got to report on Accrington Stanley. This was reserved for the important seniors, Bill Palmer - who turned to walls and tried to climb up them whenever he laughed, which was often – and Frank Kitchener, whom I thought very rich indeed because his wife had a shop.
We did not have our own names. We were Centurion, or Ajax. I was Rex. My words were based on cricket. I missed the good years of Stanley and, equally, missed the dark years. In the mid1950's, Harry Crossley, son of the boss whose errands I had attended to, was editor of the Observer and he wrote a song called On, Stanley, On. They were the words last spoken by Marmion in Sir Walter Scott's epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field, and the Stanley referred to was Edward, son of the first Earl of Derby. In 1963 the club went bankrupt and as an observer of the time said, it was now Gone, Stanley, Gone. There was always a movement to restore the club to greatness, to rescue it once for all from the grubby notebooks of comedians out for a one-liner.
There were heroes here, and Bill Parkinson was one of the greatest. In 1968 he called a meeting in a working men's club to test support for a team that would bear the town's name. It was packed to the doors. The climb-back had begun. From 1968 to 1970 he and his friends were in a flurry of raffle tickets as they fought for money. The weekly wage bill for the first season was £25. The manager, Jimmy Hincksman, got £5. The following season, Stanley won the league and Combination Cup. Where did Parky find his home? Why, Stanley-street, of course. There is a book called An Accrington Mixture, edited by an ex-policeman turned publisher named Bob Dobson. Accrington Stanley is there, of course – pages 100 and 101. My contribution – The Accrington Observer Observed – is on pages 124 and 125. So Stanley and me are separated in print, as we always were, but not in spirit. Time I closed the gap: Well done!
26 April 2006
Late at night, sitting with the dog, television off, I was reading Alan Bennett's Lady in the Van. Not for the first time. And for a long time afterwards, drifting into sleep, I was trying to work out what it was about the story that was so satisfying. Here we had a middle-aged and successful writer, getting on with his plays and observations, and suddenly, as if from heaven - or its opposite - there descended upon him a lady with a van. A lady a little potty, a little dignified, a little lost, and lonely foisted on someone reticent, talented, observant and with a deep social conscience. There you have all the ingredients of life. And of course, Bennett made the most of it.
"I ran into a snake this afternoon," Miss Shepherd said. "It was coming up Parkway. It was a long, grey snake - a boa constrictor possibly. It looked poisonous..." Miss Shepherd's van came to a permanent halt at Bennett's house in Camden Town, London, in 1971. For 20 years the dilemma of Miss Shepherd became the dilemma of Alan Bennett - she living in a smelly mess outside his front door; he resisting the tides of her advance on his life as well as he was able.
"The nuns up the road have taken to doing some of her shopping. One leaves a bag on the back step of the van this morning. There are the inevitable ginger nuts, and several packet of sanitary towels.. They form some part of her elaborate toilet arrangements, and are occasionally to be seen laid drying across the soup-encrusted electric ring. As the postman says this morning, ' The smell sometimes knocks you back a bit.'" And she died there. He had to sort out the smelly evidences of her existence, and question his conscience and moralities in the process.
Bennett's art is to take the apparently trivial - his mother's views of "her betters" and so on - and make them meaningful in much larger ways. Miss Shepherd tested all his beliefs and inhibitions one by one. The two of them existed together, but in worlds apart, like aliens. And yet, I suspect, it was the sameness that reached furthest into the writer's psyche. His long essay on Miss Shepherd is superb. Even on the second reading, I was laughing out loud, to the disgust of the dog,, and in the next sentence feeling for Bennett's own agony. So you have this magic formula, where the relationship between two people over 20 years can match the life experiences of us all. Leaving questions -
Whose was the great dilemma, Bennett's or Miss Shepherd's? Who benefited most from the relationship, the woman helped with shopping and pushing the van, or Bennett who immortalised her in print? George Bush has his Miss Shepherd now in the form of the Iranian leader. Blair has his Cameron, Berlusconi his Prodi. And the fellow down the road has his pools nights where teams from surrounding pubs arrive to challenge his skills and, by their incompetence, raise his spirits to ecstasy or, by their prowess, plunge him into despair, where only the pint glass ahead of him is the signpost to a little peace. All problems, whether great or minuscule, expand to fill the empty mind. What's the difference between them all? Not much. 23 april 2006
October 2006
I talked with Eddie Braben at Liverpool Football Club when he was writing Morecambe and Wise scripts. but it is only now that I know of the torments of that time.Braben (I read) had been writing for Ken Dodd for years when he was asked by Billy Cotton to change course. "It wasn't London I disliked. It was what happened there.
Three men (Eric and Ern with producer) sitting at a table, passing judgments, who'd eventually reach a verdict on something I had sweated blood over for over three weeks. You know: fourteen hours a day, which isn't an exaggeration, and all I could do was sit and wait. It was horrible. And eventually, there'd be the initial laugh that would break the silence - what a relief!" So Braben stayed in Liverpool and John Ammonds, in charge of production for the BBC, would phone him for long discussions on what had been said. Alterations were called for. It had to be very tactful. Ammonds said: "We were all guilty at some time or other of pushing Eddie a bit too hard.
I certainly wasn't ever easy on him. But Eric and Ernie could really pile the pressure on to Eddie at times - when they were feeling pressure, too - and I'd have to remind them: 'Look - it's not like a tap, you know. You just don't turn it on and get a load of great material and good sketches and good gags gushing out.' It takes a very rare talent, actually to write comedy - top-class comedy - under that kind of pressure." So there was a degree of insecurity hanging around, and yet, Braben was the writer who made Morecambe and Wise flourish as never before. It was an inspired relationship.
They had left Sid and Dick behind, left ITV behind, and Billy Cotton had given them the broad canvas on which they could best work at the BBC. Perfect. And Braben observed each of the duo to such a degree that he etched in and emphasised their individual characteristics so that people were no longer viewing comedians telling jokes: they were close to them in a much more meaningful way. It was more intimate, more like the relationship between Laurel and Hardy. So that is what made Morecambe and Wise the most loved pair on television. Graham McCann competently tells all in Morecambe and Wise (Fourth Estate, London). Best line in the book is from Joe E. Lewis referring to American show host Ed Sullivan: "He could brighten a room just by leaving it."
10 May 2007
To that little lower droop of the Lake District which reveals, in all its treachery, Morecambe Bay. The weather woman had promised better fare than we got. What we got was a glowering sky and whipping wind. We took ourselves to Silverdale, then Arnside, which is a few shops and houses overlooking the bay. When the children were young, which is a long, long time ago, the tide came up through the sand and began to pull my Mini Cooper like a bad tooth down and down. The water was half way up the wheels as a hysterical creature ran to a farmhouse and disturbed the farmer at lunch. The farmer was not impressed by that creature's dilemma. I know. I was the creature. He went on chewing his cud while I danced about in anguish. He had seen it all before. But he nevertheless stirred himself and got a tractor. And when he reached the area of disaster, various people were trying to dig the car out of the sands.
It was still going down. He dare not stop in case he, too, went down. He circled. He told me to attach his rope to a bumper. I said it would drag off the bumper. But I attached it anyway, because I had no choice. It dragged off the bumper. Thereafter there was much shouting and milling about, what with bystanders and helpers and resolute farmer, and my interested children, whose holiday was about to be spent on a bus. Eventually the car came loose, and was dragged clear, and we were mobile again. But much saddened.I distributed currency with mad abandon to my rescuers - a sure sign of hysteria. I remembered all that today as I glowered out at those sands.
I perched my car well up on the shore line where the flinty rocks were, ready for a quick exit should that malignant sandpit creep closer. And then we walked the dog in that lashing wind skirting the bay. It was violent enough to suggest to my mind that I could credibly cry "Mush" Mush" to our leaping creature. He was ecstatic at so much dog excreta lying about and leapt from one offering to another to nuzzle it with great enthusiasm. He is hand-reared but I can not recall teaching him that. I noted that half a dozen cars were parked near mine overlooking the bay and all contained old fellows and biddies. They stared without expression, some chewing slowly. One old fellow got out of his vehicle, went to the boot, inspected the contents, got back in the front seat, and came out ten minutes later to repeat the whole useless process. "My word,"
I observed to my wife, "he's lively today." We went back to the village and could not get a proper lunch because of the dog. We could not enter premises. We could have sat on a picnic seat outside one pub but it was covered in globules of water. We got sandwiches and coffee at a cafe take-away. For the first and only time in my life I found a use for the can holders in the car. My wife admired hers for ages. She had never used one before either. It occurred to both of us that - apart from being offensive - a recent TV programme on ageing drivers criticising their abilities is well clear of reality.
It is the white-shirt-black-trousers-small-moustache-sunglasses driver who terrorises the roads, leaping from lane to lane and achieving 90 in no time. He does that (I recall) because he is driving a company car and it won't cost him a penny if he bends it. The fact that he might be killed or maimed doing so is a thought too far for black moustaches and sunglasses. A further thought occurred: If it were not for ageing drivers half the village pubs and restaurants in the country would go bankrupt. These regiments of totterers are the backbone of the national economy. We were home by 3pm after ploughing through places with such names as Milnthorpe and Crooklands. The dog enjoyed it. That's the comforting thought.
November, 2005
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread... Ah, there you are. I was just ruminating on a little anecdote that came my way in a newsletter about former members of the Daily Express staff. It concerned Derek Jamieson, once editor of the Daily Express and prime mover behind The Star.
A writer named Michael O'Flaherty had written a story about Winston Churchill lying in state and had used the word catafalque. This, so the account went, enraged Jamieson. He was of the Christiansen tradition. Arthur Christiansen was the greatest of Express editors, reigning when its circulation exceeded 4,000,000, and he was strict on words. They had to be plain. They did not have to leave any question the reader might have unanswered. And if a curious word was used it had to be explained. "Jamieson," said the newsletter, " exploded and invited me into his office. 'What's this word catafalque?' he said, pronouncing it catafalkwee.' I tried to explain that it was a raised platform on which the body of the deceased lay. 'I am not having a word like catafalkwee in my newspaper," declared the irate Jamieson. 'Call it a platform.'
I explained that there was no real synonym for cataflque (pronouncing it correctly). 'I said call it a platform,' shouted Jamieson. And so Churchill went down immortally in the Daily Express as 'lying on a platform.' "Railway stations," said O'Flaherty, "have never been the same since." I have no doubt that Jamieson used the mispronounced word catafalkwee to show his disdain for it. He boomed in a Cockney accent and liked to be a man of the people. I knew him in London Features, and he was an extremely good sub-editor. (I could tell a very good story proving that point, but I am not going to. ) Then he became mighty with a black overcoat and executive escorts and his voice went louder. At that point, I felt that his belief in simplicity was over-emphasised.
I was not keen on his drift as an editor. I felt good writers were too restricted by his insistence on short features so that personality was being reduced in a paper noted for personalities. Be that as it may, it is why I was ruminating. I began to wonder how Jamieson would have his reporters come up with the Lord's Prayer: Our dad in heaven, you've always had a good name; I'll give you that. And I hope it keeps that way because everybody I know thinks you're ace. So make sure we have a bit of good grub on our plates to prove the point. Don't be hard on us when we do wrong things and use the short words you don't like. And on our part, we won't hold it against those who do the same to us. Save us from all nasty things - if anybody can do that, you can. And let's hope it lasts. Amen. Oh, and a little addition: Make it a long time before I am laid by thee on a platform. And thanks, our dad. Jamieson went on from various editorships to be a loud and opinionated voice on radio and television. He is, I believe, now in Florida. Florida, I dare say, will not be unaware of it.
12 June 2006
There were two articles on the obituaries page of the Daily Telegraph: one dealt with Major Roy Farran and the other had the headline, “Revealed – Dante in all his glory.” I thought at first that the headlines had been transposed. Roy Farran DSO, three MCs, Croix de Guerre, American Legion of Merit, three times recommended for the VC, was a one-man force. He was unpredictable. Was he brave – or foolhardy? Was he a planner or an exhibitionist? Did he vanquish fear, or totally lack any sense of it?
Whatever the answer, every paragraph of his obituary – he died at the age of 85 – could have inspired a book. He sees a party of Germans escorting a group of 40 hospital patients who had been taken prisoner. He kills the guards. He retakes a village, is wounded in both legs and an arm, is taken prisoner, and gets his first MC. He is flown to hospital in Athens and escapes, wherupon he is passed from house by Greek peasants. He is appointed ADC to general Jock Campbell, VC, commander, 7th Armoured Division. in North Africa, and overturns the car he is driving so that the general is killed. He joins Colonel Bill Stirling and becomes second in command of an SAS squadron. With a detachment of SAS, he drops behind German lines and creates mayhem. Second MC. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... Nobody ever knew what he was up to. With Lt Col. P. H. Labouchere, OBE, happily in charge of the 3rd Hussars, Farran – I happen to know because I was serving with them too - was writing to friends at the War Office suggested that the regiment might be best employed as the armoured element of 6 Airborne Division.
And so it came to pass, to the surprise, I think, of the colonel, whose main claim to fame was that wherever he stopped in battle, he built latrines as a first priority. >When the camp was raided by people in Airborne uniforms, Farran was to be seen running towards the main gate waving a revolver and shouting to anyone who would listen, “Come on. We can cut them off.” The raiders had just tied up the adjutant and left him next to a bomb at the ammunition dump. One night, he crept into the orderly room with a woman and he was making sh-ing noises. They vanished into the darkness of the colonel's office and reappeared later, shushing again.
Next day, Farran accused the corporal on duty in the orderly room of being asleep. The reply was: “Sir, you arrived at 23.42 hrs with a lady, asked her to be quiet, walked past me and into the colonel's office. You did not switch on the light. You were there 24 minutes and when you left you closed the door quietly.” Farran decided no further action was necessary. His thoughts did not follow normal patterns. When he felt the propaganda war was being lost in Palestine his instincts were to go to Jerusalem and call a Press conference to tell the English correspondents what life was all about. Farran won a DSO in the name of Patrick McGinty, from a song about an Irish goat swallowing a stick of dynamite. He was likely to disobey orders if he thought it necessary and instinctively he was a mercenary. He would progbably have been court-martialled for an attack in Italy. He expected it. But he had, in the process, assisted the Americans and they gave him the Legion of Merit. So he escaped again. He did some kind of covert job for the Palestine Police.
His brother was killed by a bomb in England thereafter. Farran ended in Alberta where he was a city alderman, minister of telephones and utilities, solicitor-general and heaven know what. At 80 he broke his back for the sixth time while herding cows. He had throat cancer; his larynx was removed; but he talked through a hole in his throat and returned to public speaking.The obvious words that come to mind are: We shall never see his like again. In Farran's case, the words are not a cliché. They are absolutely, unquestionably true
.Charles Lamb - Kissing and congeeing
November, 2005
When I was 14 or 15 I was looking for elevation in life. I did not know where to find it - in pictures, in travel, in companionship. It turned up, by accident, in a piece by Charles Lamb - Imperfect Sympathies, first published in the London Magazine of August, 1821. And more specifically in a single phrase. Lamb did not relish "the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable." (Political correctness had not been born and he was rash in his assumptions.) No.
"The reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue - and here it comes, the phrase that glued itself to my progress through a longish life - "kissing and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility."It was poetry at the time. It is arrogant balderdash now. But there is magnificence in it, too. "Kissing and congeeing." I never did know what the latter word meant, and when - just now - I sought an answer, none came. Not in the online Oxford dictionary, nor in Chambers (where I did not expect it);' nor anywhere else for that matter.Lamb was impish. I did not know it when I first came across him. But he was impish as Voltaire was impish. Impishness gets you anywhere and everywhere.
I even found Dr Daitetz Suzuki quoting Voltaire in a speech on Buddhism given to the Emperor of Japan.Had I realised that Lamb was impish I would not have been a plague on the combined sub-editors of an evening newspaper that employed me. I would not have invented my own pontifical phrases and showered them with pseudo-intellectual rubbish. But I was Lambed when I needed to be Lambasted. They tolerated me. They took out my more extravagant phrases. And while they did it, I devoured more of Lamb and his impishness:"I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me - and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it."Could I ever have taken him seriously?
Or Dr Johnson when he said that the most pleasant prospect for a Scotsman was the high road leading to England? Back to Lamb who, surely, would have been reported to the Race Relations panjamdrums for this: "In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these "images of God cut in ebony". But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them — because they are black."
He was having his little joke at my expense.It took years to drive ponderous phrases from my head. I was helped by a news editor who warned me not to keep slipping poetry into my theatre reviews. Theatre! It was small-time stuff where I could not criticise the players (because they and their friends were readers and we needed them all), so I criticised the authors, such as Oscar Wilde, because he was not a reader. "From a comedy in three acts, this presentation plunged into a drama of two intervals," I wrote once - because the intervals were over-long and people were forgetting what they had seen in the preceding section of the play. Who would have thought that so much commotion could have been caused by being exposed to three words at too early an age? "Kissing and congeeing." Only I cared for them. And I have not come across a human being since who could explain congeeing to me. It will come. Some time. And meanwhile, Lamb is laughing in his heaven.
15 May 2007 (Picture: Edward Rawlinson)
There are few places, these days, where you can see old journalism rampant. But it showed its colours in Manchester at a place that is a shrine to its past: Sam's ChophouseOld journalism was insecurity, hard work, outrageous behaviour, a determination to win, a monastery, a commitment that no college could teach and which only birth and experience could temper, booze at the right times and sometimes the wrong, writers with phrases sent directly from heaven who could hack it through half a dozen large whiskies; it was like the police used to be, in a way - a fraternity, a band of soldiers in suits.
This meeting of a few people in Manchester was to remember such things and, specifically, to record the fact that Stanley Blenkinsop, news editor of the old Daily Express, and Gordon Amory, who, principally, ranged Newcastle upon Tyne and the north-east as an Express photographer after working in Manchester, were marking the 62 years they logged up between them after joining what they care to call the World's Greatest in April-May, 1957.
There we were, then; and there was Manchester. A Manchester that, I swear, reinvents itself, every time I visit it, in brick, steel and concrete and which, even as I watched, was changing its shape. A confident city, this; not one I have much affection for in itself, but good enough to challenge any other I can think ofMy affection was for the immediate surroundings of the great black palace of Express Newspapers: the Land o' Cakes, Yates's, where a woman named May ruled, the Crown and Kettle, once a magistrates' court, and Sam's.
Sam's was regarded as the editor's place. Editors took people there and reduced them or enhanced them according to performance or whim. Sam's shut out the world completely. If it was raining outside, or sunshining, or if it was besieged by aliens, it made no difference in Sam's. There was a little nook where you could drink large sherries from the barrel before lunch, and there you were cocooned against the entire universe.One editor was known as a lunch appointment. Another held a cigar in his mouth by means of a match inserted into the end and thence in his teeth. "Editors," said a journalist of the time, "always disappoint. You wind them up, put them on the table, and off they go clanking along, and always, they fall off at the other end." He was near enough right, but some went on to greatness.
After large sherries, there was wine at the table. And after wine, brandy. Always we discussed work. What to do, how to do it, where to go and by which path - work, work. The office car would call at 3.30 for the return to the glass palace. I recall one editor saying, as we entered it, "Now - let us get back there and DO it." Alas, we went back there all right, but he was left to do it. I had a beneficial rest at my desk and was in the Land o' by 5.30 for a livener before taking the train home. Life is full of good intentions.You now realise why this celebration for Stanley and Gordon was by way of the Crown and Kettle and Sam's, both smarter now. When you leave these places for too long you forget your roots.
I am inclined, now, to use the sort of humour that is considered insulting in normal society. But it lives. It gloriously lives. One journalist was describing how it had taken him 25 minutes to get from here to there. "Ah," observed his friend, "but you're a cripple."Outrageously out of tune with the times, that remark. But to me, like the first smell of Spring hawthorn: a reminder, a reawakening, a memory of a fraternity accustomed to hard talk and hard drink.When Stanley and Gordon joined, the circulation of the Daily Express was 4,250,000 a day. So you see why they wear Crusader ties and talk of the world's greatest.
Of course, it is impossible to compare those days with these days. Television came, and computers, and instant messaging, and the whole of the communications media is being re-thought and re-drawn. These are days of crisis. The menu is nothing like the one I remembered. I always had lamb chops and chips and was served (as were we all) by our own waitress, Edna. Somewhere in the dining room is a brass plaque to her name. So - the menu. Brown onion soup with cheddar cheese; choice of fish chips and mushy peas; home-made corned beef hash; steak and kidney pudding; curried Welsh lamb's kidneys; a "most excellent cottage pie", Sam's bangers and mash. Perfect.
Gordon Amory had printed the menu and all its adornments and it was brilliantly done - and in itself a reminder of changing technology.The Land o' Cakes is now the Lord Atterbury, whoever he is. Opposite the glass palace, in place of an employment exchange and a newsagent's is a Travelodge. There is a big shop nearby selling all kinds of clothing, nothing costing more than £3. A pub says "No track suits after 10pm."I seem to recall someone saying that the manager of Sam's is a Polish man improbably named Jim. If that is so, he is a very fine manager indeed. He slipped into our way of saying and doing things to perfection, and even seemed to look on in approval as our fish and chips were delivered wrapped in old Daily Express newspaper.Of course he was praised for his part. And I seem to recall - but it is an illusion, a trick of the mind - that as he received the praise he said, "Chuffed to buggery that you enjoyed it."No. That could not be Jim, the Polish gentleman. Somebody else must have said it.
Water’s little dance / June, 2007
I was in Ambleside, Lake District, when parts of England became lakes themselves, and the weather was about right for the area: that is, a gentle weeping followed by wetter spells. This is enjoyment for the masochist. I am not knocking it. I was a part of it. I tried to take on the mystic communion of a million trekkers and cyclists who have gone through this enormous shower-room for hundreds, if not millions, of years without feeling resentment.I was inclined to say, “I'm just going for a shower” when I intended a walk with my dog.
Here is the haunt of lecturers and professors who, in Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge or Reading would take shelter if it rained. The normal rules of perambulation alter. In the Lakes, pilgrims take on the beatific look of the holy martyrs, the eyes half-closed, the faces streaming, the back-packs bobbing, the bony knees exposed, the shoes like great clods of brown earth with laces. I applaud them. Like those burned at the stake in the cause of religion they have found the joys of martyrdom.As for the rain, it does not, in local parlance, exist. It began to rain as I strolled around Hawkshead.
A landlord leaving his pub and observing it stared at me for a moment and gave his verdict - “Mist.”The joy of getting into it only to get out of it can not be over-emphasised. I had hired, for the week, a floor of an ancient building with an elevated view. (The description said that it was part of a gentleman's house in the 16th century – the inference being, I thought, that no gentleman had set foot over the doorstep since.) Ahead of me as I stared out was the main road from Ambleside to Bowness and Windermere, a thoroughfare of endless movement. Lining it were bed and breakfast places – Bee and Bees as one called itself – three newly-built houses in local slate, and a garage.
Beyond all that, a large hill and behind it more hills that came into sight or out of sight according to the moods of the clouds dancing around their upper surfaces.You can get Pavers shoes, Rohan gear, any sort of walking gear in fact, art of any kind, vases of most kinds; and I can not for the life of me see why that should be about it. No Tesco here, you will note. No great variation in the wares on offer.
There is a cannyness about in the way of groceries: a feeling that supermarkets are kept away by design. Best to keep to little shops where the profits are higher, some local probably argued. A couple of cups of coffee cost near enough five pounds. I am not quibbling. I drank enough of them to help someone eke out the long winters when the visitors have gone soft and gone home.In some shop windows, there are facsimiles - brown as the old tobacco smoke of pub walls - of the Cumbrian landscape; puckered, and pockmarked by tears – the blue slits of water that signal Derwentwater, Coniston or whatever. I even climbed a hill impossibly high by my standards to view water gushing over a rock. People are intrigued by such evidences of nature and I never thought I would be one. Many must have had the same sense of wonder when they first saw a flushing lavatory.
I was not alone. It was so steep up there that a large backpacker emerged round a sharp corner at speed and out of control without brakes. I was glad to avoid a collision as he careered out of sight, like the water. Water is the beginning, middle and end of the Lake District, and when you view it in the placid reaches of village streams it is clear and the small rocks beneath it are plainly etched for your vision; there is none of your muddied nonsense of other places. It flows and gurgles its delight at being in motion and in that, it is not unlike the visitors from other places that do not have such magic. They, too, flow and gurgle their delights, endlessly coming, endlessly going to find what Wordsworth knew as his daily and yearly life.Wordsworth!
There he was in Grasmere, and in Ambleside is where he had his office. A plaque marks the spot. He was in charge of the stamps thereabouts. As usual, I went to view his grave in a Grasmere churchyard. He planted trees in that place and then he was planted there himself, to grow only in stature. One should not be flippant about so serious a poet, but as I stood with a small group, I said, “I didn't know he was dead.” The remark was noted. I say no more.I am always intrigued by the faces of people who travel half way across the world to do as I do. There were Oriental faces here and many have come, principally, to see something of the Beatrix Potter inheritance in Sawrey – she of Peter Rabbit and the glowering clothes and the sheep with wool like Brillo pads. I know. I have one of the sweaters. It would keep the North Pole warm.As the days went by we were getting news of floods in parts of Britain.
Worst day for 50 years, said a headline as I braved my own grey drizzle. One would have thought that the gods of the lakes who growl through the hills here would sense the rivalry, and put on a show of defiance. But no. They growled but softly, not with heat. If they sensed a rivalry they knew it could not last. They were supreme in their historic role as the voice of the mid-heavens.But they were to show that they, too, could put on theatre. In my final night I looked out of my elevated window at around ten o' clock and the grey clouds were slowly, ponderously rolling in over the hills. There was not the slightest hurry in their progression.
They could have been ghostly monks gathering for a service. For the following day, my exit day, the forecast was horrendous, and perhaps this was the start. But no. These clouds were benign, playful even. And searing across their edges were great slashing streaks of red light from some far-setting sun. Enough to bring out the cameras – and tripod – next door. When the day of atonement came, this day when the forecasters had talked of doom as if they were hell-fire preachers, a light drizzle greeted the morning and through it I drove home in blessed peace. The Lakes had relented. All was well.
A long time ago - so long ago now that memories of it are fading - eleven people in a remote place found a cause, made a stand against government authority, and emerged bankrupt.
They were heroes to their friends, rebels to their enemies, unfit to be councillors according to Lord Denning as Master of the Rolls, and their battlefield was Clay Cross. But whatever you call them, they were, indeed, martyrs. And martyrs deserve to be better remembered whether you call them brave, stupid, or just stubborn. Little is seen or recorded of their battles today.
They were made bankrupt in the seventies after running up huge losses on the housing revenue account and refusing to introduce council rent increases ordained by a Tory rent act. And this - as one of them, David Skinner, recalled it - is what happened:
"One of us had just retired and booked a holiday. The firm went bust. Just about when the official receiver was tapping around, he got his money back and they took it from him. He had been a school caretaker for 30-odd years and he was going on a nice retirement trip with that."My brother, Graham (another councillor) had a car and they wanted that, so to make it a bit awkward, he jacked it up, stuck it on some bricks, and took the wheels off. The official receiver's staff came along, wound it onto a low-loader, and took the bricks and all.
"Another had some carpets taken."
The people of Clay Cross, 10,000 of them in deep Derbyshire mining country close to Chesterfield, were part of the comedian's stock in trade: "Anyone in the audience from Clay Cross? Get off home and pay the rent."
They were remembered, as places like Marston Moor or Eyam are remembered: the name rather more significant with the passage of time than the event that makes it memorable. Clay Cross's reason for notoriety is complicated. It was to do with the Housing Finance Act, 1972, and rents rising according to market forces.
Clay Cross's housing was not all that good. Because of the decline of the mining industry in the sixties, the area had lost six or seven pits and, says David Skinner, "we were not prepared to increase rents dramatically bearing in mind there had always been high unemployment."
There was another factor: they,"too, had an election manifesto and it declared that they should not increase rents." That was the start of what is now history.
Like his brother, the MP, David Skinner was nothing if not blunt. At the time of the battle of Clay Cross he was a supervisor on roads for the highway authority. In the mid-eighties he was manager of a youth training scheme for the district council.
He had declared his office a no-smoking zone (and insisted on it). At 41, he was already been a member of the Labour Party for 26 years.
Given his temperament and beliefs, events of the early seventies had not scarred him; and at that time, he made light of what followed.
"We were not able to have bank accounts. The majority of us never had bank accounts anyway. We have not been able to buy things on HP. And while you are bankrupt you have to be wary because the Official Receiver can impound what bits of furniture you have. That's the difficult thing. A bit of an inconvenience.
"Politically, we couldn't have a school governorship or be appointed to public bodies. But we have been active in our unions and the wider Labour movement.
" We get together quite often. We had a tenth anniversary drink in a local pub. One member (a woman) has died. Two, including myself, have moved out of Clay Cross (very close to its boundary). Most of us are basically old-fashioned type Socialists."
They were out of bankruptcy in 1981 and disqualified from public office until 1986 - "you serve an extra five years after your bankruptcy has been removed and those five years come to an end in May."
In November, 1975, £64,000 was owed. This included £7,000 surcharge on the deficient housing account and £50,000-worth of other financial debt plus legal aid. Only £400 of the debt was recovered. For the next five years council tenants caught up in the dispute had to pick up the bill for what had grown into an £87,000 loss by paying extra each week.
There was no victory then, or later. Glorious defeat or stigma? "We didn't see it as any of that really. We carried out the mandate we were elected on, as Mrs Thatcher is doing now. We stayed the course. We knew what the consequences were. We have not mugged anybody."
They would claim to have invented the country's first job creation scheme - "we looked around the dereliction in Clay Cross and set up job creation before the Manpower Services Commission was born out of wedlock. We gave kids free milk back."
And they suffered the consequences of their acts. To what degree individuals felt that will probably never be known.
"Friends, neighbours, everybody were prepared to form human barricades when the official receiver's staff came and in some cases they could not get in. It was a spontaneous thing. People were prepared to lie down and stop them taking washing machines, things like that. We hadn't robbed anybody. "We hadn't fiddled anything."
Clay Cross was front-runner for what happened later in areas of local government. Now, as then, it is the law that has to prevail. The alternative is plain: You go for broke. And end up in limbo.
"Once the official receiver sends you that piece of paper, you are prevented from paying tax, which is not a bad idea; you can't pay electricity bills, phone bills, anything. Your gross earnings become your net earnings. It all goes into the official pot. They stop you paying anything. Everybody becomes creditors: Gas Board, Water Board, any other board."
It was not a subject that came easily to people in the area when I visited it. "It is all a long time ago, a sad time for all, and I see no purpose in resurrecting the past," said Roy Norbron, a Tory member of North East Derbyshire Council, which took in Clay Cross under local government reorganisation in 1974.
What advice did David Skinner give to councillors running foul of the laws of the land?
"If you've got money, if you've got anything - shift it. Spend it. Take it out of the bank. Do anything with it before the district auditor sends in the official receiver."
A melancholy solution and not one to commend itself to anyone in need of peace of mind. But twenty years ago, it was the only one being suggested in the place where it all, unfortunately, began.Edmund Spenser: The poet and his hard times
Picture of the Spenser House at Hurstwood by Edward Rawlinson
If you ask strangers about fairy queen these days you are likely to get a poor response and an odd look. But it is upon these two words that the memory and reputation of Edmund Spenser, second great English poet after Chaucer, rests. It was spelled Faerie Queene, of course, in his day, and it referred to Elizabeth 1 and the Tudor dynasty. An epic poem.
In the wilder part of East Lancashire, off a road between Burnley and Todmorden, is a place called Hurstwood, near Worsthorne. And in it is a sizeable chunk of Spenser memorabilia, solid as an oak, venerable as a bishop, secure in its time and this time, and eminently desirable to romantics. The House. Spenser House was built around 1530, and members of the Spenser family lived there until about 1690. But the great Edmund? Did he or didn't he? Would he or wouldn't he? Mystery, you see; all is mystery.
It would be nice for romantics to see him moving ghost-like by the monumental pile he loved as the last sunlight of the day slips into shadow. But in truth, he was born in London. I suspect he claimed better parentage than he had. And he was not all that nice a chap even for Tudor times when skulduggery was an art for infants who would later take first-class degrees in Mayhem.
Several of his pieces are addressed to the daughters of Sir John Spencer, head of the Althorp family; and in Colin Clout's Come Home Again he describes three of the ladies as "the honour of the noble family Of which I meanest boast myself to be."
Mr R. B. Knowles, however, is of the opinion (Spending of the Money of Robert Nowell, privately printed, 1877) that the poet's relatives must be among the humbler Spencers of north-east Lancashire. So arrogant he was, and talented he was, pretty ruthless, too - not at all humble.
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 1599) was possibly the son of John Spenser, a free journeyman clothmaker living in East Smithfield, London. Possibly, you see. Nothing certain. Whatever his parentage, it is likely that the Spensers (or Spencers) originated in Lancashire, where they would have been connected with such as the Nowells and Towneleys. Three years after leaving Cambridge, in 1579, Spenser issued his first volume of poetry, the Shepherd's Calendar.
“Where and how he spent the interval have formed subjects for elaborate speculation. That most of it was spent in the study of his art we may take for granted. That he lived for a time in the north parts of England; that there or elsewhere he fell in love with a lady whom he celebrates under the anagram of Rosalind, and who was most likely Rose, a daughter of a yeoman named Dyneley, who lived near Clitheroe; that his friend Harvey urged him to return south, and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney; that Sidney took to him, discussed poetry with him, introduced him at court, put him in the way of preferment - are ascertained facts in his personal history.”
Good. Wasn't he doing well? And courting influential friends along the way. Spenser may have been employed by the Earl of Leicester as early as 1577, perhaps carrying messages to Leicester's brother-in-law Sir Henry Sidney, then Lord Deputy in Ireland. And all went well. He was appointed clerk of the Chancery for Faculties in Dublin (whatever that was). He got a lease of Lord Baltinglas's Dublin home. He leased New Abbey, County Kildare, serving as Commissioner of Muster for Kildare (whatever THAT was).
And when the lands of the attainted (corrupt) Earl of Desmond were set out in plantation in 1586, Spenser was allotted 3,000 acres or so near Doneraile, including an old castle at Kilcolman.
So a degree of greed and ambition was in his soul and he was zealous in the destruction of Irish culture and colonisation of Ireland.
He met Sir Walter Raleigh, who read his draft of The Faerie Queene and encouraged him to join him on a trip to London in 1590, where he presented the poet to Elizabeth.
Spenser used his time in London to publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene, but although the Queen promised him a handsome pension for his labours, her generosity was questioned by Lord Burghley, whom Spenser went on to lampoon in Complaints, printed and almost immediately suppressed (or 'called in') in 1591. Judging from a commentary on the scandal recently discovered in a contemporary letter,Spenser seems to have returned to Ireland in the early months of 1591 as a direct result of the offence he had caused to Burghley.By chance, I happen to be a fan of Burghley. He was a sage, constantly at Elizabeth's side, and I consider his letter of advice to his son on how he should conduct his life to be a masterpiece of sense and cunning. Whatever the relationship Spenser was a fool to tackle him – a little like a hen challenging a fox.Arriving back late in 1598, Spenser took up residence in London's King's Street, and died there, according to Ben Jonson 'for lake of bread', on a Saturday in January 1599. Imagine that! Lack of bread!How could he soar and fall in so spectacular a way? There are more gaps than firm ground in all of it
.“It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically well-connected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Jonson later testified." The Earl of Essex paid for his funeral, and poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens into his grave. His tomb is adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.And there you are. You can go up that tortuous road, as I did, and find that house, and speculate – as I did – on the secrets it still holds. But there are no obvious answers. Only wonderment.Surprisingly, there is an ancient house directly opposite for sale at £150,000 that would make a fitting home for reminders of Spenser. Mind you, it would be the ruin of Hurstwood. There's hardly room to swing a mini around. So I, for one, would prefer to leave things as they are.
August 2007
In the 17th century, people had to tiptoe through their opinions as if they were hot coals. Roman Catholicism and Henry V111's requirement for something rather different had made sure of that. So a man who could perform this delicate progression through life without losing it is worthy of attention.
Alexander Nowell (1507-1602) was notable on several counts: He invented (by chance) the beer bottle; he was Dean of St Paul's for 42 years; and he was heckled by Elizabeth 1. In a time of religious unease, he wrote three catechisms in Latin. He came from an imposing house and an imposing family, one of whom was to pursue Lancashire witches. At Read, near Clitheroe and the Ribble Valley, stood the Read Hall of the Nowells illustrated here as it was in 1750. (The present Read Hall of 1825 is nothing like it.) The inscription says: "To Alexander Nowell, Esq, of Hunderley Hall, Westmoreland, this view of Read, the seat of his ancestors for more than three centuries, is with sincere respect inscribed by his much obliged humble servant, R. Churton."The building looks to me like a school or an institution. No Roman pillars, no embellishments as there are - say - at Hardwick Hall, where Bess of Hardwick was almost imitating Elizabeth 1 in grand structural statements.
It is Spartan, yet grand, lavish yet muted. Is that the sort of man Nowell was? In his steamboat-funnel hat and dark clothing he stands as an emblem of his time. He looks inscrutable, reserved, and careful. Being careful was an art form among those who knew the tempestuous Court of Elizabeth. If Lord Burghley, her chief minister, could be bounced around, there was little hope for Nowell.Many years ago, I spent hours each day close to the clock in Clitheroe Library. When it first whirred and bonged I leapt from my seat. Then I got used to it. The clock had the sound of indigestion. The bong was the sign that the inner rumblings had produced their desired result.I did not get as far as the clock this time; only as far as the first floor. And there I surrounded myself with the Nowells of Read in picture and manuscript.Nowell, I noted, preached the first and last sermons in Lent before Elizabeth 1. In one he spoke less reverently than Elizabeth required in referring to the sign of the cross. So she called aloud to him from her closet window commanding him "to return from that ungodly digression and return to his text."Imagine that. A rebuke in public from she had who had to be obeyed. A man needed a strong stomach for such things.
Nowell attended the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, who had been found guilty of treasonable practices with Mary, Queen of Scots. A shift of fortune was never far away for the greatest of them.Nowell himself was vilified by Rome "from which place some issued measures of deadly hatred against him." He joined the Tudor equivalent of a hit list: he was to be despatched by burning or hanging.He had earlier developed "puritan and almost presbyterian views." but he submitted to the Elizabethan settlement of religion, and was rewarded with the archdeaconry of Middlesex, a canonry at Canterbury and in 1560 with the deanery of St Paul's. Nowell is believed to have composed the Catechism inserted before the Order of Confirmation in the Prayer Book of 1549, which was supplemented in 1604 and is still in use; but the evidence is not conclusive.
Early in Elizabeth's reign, however, he wrote a larger catechism, to serve as a statement of Protestant principles; it was printed in 1570, and in the same year appeared his "middle" catechism, designed it would seem for the instruction of "simple curates." He was twice married, but left no children. His chance to invent bottled beer came when he went fishing and forgot the beer he had taken with him. Returning days later, he found it in the grass and discovered that it was frothing when opened and in pretty good order. The Nowells had acquired land at Read in 1364 and at the dissolution of Whalley Abbey Roger Nowell was able to build Read Hall.
He had three half brothers each famous in their time, Alexander as Dean of St. Paul's, Lawrence as Dean of Lichfield and Robert, a lawyer at Gray's Inn. Dean Nowell was executor for Robert Nowell, who left money for a splendid funeral feast. It included many of today's dishes, but also 318 skylarks, a delicacy of the time, eight blackbirds, and £100-worth of sugar.I recently wrote here about Edmund Spenser, the poet, author of The Faerie Queen, whose family members lived not all that far from Read. He was helped to study at Cambridge through Roger Nowell's will.Another Roger Nowell (1582 - 1623) was Sheriff of Lancaster and as such was responsible for bringing the Pendle Witches to trial.Small world.
The way they tell it, the countryside was swarming with mink, enough to take the coat off your back, the child from its pram, the cat from its corner, the hen from its pen, and the bird from its roost; and pound for pound it is one of the most savage killers on earth.
Cecil Walling, countryman by birth, mole and rabbit catcher by trade, and mink hunter by choice, paints a less bizarre picture:"I can't see a mink flying at anyone. It'll go by them. You've got to see something like this to believe it - I've sat and seen them come by me, go, and come back again. They try to work out what you are. They chitter a bit. And usually they go under t' water and next time you see 'em they're coming up 300 yards away."I wouldn't feel in any danger.
Maybe they're different if they met cornered in a building but I think they try to get out of your way. A lot of this talk is stories made out of nowt."Cecil is an amiable predator himself. He has lived in Lyth valley; ten miles south of Windermere, for 30 years and listed in the next valley before that. He traps for farmers and in past winters has seen off, maybe, 5,000 moles. These days he expects 1,000 or 1,200 a winter. But since mole-ins is seasonal and rabbits are fewer he can bend his attentions towards mink which an organisation named Animal Liberation Front has been freeing from farms in Perthshire and Essex and causing a great to-do in the process (although the runaways tended to return)."I wouldn't say mink are really cunning," says Cecil, who is. "And they're not afraid of people. But I'd say it is dangerous to release them because as soon as they find streams or river courses away they go, and next minute they're breeding."
Cumbria has many."I have a mink cage trap and if I see any footings on the riverside I usually put it down. Sometimes it can be there a week or fortnight. They move on and you never see them again.
"They'll eat anything, following water, swimming under water, and they go for fish, wildfowl and other birds. A mole is more cunning. Their has to be just right. For mink, we use just a metal cage with a door and plate. Once the plate is touched, the door shuts.
"They'll go into them without bait. I always bait mine with a bit of liver. I've caught 36 by trap. I might have shot another dozen or so. There's one chap who must have had towards 100 over the years and he's retired on pension."There's someone else and his daughter said he'd had, I think, 32 this. year without baiting his traps, so they're going up his stream aren't they?"I've seen them swimming about among wild ducks. I watched one for a long time around six young ducks. The old duck knew it was there. The mink went under water and the old duck changed their direction so that when it came up, they were somewhere else."When.it.went under again, the old duck turned and brought 'em elsewhere and again the mink missed them It gave up. Then it came down river and I just sat there with my gun and, bang, I got it."They say there's quite a lot up the Lakes now. I should think they're up every mountain stream. There's some blackish and some brown, and I've heard of some with a bit of white under the chin but I haven't seen one."I've heard of them attacking swans and killing dogs -but I can't see a mink killing a dog. Somebody at Windermere said a terrier had been killed by a mink. But what's going to kill a terrier? It would have a go at a lion would a terrier. If it couldn't worry a mink, it must be a queer dog."I've heard of a woman whose cat was missing half its tongue. She lives near a river and doesn't know what happened. I've also heard of a bloke whose big cat brought in a dead mink. So it must work both-ways..
"Mink will clean little streams of brown trout. I've seen them with eels. I've.eeen trout heads just lying there. They've eaten the rest."We've noticed up this river here that moorhens have disappeared. You see only odd ones now. There used to be a lot. Only thing we can put that down to is mink."Sometimes they ramble away from rivers. They've been seen nearly a mile from water."There's a story going that a mink turned up in a chip shop and the lads say that's right, but I don't know: it has me beat, has that."The previous day the rain had been draped over the hills like a theatre curtain and the river ran high. In the evening Cecil; combining business with pleasure, took his fishing rod to the banks and inspected his trap. It was empty.He usually drowns the mink. It takes only two minutes. Some use exhaust fumes. "I don't do anything with pelts. I've given one or two people mink to take to a taxidermist.
One bloke wanted to make flies for fishing out of their tails."He is not married so there is no question of a wife missing out on a coat -"I've heard they're no good once they've been in the wild." Mink, he meant. He has an urbane view of living and dying. The moles he hangs on hedgerows so that farmers will observe that he is doing his job. He likes to have foxes around and if he comes across a litter of cubs he keeps the discovery secret."I like my fox-hunting. I go up into the felts, and it's a good walk out, a good view, and you see everybody."He and his kind are not alone in their pursuit of mink. "Otter hounds take naturally to it." Otter hunting is banned.
"If they ever did find another they might give it a run and say, well, that's a day, let it be going, and if they then got scent of a mink they'd be happy."He supposes the escaped mink which led to all the hunting and trapping don't know what to hunt for food when someone releases them,
"If we were shoved into a building and brought up like them, we wouldn't know what to start looking for when we got out."Mind you," he adds, "they can always go to the chip shop..."(The big debate about mink was in 1982. The above was printed at that time.)
Everyone has a secret ambition. Mine, was to be a country man, writing about the cherrvhorn and croot. dark - winged against fursil, or whatever all these things are called.I met such a man, splendid in visage, his fingers like twigs, fused interminably to his briar, and he wrote masterpieces of nature, sending them to London, New York or Paris, I imagine, by pack mule. He would note a mole. a wood pigeon, a shrew." As I tramped near old Bob's farm." he would begin. " a shrew peered timidly from behind an oak, then tripped across my path, causing my old collie to howl at the lowering sky. It is not generally known that shrews ... '
At this point would come wondrous revelations about their intimate thoughts and habits. It took me years to discover that after the first paragraph he turned to his large library and, by careful manipulation of other people's wards. presented an account of what he might have known had he wandered long enough to find out.I came across another countryman who used to prod udders and inspect horses' teeth while I tried to understand Lonk Tups. Ram Lambs and Shearlings. Oldcountrymen can prod udders for hours without a word and. I concluded it was their rustic way of doing nothingI often wanted to prod udders but was, usually told to get off and find out something about, well, Long-faced Tipplers for a start. I suppose it was at that point that I decided I might never be a proper countryman, but I persevered.
Last winter I found myself high up in snow, dying. while a farmer stood by, coatless. All he said was. as my soul expired, "It's turning a, bit nippy." He helped me to his car where the fug of his heater restored me. I wrote a quick piece on curlews and pipits and took to bed. Even then I had not fully abandoned my secret ambition. Recently I browsed through a book without first looking at the title. "Madame Legras de St. Germain." it said. "has blooms of sumptuous size." Then - " Duchesse de Montebello, for sheer dainty freshness. is unrivalled except by some of the Albas." Eyes apop. I found that Frau Dagmar Hartopp, flesh pink with delicate veinings, is followed by some of the finest hips in the family for their size.
Then I discovered the book was about flowers, not ladies boasting of their embellishments; and I was reminded anew that I am but a would-be countryman optimistic about my ignorance.I am not alone. Beneath a townie lurks the hunter. I found a man who fattens trout in his stream before transferring them to the river where city men with pallid faces haul them out, believing they are battling raw nature. The fish are tame enough to leap to the surface each time some simple yokel slings in a handful of food pellets. So who's the fool? It is fine enough in an old pub listening to country talk about crows lettin', and astigotabitoproven? but note the narrowness of the eyes. They're not daft.
A city-born should have ten miles of concrete between him and reality. When night falls I imagine myself shouting, "Mornin' Reuben." prodding an udder with my long stick and looking at horses' mouths, my tweed hat jaunty atop my battered face. But deep in my heart I know the long road of reality is. for me. a ribbon of black asphalt and a lone sparrow fighting bronchitis as it stabs at my poor garden crumbs.
Trading on the London stock market was thrown into confusion after technical problems resulted in misleading information being published. In a highly unusual move, trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) was extended to 1800 GMT after terminals in the City displayed incorrect prices.These showed the benchmark The LSE blamed disruption on problems with "data dissemination" - News item.
Technology, technology... A man has to have a sharp mind to navigate life these days. "Have you got your locking nut?" says the mechanic changing a tyre. "Ah, yes," you reply. "My locking nut 4706." He takes it, uses it to release a wheel from vehicle, then pretends he has made a simple mistake when he transfers the nut to his own pocket. Motorists without a locking nut are doomed, doomed. Even more doomed if they do not know its number. The other day, my bank, which requires three means of secret entry to its web site - a long number, a password, and digits entered separately at its request - added several more requirements for my choice. Favourite colour, mother's middle name, favourite food, best friend. Any one of these questions might, at the bank's discretion, be asked at any time.
That added flavour to an already complex task. I put down "dog" as my best friend on the grounds that a dog remains constant but best friends have a habit of moving on. Or off. My mother did not have a middle name because when she was born, people could not afford them. Is my favourite colour red or blue? I can not decide. So there you have but one bank and a multitude of reasons why, in the future, as memory and eyesight fade, I shall have the greatest difficulty in regaining my money. Even worse. If I pass on to a pin number in the sky, relatives will have the devil of a job benefiting from a lifetime of my prudence.It might not be too bad if there were only one bank.But there are endless financial institutions interested in putting numbered and encrypted barriers between me and them. There might be little or no money involved: I can, for instance, view the annual reports of companies. Of course, I never do.Beyond things financial there are all the bits and pieces that are attached to computers: firewall, anti-virus programme, phishing thingy and so on. They have licence keys so vast that you could not possibly enter them without a week of your time to spare. You have to copy and paste them.And each time you go to their web site they say: Forgotten your password? Of course you have. And even if you have not forgotten it, have you not just entered the pin for your Abbey National card into the little machine clutching your Barclaycard in the hope of petrol and been given a blank stare and a disconcerting beep for your pains?Did anyone ever get out of Amazon with a clear conscience?
Or did they all agonise, as I do, about whether they have ordered no fewer than eight times the single copy of a book they required?The only time I ever exceeded a credit card limit was when I discovered that two identical television sets - flat-screen, large dimensions, costly - were on their way. Now how did that happen? I wanted only one. Amid all the clickings and whirrings something plainly went wrong. I was advised to wait for the two and send one back by the same vehicle.
I did this, but in the meantime I had been charged for exceeding my credit limit. A lady at a call point in India received my cry of agony and did the merciful thing. She cancelled it.Once, few people had a telephone. Now, they have telephones on every shelf. Or in every pocket. If you know, say, 100 people, you have to remember 200 or 300 phone numbers. You buy a phone that remembers these for you and promptly lose it.I drink with a small group of people only one of whom understands mobile phones. The others sheepishly produce their phones so that he can explain something highly technical. Like how to turn one on for a start. Town of birth, date of birth, mother's maiden name...
What does this mean? F-Prot 149? I have made a careful note of it. Is F-Prot the product or have I used it as a password for another product? Is 149 some kind of pin number with one digit missing or something else more mysterious? I can not remember, of course. To add to the confusion, I often use Pitman's shorthand to make notes. I can not read half of it myself.I dare say I have 70 or 80 - give or take 50 - numbers, passwords, pins or items of personal nature to remember. Plus the Pitman's which increasingly looks like Gregg's.How can I possibly remember? And if I write down a pin number on a piece of paper, red lights flash in the headquarters of financial institutions, sirens sound, bank bosses awake from their after-lunch slumbers and call down shafts of lightning.I confidently forecast that when a person dies ten years hence, it will take a young person his entire lifetime to sort out the financial mess.
There will be half a billion pin numbers for the 60 million population and power failures will account for the irretrievable loss of half of them.We are doomed. Not by nature with its whirlwinds and floods and capricious dances, but by pins. By passwords. By plastic cards. By holes in the wall. By trying to recall favourite colours or mothers' maiden names. By cloaking our pins in fake telephone numbers, then not knowing which of the numbers is the actual pin. In short, by technology. By encryptology. By us.I expect that when we get Up There - you know? - the first words from St Peter will be: Have you logged in?
When they compile the list of women whose reputations live for ever - Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette among them - I do not suppose they will include Rosie Boot. But the name of that theatrical lady is one that decimated the Daily Express in Manchester one evening long ago. And she achieved this unlikely result, not by displaying her talents, but by abandoning them. In short, her entrance was her exit. She died.The Irish edition had gone, and I suppose that by Greenwich Mean Time we were between the second and third editions when a small group of men gathered quietly in the Crown and Kettle pub, 20 brisk paces from the front entrance of the Express, and quietly drank.They were in twos. Nobody to this day will know why this tranquility should explode as it did. Charlie - the one who said there was no call for tonic when asked to provide it as an addition to gin - was behind the bar with Edie, his beloved. And Edie was resting against the bar top in the way which led our theatre man to declare, "If those two ever have pups, I would like one."Peace on earth, goodwill towards men time. Not a discordant note.But then something happened. The editor of the time was with a companion and he invited another two to have a drink.
This drink had, of course, to be reciprocated. Others around the bar were offered drink, in turn, and the twos merged into a group. The group was invited by the editor to toast the life and times of Rosie Boot. Nobody had heard of her, but they - we, I might add because I was there - drank whole-heartedly as a tribute to her unknown past and her possible heavenly future.Magically, it seemed, a circle formed to continue this tribute and as a diversion, one of our members absent-mindedly decided it was a scrum. Bending low, he headed in the direction of the editor and took him cleanly below the waist. In no time at all others had charged in any direction and our leader was beneath a turmoil of people. Not so much a try as an accomplished fact.He raised himself from the floor in a dishevelled state and toasted Rosie Boot all over again to cheers of approval. Edie, capturing the moment, and seeing profit, detached herself from the bar and stood in the centre of our group with a bottle of Scotch.
She went in a regular circular peramubulation pouring a shot into each glass and as each glass was charged all cried aloud, "Rosie Boot! Eighteen and eight" - the latter being the cost of the round which was cheerfully borne in turn by each of us.
Charlie watched. I thought he might. On busy evenings Charlie tended to move to the front of the bar and if you asked him how he was, he would reply, "Working me puddings off," while sitting on a stool.Edie was quick with the bottle, so that by the time she had passed she was, it seemed, there again. Charlie was shovelling the money like small coal. Amber was flashing before my eyes at about the same pace as Edie. I lost count. But much later, all could count the number of celebrants who dropped in repose as they attempted to make the 20 paces required to the office steps.
This trivial distance had become Scott of the Antarctic trying to make the tent during a hurricane. Those who made it, quickly took to the newspaper equivalent of intensive care: the cubicles to be found in the second-floor washrooms. And there they stayed for hours, staring fixedly at the doors as editions came and went, emerging only to view a world that had somehow changed for all time.I said to one friend who had dropped to the pavement six paces from the pub front door, "What a night that was." He stared at me as if I was mad and denied recollection of any of it.As for me, I sometimes waken, usually around 4am, and the damnable words still drift across my mind - "Rosie Boot! Eighteen and eight." The stark vision returns.Rosie was, without doubt, the most remarkable lady none of us ever met.
In the broth of life, I am not the greatest of cooks; but there are times when one is forced to declare an interest, a modest competence. That time came around mid-November last year when my wife ran head-first into medical problems and I took over the kitchen armed only with hope and a small piece of printed paper headed: Risotto. I am still there, and I still have the paper.
A chef like me can expect some early casualties. Rice pudding was one. A home denuded of one devourer amasses a great deal of milk. Milk belongs to rice puddings. I made a rice pudding which a granddaughter, who took a large dollop home with her, declared to be lovely. Superb. A granddadian triumph. It was awful. Wrong rice. Like eating road grit. It proves only that my granddaughter was prepared to lie on my behalf. Which is one reason why I bought her an implement that cuts wavy chips. She had coveted ours for some time.
Soups: I became a dab hand at those. You can claim authorship of a soup by using frozen mixed vegetables, adding a sache of cup-of-soup, then zapping the lot, when cooked, with a food mixer. The result is a smooth, thickened gruelly meal made more interesting by the addition of a few flakes of tarragon, plus plenty of pepper.
A shop in my neighbourhood sells pies that are noted widely among the cognocenti - ie, people felling trees, attending to electricity pylons or building houses. Those people, in short, with the greatest appetites satisfied only by bought lunches.
The pies are nectar to the climbing classes. And why? I decided it was because the cook added lots of pepper. There is a satisfying bite at the back of the throat from a peppered pie in cold weather that is altogether wonderful. Never underestimate pepper. Other pie makers in my area fail on that account.
Great truths about cooking will emerge with experience. If, instead of adding a lot of liquid (ie, a soup) you drain off the liquid, you have the ingredients of a spaghetti meal. You add a tin of plum tomatoes (zapped). The spaghetti is no problem: in eight minutes those little yellow spears are a squirming mass of goodness.
If you keep to soup, you can quickly make the meal interesting by what you put on a side-plate. A good, crusty baton is an obvious choice. Beyond that, cheese on toast. Put your solid cheese into a food whirler with a few bread crumbs and zap the lot together before putting the mixture on lightly-toasted bread and melting it under a grill. The crumbs will ensure that you get a lovely mottled effect. They will tend to burn a bit while the cheese melts and that is nectar.
There is nothing in nature so satisfying as the chip butty. Some people who make a living from selling that kind of thing have gone overboard by using barm cakes. They are not half so good. A good chip butty needs a lot of butter so that it melts into the potato and bread to form what I can only think of as a heavenly concoction requiring that you wear a bib, like Poirot. Always use your own chips, not frozen ones, with one exception: supermarkets sell the very thin frozen potato chips that fry in a couple of minutes. I use McCain's. They are superb for lunches with soup.
A good cheese recipe that I like to think of as my own is prepared as follows:
For two people: Chop an onion into small pieces and fry until soft in a knob of butter. Add two or three ounces of chopped Cheddar cheese, salt and pepper. Pour onto the mixture half a cupful of milk. Let it simmer and bubble to its heart's content. After about 20 minutes of bubbling, the milk should be absorbed, and the mixture should be ready to spread into fresh batons of bread. Heavenly. (If it begins to cook dry, add more milk of course.)
The better supermarkets these days - Booths in my area - have hot joints of beef or ham. Get a couple of thick slices (for two people) and you have a good lunch if eaten in a baton, or a better dinner. For the latter, let the meat go cold and boil small white potatoes without taking off the skins. When they are soft drain off the water, add a knob of butter and some fresh chopped parsley; swirl the lot around the pan. Mix a good salad. And there you have a healthy meal without much trouble on your part.
As you grow more confident, you will begin to boast. This is a tricky business. You might be talking to someone more accomplished than yourself - which, let us face it, is not difficult.In the pub, I jeered in the most kindly way at a friend whose wife had gone away for a week. When that kind of thing happens, he makes a stew and lives off it. "How many stews?" I asked. "Seven? Or did you have three lots of fish and chips?" He said he had kept to the stew.
I fastened onto another in the company named Ernest. "Did a Risotto, mushrooms and chicken, this lunchtime, Ernest. Came out well."
I could not have timed it better."I have never been able to do a good risotto," he said.
"Ah well," I replied, "you have to work at it. Five ounces of risotto rice - it has to be risotto rice - mixed with the ingredients, in my case mushrooms and chicken, and stirred constantly for half an hour or so, adding hot stock, or chicken soup, from a pan at the side, half a cupful at a time. Takes an awful lot of liquid. But finally, it is all absorbed in the rice and you have a chewy mixture."
"My wife," he said wistfully, "does not like risotto or pizza. She doesn't make it."
"Keep at it, Ernest," I said adopting my wise expression.
His wife is a cordon bleu cook.
It is good to have young people around me, and a particular friend fits the bill nicely.
He has just celebrated his 100th birthday*, but I have met people of 50 whose minds are less active. Indeed, he has a mischievous mind at his best. And when I saw him a day or two ago, he was sitting in an easy chair whose legs were on small blocks to raise him to the
desired level, and by his side was the Queen's rather large card with her message of congratulation.
The front was dominated by a picture of her in yellow. I said to Les Chapman, "She will be 82 on April 21, so I will do you a card to send to her for the occasion. There will be a big picture of you on the front, and the message inside will be similar to hers."
The big picture I had in mind was one of Les in his new Arab headdress, and if that is mysterious, hold hard; all will be revealed.
I do not know how old Les was when I first met him. In his nineties, of course, and a bit of a dandy. But he was not the oldest member of his Probus group. Seniority belonged to a coach proprietor who had a soft heart, a stern frown, a strong will, a walking stick covered in little shields, and, it is said, an opinion: He did not want people under 60 admitted to the club because they tended to be frivolous.
Les did not have airs but he had graces: a strong whiff of class: the clothes tended to be carefully chosen, he talked of fishing great rivers, and when he went away from home, which was seldom, he was staying with friends in banking. When his wife died, he wore her Fedora, and it looked well on him. I saw a picture of him in his wartime days, when he served in a photographic unit, and he was the one languid and slim.
When Germany surrendered to the Allied forces under Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneburg Heath in Germany. Les was there with his camera. He was at Belsen concentration camp, too, snapping victims and guards.
So there he is, now, at 100. He sits regally at home while various care people go in and out, and I could not think of a better present than a shemagh, or Arab scarf - the thing they wear as a headdress. I chose it because I know his tastes.
He will appreciate the bizarre nature of the choice. With it, I included instructions on how to wear it during sand storms.
We do not have many of those in Lancashire, but you never know, Lytham St Annes might perk up a bit, and if it does, Les will be there, I dare say, looking like Laurence of Arabia.
We used to sit together during lectures and were shushed more than once. Les spoke rather loudly at times so that no-one was sure which of the two was the speaker. When I replied, my head tended to bob this way and that in the close vicinity of his head as I tried to find an ear that was receptive at one-inch distance. Les's hearing was fading, as mine was. When he got a hearing aid, he tended to fiddle with it in class and it whistled. It whistled when I tried to reply to his remarks.
If he took out the battery to inspect it, the reverse process was like facing molecular physics with an O-level. For both of us.
Throughout all this he remained cheerful, observant, and mischievous. "Who was that woman I saw you with on a park bench?" I asked. There had not, of course, been either a park bench or a woman. "Oh, her," he said.
It became a bit tedious one day as we waited for the coffee lady to serve us. We were in a queue. So I asked Les whether he would like to do our tap-dancing routine. We did not have one. It was the first he had heard of it. But Les immediately volunteered, and we stepped out of line and performed a passable imitation of two Fred Astaires on an extremely bad day.
He got himself in a bit of a pickle one day. His motorised vehicle was at a clinic in town and he had no means of reaching it. Which meant that I drove him to the clinic. He had some medical business there and won immediate attention through a breezy belief that there was no need to wait in a queue.
At the end of it we found his invalid machine in a small room where it had been parked overnight for safety reasons. He began to go forward and reverse in the most confident manner and within inches of filing cabinets and so forth.
Nail-biting moments for watchers, of whom I was, of course, one. But he got himself out unscathed and sailed off at a good speed into the street, wearing the Fedora and with not a care in the world. I chickened out. I drove another way, but came across him again, by accident, just as he was passing the rather large police station. He was in the roadway, sailing with the traffic, his Fedora rampant. Again, I took a turning, because I do not have his spirit.
A couple of times, a mutual friend and me took him to a pub for lunch and he was splendid company. Les appreciated the trips and invariably praised the host vehicle in the way that would baffle a younger man. "It runs well," he would observe.
Well, they all do these days, don't they? "It's quiet running, isn't it?" He was no Jeremy Clarkson, having come from an era of solid tyres and radiator steam, but then, he would not wish to be.
The mutual friend renovated milestones as a hobby (he had been a county council surveyor) and was an expert on cloth caps. To test them, he would put cap on head, then bow low, up and down, violently, to see whether the cap fell off. If it did, it failed the test. It was wrongly constructed. But all this bowing at a fast rate was a bit disconcerting to strangers, and what with Les in the Fedora, I suppose we were an odd trio.
I am, of course, a dab hand at 100-year-olds, having interviewed them at a rapid rate when I was a junior reporter. They never made much sense. A friend engaged in the same trade said wonderingly, "I've just interviewed one and he said his most memorable time was when he helped move the machinery from one mill to another over a week-end. Fancy that - in his best moment he bahaved like a donkey."
Les is nothing like that. Given half a chance, I dare say he would be out there interviewing 100-year-olds. A local paper picture showed him having a go at a computer in the local library. It figured.
* Peggy Ashcroft, Lord Hailsham, Dixie Dean, Cesar Romero and W. H. Auden were born in the same year.
I can hardly think of a time when Abbot Paslew was not leaving his Abbey of Whalley, in Lancashire, to be hanged. Here is an event frozen in time. It must be 40 years or more since I walked into a Manchester jeweller's and found a large, framed engraving of that very act hanging on his wall. It was etched by Charles Cattermole,* and the jeweller had bought it to cover a damp spot. I bought the print from him. Which is why I see Paslew every time I go for a shower.
Paslew was, of course, a victim of greed and double-dealing on a monumental scale and he was executed in 1537, caught, I suspect, bewildered between King and rebellion. The event, as part of dissolution of the monasteries, was partly about religion and partly about graft. The monasteries offered good spoils. Everyone had his fingers in the tills, not least Henry V111 who was desperately in need of cash. Next, Cardinal Wolsey. And so on down the line to the minor lords. Many waiting to get their fingers on the loot and all masters of the art. MPs massaging their expenses today are of little account by comparison.
Henry was helped in no small way by Martin Luther who, in 1521 had published a treatise stating that the monastic life had no scriptural basis; that it was pointless and actively immoral in that it was not compatible with the true spirit of Christianity.
The Paslews, meanwhile, were a family of substance, dignity and importance, which would explain the abbott's activities and style in Whalley. His father was a "gentleman" and to be awarded that designation meant that a man had to be a landowner of at least three generations. John, born in 1464, entered the novices' cell at Whalley in 1487 (at 23). In 1507 at (43) he became abbott and he ensured that Whalley became a mitred abbey. So he had ego and he wore a big hat! He also had taste. He ate well and drank well. Much of the abbey's money was spent on meat and wine. From an income of less than £1,000 a year more than half was going on provisions.
In 1534 Henry had Parliament authorise Thomas Cromwell, to "visit" all the monasteries (which included all abbeys, priories and convents), ostensibly to make sure their members were instructed in the new rules for their supervision by the King instead of by the Pope, but actually to make records of their assets.Many dismantled monasteries and friaries were sold for nominal amounts (often to local aristocrats and merchants), and some of the lands were given by the king to his supporters; there were also pensions to be paid to some of the dispossessed clerics. Many others continued to serve the parishes. The total value of the confiscated property has been calculated to have been £200,000 at the time, but the income King Henry received from it from 1536 through 1547 averaged only £37,000 per year, about one fifth of what the monks had got from it.
Where stood Paslew in all this?
He was a witness of the Pilgrimage of Grace. And since we have all forgotten what that amounted to, here is the explanation:
The worst uprising of Henry VIII's reign. was a direct result of dissolution, a policy that angered most Englishmen. The rebellion began at Louth in Lincolnshire in 1536 and the cause was a royal commission. The Lincolnshire rebellion lasted a fortnight, but Yorkshire - led by the lawyer Robert Aske - was next. An army of perhaps 30,000 men gathered in the north. The king ordered the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the earl of Shrewsbury to respond. But there was no standing army in England and the people's sympathy lay with the rebels.
The king's forces were hopelessly outnumbered; their soldiers lacked equipment and the will to fight; and the rebel forces were far more experienced in battle. So the king turned to diplomacy. The rebels, after all, did not seek to overthrow him. Their primary desire was for the dissolved monasteries to be restored.
Henry negotiated peace through Norfolk, conceding demands and promising free pardon to all rebels who dispersed. Monastic lands would be restored and a new parliament called to address their concerns. The rebels, foolishly, dispersed; and then, on the slightest pretext, Henry broke his word; martial law was declared, rebel leaders were indicted and put on trial and several hundred, including Aske, were executed.
The earls of Derby and Sussex were appointed joint commissioners for Lancashire to receive the submission of the rebels and to administer the oath of allegiance. They were to deal summarily with men who refused to swear the oath and to show no mercy to them who had committed acts of treason after the operative date of the pardon. There is some suggestion (writes ) that Paslew either was reluctant to take the oath or even refused to do so, but there is no evidence to support this. The abbot was arrested and faced five charges of treason, three by himself, two with others. Surprisingly, he pleaded guilty although as Sussex said "... it would have been hard to find anything against him in these parts."
So meekly goes the lamb to slaughter and on 10 March, 1510, he exited, aged around 73. At Whalley? Elsewhere? Nobody seems quite sure. And he was neither martyr nor saint, but rather a man caught between two forces of history - king and rebels - and probably wishing they would go away, taking their problems elsewhere.
Not a great deal to see at Whalley now. They have a cafe for tea and a shop for books, and you can't make much sense of the stones here and there - survivors of the great abbey. But those who like atmosphere can conjure from space or their imaginations something of what happened and my wife swears that as she stood amid Paslew's ruins she heard the voices of monks, singing.
* Cattermole was a noted artist of the time. He also etched James 1 and his retinue as they visited Hoghton Tower, near Preston.
Wellington's England remembered
I have been following the Duke of Wellington's feisty campaign against Napoleon's generals in Spain. And it is conceivable that it has told me more about this island's spirit 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, rather late 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 employment 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 degradation 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 concur.
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.'
Evil and good were never far apart and the extremes of both have been witnessed on that large and brooding shape. Pendle Hill in Lancashire was the place that inspired George Fox, whose vision led to the Quaker religion in 1652. It was the place, too, that inspired witches, or at least the hunting of witches. So good and evil were intertwined in much the same era and what was evil and what was good was all in the eyes of the beholder.
It must have been good, as a magistrate, to catch a witch. But what if the witch was not a witch but a bumbling, ignorant old woman marred by delusions of the time? Who knows, who knows? For all is conjecture, all is doubt.
From childhood I have been fascinated by this area and the names are as familiar to me as my own town of birth - Sabden and Barley, Newchurch and Colne and on the other side Clitheroe where the manorial lords, the Asshetons, live now as their ancestors lived then with Downham as their home and their birthright. It was an Assheton who told me that his wife's family were late-comers, having arrived with the Conquerer.
For these mixed reasons I went back and the witches got there before me. As I arrived in Barley, a village sturdily built up narrow lanes, the weather was bright and blustery. And within an hour the blackness was upon it and then within half an hour green hillsides were white with hail. In the old days, I suppose, that would have been interpreted as a sign that I was marked for punishment.
Barley has a car park, a couple of pubs, a scattering of homes and a long memory. The car park has a machine requiring one pound. But it does not, like all other machines I have seen, give tickets. My money plonked in to a sound of near emptiness. Payment, it seemed, was on trust. And trust is a fragile thing, as the witches discovered. At the cafe there, only guide dogs were allowed, and since our dog never joined the guides, my wife and I got two large mugs with the tea bags floating, and sat outside, beneath a limited extension of the roof, for shelter.
Out of the bluster and at the start of the storm a wiry old man arrived with a shivering dog and what looked like a tiny grandchild. He reminded me of actor Lionel Jeffries' description of Leeds - "a place where everybody leans forward against an imaginary wind." Others ran for shelter but he carried on as though nothing was happening and vanished into woodland. That was the nearest thing I saw to 17th century behaviour.
The Pendle trials of 1612 are among the most notorious in English history. Twelve accused were charged with murdering 10 people in and around the Pendle Hill area by use of witchcraft. One, Old Demdike, died, aged 80, in jail before her trial. All but one of the surviving ten were found guilty, and hanged at Lancaster Moor on 20 August, 1612. It meant slow strangulation in front of large crowds.
Mothers Demdike and Chattox, two old widows living near Pendle hill, had been in Lancaster Castle where prisoners were held 30 feet below ground in a small dungeon. They did not have legal advice. The star prosecution witness, whom they could not challenge, was nine years old.
So there is your evil, allegedly in pursuit of good. James 1 thought there was evil about, and no doubt many more did, too. Because of James, an Act was passed imposing the death penalty "for making a covenant with an evil spirit, using a corpse for magic, hurting life or limb, procuring love, or injuring cattle by means of charms."
These witches owe much of their resurrection to the fiction of Harrison Ainsworth (The Lancashire Witches, 1849, to Robert Neill ( Mist Over Pendle), and Thomas Potts, clerk to Lancaster Assizes, who presented an account of the trials. Potts was instructed to do so by the trial judges, Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley. Was at least one of these anxious to have an account that would advance his own career? Do parts of the witches' confessions reveal symptoms of psychotic illness, delusions, hallucinations? Some made their statements voluntarily, without any threat of torture. Strange. An odd figure in the business was Alice Nutter, a woman of some substance by comparison with her fellow prisoners. Roger Nowell, an investigating magistrate, had a boundary dispute with her and make of that what you will.
Whether dealing with fact or fiction, there are more questions than answers and superstition threads itself through both. My own grandmother, a God-fearing woman who died in her eighties spoke in mysterious terms about playing cards - "they had a way of witching with them in Immanuel churchyard..." She lived almost within sight of Pendle and her remark was made in the 1940's.
George Fox, his head full of love and dedication, was the other side of the coin: a different path but the same sort of zeal. The message he spread gained strength far from this spot. William Penn was his friend, and Pennsylvania is the result.
Fox wrote of Pendle in his autobiography:
"I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered. As I went down, I found a spring of water in the side of the hill, with which I refreshed myself, having eaten or drunk but little for several days before.
"At night we came to an inn, and declared truth to the man of the house (some of the landlords I know would have thrown him out), and wrote a paper to the priests and professors, declaring the day of the Lord, and that Christ was come to teach people Himself, by His power and Spirit in their hearts, and to bring people off from all the world's ways and teachers, to His own free teaching, who had bought them, and was the Saviour of all them that believed in Him. The man of the house spread the paper abroad, and was mightily affected with the truth. Here the Lord opened unto me, and let me see a great people in white raiment by a river side, coming to the Lord; and the place that I saw them in was about Wensleydale and Sedbergh."I have no quarrel with the Quaker movement. Indeed, in one of their meeting places I once enjoyed their communal silence. But it does seem to me that people of the time were desperately keen to acquire visions of one kind or another.
I had less visionary ideas myself before the storm. I found the village cafe and they were advertising dumplings and stew. Fox would have drooled at the thought of it since he had eaten so little; and I was not far off drooling myself; but I had the dog and the dog would have been barred from the premises, so I settled for the Pendle Inn, where dogs are welcome. A good choice as it happens since I had the cheese and onion pie after observing that the hail had filled the window boxes so that the tiny flowers looked as thought they were wrapped up in bed.
Lustier people than me were coming in from the hills for food and it was all very pleasant.
But how unpleasant it must have been, once upon a time, when people's minds were warped by their own imaginations. And now? Look around this sorry world of ours and it is still much the same.
© geoffrey mather 2008
