Standing was a bit of a mumbler. But he explained his own expertise: he was steeped in the history of this forest – his MA research focused on its seventeenth-century landscape. But now, he said, ‘it is a complicated multi-purpose forest’. The three current verderers, sitting on the platform behind him, looked rather doubtful, as though uncertain what was meant by this word ‘multi-purpose’ but not liking the sound of it.
None of this mattered. Everything was preordained. When the vote was taken, a respectable but not overwhelming number of hands went up for Rob Guest. ‘I don’t think we’re going to get this,’ said a well-spoken woman near me. ‘It’s all going to turn into a political nightmare.’ Then the Standing supporters were asked to indicate. It was what you might call a forest of hands. ‘Oh, God,’ said the woman.
The victor spoke graciously and said he was sorry there were not two seats: ‘I think Rob would have served you equally well.’ Behind him, his new colleagues said nothing, though they looked as though the waiter had just brought them a plate of particularly nasty turbot.
And so the battles for England’s soul rage: violently in Stokes Croft between capitalist conformity and its enemies; understatedly in Gloucester Cathedral between different views of the English countryside; eternally on the Severn, between the sluggish current and the inrushing tide.
October/November 2011
Ian Standing, who seemed a very decent bloke, later told me that, at his first meeting, his fellow verderers ‘were very warm and welcoming, and presented me with two ties’. But he was not yet ready to succumb: ‘This forest needs a vision that will value it and protect it.’ There was no internal argument about culling the wild boar, which had reached an estimated 800 by 2014, and a major anti-boar programme was planned. By then the Tesco Express in Stokes Croft had extended its opening hours, but only until 7 p.m.
7. Bye-bye to the bile beans
YORKSHIRE
Yorkshire day, 1 August, dawned warm and humid, but no rain seemed imminent. The group gathered at Walmgate, the easternmost gate to the city of York, at 10.45 a.m. The Yorkshire Declaration of Integrity was read for the first time:
I declare …
That Yorkshire is three Ridings and the City of York with these boundaries of 1,136 years standing;
That the address of all places in these Ridings is YORKSHIRE;
That all persons born therein or resident therein and loyal to the Ridings are Yorkshire men and women;
That any person or corporate body which deliberately ignores or denies the aforementioned shall forfeit all claims to Yorkshire status.
These declarations made this Yorkshire Day 2011. YORKSHIRE
FOR EVER! GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
This was greeted with a cheer from everyone present, a crowd totalling fifteen. There was a brace of Japanese tourists on the city wall and two ladies in the coffee shop; otherwise just the heedless traffic. Roger Sewell, chairman of the Yorkshire Ridings Society, said the turnout was always a bit thin at Walmgate. The eastern wall is the furthest from the city centre; the area is full of council flats and hardly a visitor hub. Things will warm up later, he said.
Every Yorkshire schoolboy used to know that they lived in the largest county (and the best). The three ridings were North, East and West, the word ‘riding’ deriving from ‘thirding’; there never was a South Riding except in a novel. And, as the declaration said, York was not in a riding but an ‘ainsty’ of its own. Then in the great shake-up of 1974 the ridings were abolished and six separate bits of the county, some small, some substantial, were chopped off and merged with neighbouring, lesser counties. The West Riding was actually shared between seven different new authorities. These decisions caused controversy at the time but were not halted. Most of those who even remember the old county are now in bus-pass land; certainly most of this little group were.
We made the declaration by setting foot, just, in each of the ridings: outside Walmgate for the East Riding, Micklegate for the west, Bootham Bar for the north and inside Monkgate for the ainsty itself. It was read in English, in Latin, in Old English – full of references to Eoforwic-scire – and Old Norse, a prolix language which always took twice as long as the others. However, it was declaimed with great elan by a scholarly chap called Peter Hindle. ‘It’s an easier language if you’ve got a Yorkshire accent than if you’re southern,’ he said. ‘Very flat vowels.’ Sometimes the proclaimers preceded their declaration with a traditional Yorkshire opening: ‘Ayyoop’ or ‘Nah then’.
And the crowd did build. By Micklegate there were a good two dozen of us. The group regards that one as the main event and insisted on it starting at 11.36 to mark the fact that it was 1,136 years since Eoforwic-scire first got a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. There was also one declaration for luck, at the market in Parliament Street, where we were joined by the Deputy Lord Mayor, not a grand figure in robes and chain but a jolly bloke in a panama hat, and a girl called Amanda who had a Yorkist rose tattooed on her left shoulder.
There was a large crowd at the market, shopping and eating their sandwiches. Most took no notice whatever. Roger had warned me it would be a bit like this: ‘The trouble with York is that 70 per cent of the people on the streets are tourists.’ But you could tell he was a bit disappointed. At Bootham Bar, where we gathered outside the Gents, and even Peter’s theatrical Old Norse could not be heard above the traffic, we did seem particularly pathetic.
We tramped the walls from Bar to Bar, waving our flags. And the general response was simple indifference. A local resident, Carolyn Dougherty, who fetched up here from San Jose, California, explained to me that the great delight of Yorkshire was the number of eccentrics. So a dozen or so of them gathered together impressed no one.
Much of the conversation among the group concerned the iniquity of the 1972 Local Government Act, which not only dismembered Yorkshire but created the much-loathed, and now abolished, artificialities of Cleveland and Humberside. ‘I heard on the BBC News the other day the words Bridlington, North Humberside,’ snorted someone. Judith Preston Anderson, a retired headmistress (there were several in the group), told me that she moved to Lincolnshire to take over a primary school and her first act was to get the words ‘South Humberside’ removed from the note-paper. ‘All the old grannies gathered at the gate and said: “But you’ll get sent to prison, Mrs Anderson.” They wouldn’t have dared, believe me.’
And I had some very complicated conversations about the precise status of Goole. There were even hints of dissension in the ranks of the society, between those who wanted to emphasise the county as a whole and those more concerned about the ridings. These are not the major topics of concern on the streets of Leeds and Bradford.
And yet beneath it all one can detect a barely audible rustle of success. Yorkshire Day was conceived by the society’s founders in the 1970s, when the resentment of those who felt it still burned hot. They chose 1 August primarily because it is Minden Day, which celebrates the Battle of Minden, 1759, when the 51st Foot (later the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) fought their way to victory over the French wearing roses in their coats. It is also the anniversary of the abolition of slavery across almost all the British Empire in 1834, brought about by the Yorkshireman William Wilberforce. It is also Lammastide in the Church calendar. ‘And my husband’s birthday,’ added Judith.
In 2011, for the first time, the concept looked like gaining real traction. In the Test match at Nottingham, England beat India thanks to the bowling feats of the Yorkshireman Tim Bresnan. Both the radio commentators and the Sun made much of it being Yorkshire Day. In Whitehall the communities secretary, Eric Pickles, the bumptious ex-leader of Bradford Council, reportedly ordered his staff to fly the Yorkshire flag. This was also created by the society, and very handsome it is: a double white rose on a delicious ice-blue background. A blue of more southerly skies. There were various stunts across the county as well: an ice cream firm near Huddersfield made a special batch – Yorkshire pudding and gravy
flavour; there was a Yorkshire Day cooking competition at Leconfield; and an evening of stories and music at Meltham Church Hall. One of the activists, Mark Graham of Stamford Bridge, was delighted to be told by his daughter that at the Leeds rock festival, which takes place later in August, there are regular chants of ‘Yorkshire, Yorkshire’. Nothing like that happens anywhere else.
It was only when the Welsh Nationalist Gwynfor Evans threatened to starve himself to death unless the government provided a TV channel in Cymraeg that Welsh language and culture ceased to be a joke and started to revive. And it seems to me that the Yorkshire Ridings Society has become marginalised by its own moderation. As I left them, I felt that what the cause needed was a few Gandhian fanatics. And good Lord, there ought not to be a shortage round here.
In the drab open country between Tadcaster and Pontefract there occurred, on the bitter-cold Palm Sunday of 1461, what is now thought to be the grisliest day ever on English soil. This was the Battle of Towton, where the white-rose forces of Edward, Duke of York, routed the red-rose forces of the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, leaving thousands dead: 38,000 is the top-of-the-range figure. Many were slain on a field still known as Bloody Meadow. Others either froze or drowned in Cock Beck.
Most of the dead were Lancastrians. They had the numerical advantage but the Yorkist archers had the wind at their backs. The victory secured the kingship for Edward IV, whose heirs might have stayed on top for ever had Edward not died suddenly in 1483. This led to the murder of his sons (in most versions) by their uncle, who became Richard III until his own death at Bosworth handed the throne to Henry Tudor, who was more or less Lancastrian. The rest, as they say, is history.
Despite its gruesomeness, Towton is not a very well-known battle. However, a clearly marked trail had just opened to coincide with the 550th anniversary. On a clear day at Towton you can see the Drax power station; but I arrived in the midst of a filthy downpour. A cross of St George flew in the adjoining field, but that was simply to advertise a forthcoming ploughing match. There were, however, two wreaths at the foot of the tiny memorial, Dacre’s Cross: one of them, improbably but charmingly, from the Military History Society of the West Midlands Police.
Towton actually takes up most of the second act of a Shakespeare play, but the play is Henry VI Part III, which is not high on the list of audience favourites. And indeed the Wars of the Roses have generally struggled to maintain their place in the nation’s historical imagination, especially since school history became largely Hitler-centric. Their most obvious commemoration comes in the cricketing rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, which is still real, though with little of its old intensity. Most half-interested people probably assume, as I did, that the counties were relevant to the conflicts of the fifteenth century, when they had already been in existence for half a millennium.
Evidently not. Then and now, dukedoms were titles unrelated to local connections: the Dukes of Devonshire are based in Derbyshire; the current Duke of York, Prince Andrew, does not go round saying ‘Nah then’ or ‘Ayyoop’. According to Professor Michael Hicks, author of the recent work The Wars of the Roses, the Lancastrian heartland was actually Leicester. And although the Dukes of York had a castle at Sandal, near Wakefield, the centre of their power was Wales. The families that mattered in Yorkshire were the Percys and the Nevilles. Indeed, York itself was a hotbed of Lancastrian sympathy, as was the East Riding. The realities of York-shire rarely accord with the perception.
Still, the notion of Eoforwic-scire does date back more than 1,100 years, and the characteristics associated with Yorkshiremen also have a long history. ‘A more stiff-necked, wilful and obstinate people did I ever know or hear of,’ complained Archbishop Edwin Sandys, translated from London to York in 1577. The word ‘tyke’, otherwise a mongrel or boor, was applied to Yorkshiremen from at least 1700. In 1736 the ballad-opera A Wonder, or An Honest Yorkshireman was a West End hit, the title being a bit of a giveaway as to what London thought.
The line ‘Eat all, sup all, pay nowt’ seems to have a long provenance, as does the verse
Tha’ can say what tha’ likes to a Yorkshireman
Tha’ can do as tha’ likes an’ all;
But tha’ll gerrit all back an’ more besides
So mind what tha’ sez, that’s all.
There would be no perception these days that Yorkshire people are any more dishonest than anyone else. But wilful, canny heading towards tight, and combative? All of these, and more, are part not just of their image but of their self-image. Boastful, too.
‘What’s the biggest county in England?’ one of my favourite Yorkshiremen asked over dinner.
‘Yorkshire,’ I replied.
‘What’s the second biggest?’
I began to get suspicious. ‘We are talking traditional counties?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, Lincolnshire, then.’
‘Wrong! The West Riding!’ he announced triumphantly. (True, I now think, but only just.)
The ur-text on Yorkshireness these days is the Monty Python sketch:
‘We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.’
‘Looxury.’
It is a stereotype, of course: the hard-as-nails, mook-an’-brass, oop-by-his-bootstraps, University-of-Hard-Knocks northern businessman, so busy telling you how successful he is that he can’t possibly have time to make money. He exists, though, and not just in Yorkshire. But Yorkshire is his spiritual home. And if anything, the notion of Yorkshireness has grown stronger since the county suffered its multiple amputations.
Accents that were a rarity in the media in the early days of the BBC became far more prevalent from the 1960s onwards. The cosy tones of J. B. Priestley once embodied the county. Later came harsher figures like Arthur Scargill, Geoffrey Boycott and Jimmy Savile. The last two bewildered the radio psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare, supposedly unflappable as both a broadcaster and a shrink: Boycott told him cricket was not a team game; Savile, a lifelong bachelor, derided the notion of the word ‘love’, implying the whole thing was some kind of global hoax.1
The anthropologist Kate Fox saw the classic Yorkshire type as a self-conscious inversion of the English character. The English in general are even more squeamish about money than they are about sex. She regards the blunt Pythonesque Yorkshire businessman as a deliberate, very self-conscious reversal of this, even a parody. It is not a diagnostic condition that afflicts every male born in the Broad Acres; Yorkshiremen come in all flavours. And not every example is in business. My own favourite representation came from Peter Simple, the late, great Daily Telegraph columnist, who invented Alderman Foodbotham, ‘the 25-stone, crag-visaged, iron-watch-chained, grim-booted perpetual chairman of the Bradford City Tramways and Fine Arts Committee’. At least I thought Simple, aka Michael Wharton, had invented him until the day I first clapped eyes on Eric Pickles as a real-life Bradford councillor.
Not everyone looks like Alderman Footbotham or blusters like Arthur Scargill. For each county in this book, I have tried to distil the essence of the place. On Yorkshire Day I kept asking the enthusiasts where I might find that essence. They all replied that the whole point of the county was its diversity, which is fair enough. More acres in Yorkshire (3,882,851), they like to say, than letters in the King James Bible (3,228,076). (There are different versions of these figures, but the principle stands, for what it’s worth.) Paul Jackson, editor of the Dalesman, told me that Yorkshire’s size was the key to the strength of its identity. ‘After the Industrial Revolution, when people came out of the Dales to find work, they tended to move to industrial areas within the county. Elsewhere, they would have been far more likely to move counties. I’ve traced my ancestry back to Nidderdale and round Settle in the 1800s. They went down
to Leeds, Bradford and the Heavy Woollen District, but they didn’t leave Yorkshire.’
Britain’s Texas, it is sometimes called – a phrase I mentioned to Carolyn Dougherty, the Californian Tyke-ophile. ‘No! Texans are mean,’ she said. ‘Yorkshire people aren’t mean. Canny. But not mean-spirited. Very generous.’ With the zeal of the convert, Carolyn listed for me her favourite safely dead Yorkshiremen: Sir George Cayley of Scarborough, who was tinkering with primitive flying machines before the close of the eighteenth century; William Scoresby, Arctic explorer and curate of Bessingby; and Squire Charles Waterton of Walton Hall, collector of South American animals and creator of the world’s first bird sanctuary, a man who shot a donkey with a curare dart and then spent four hours resuscitating it with a bellows, so it lived on as a family pet for years. ‘His personality was so charismatic I can still respond to it more than two centuries later,’ she said.
Had they lived in London, such men might have been hailed as geniuses. But inventiveness in draughty northern manors and vicarages always tends to be taken for madness. Despite all its pretensions, moaned Foggy Dewhurst in Last of the Summer Wine, ‘Yorkshire is not even one of the superpowers competing for the ideological leadership of the world.’ His mate Cleggy moaned in reply: ‘It all went wrong when they sacked Boycott.’
If Yorkshire were a country it would have a respectable population size, comparable with Ireland, Norway, Singapore and, come to think of it, Scotland. But it’s not a country. It’s not even a proper county any more. Imagine how Texas would respond if some Washington dumb-ass proposed shifting the panhandle to Oklahoma on the grounds that it would be more administratively convenient. Faced with the destruction of the county, allegedly proud Yorkshire folk behaved in a manner that did not invert Englishness, but epitomised it: they grumbled and did what they were told.
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