Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Holmfirth turned out to be both more upmarket and more distressed than I had expected: Pennine Wealth Management and Harrow’s Wine Bar rubbing shoulders with a large cluster of charity shops. There was some minor but not very intrusive cashing-in. The Wrinkled Stocking Tea Room and the Summer Wine Shop and Exhibition were closed. Sid’s Café, where Foggy, Clegg and Compo sat for years contemplating life, the universe and Nora Batty, was open. As is surprisingly normal in Yorkshire, the tea came in a mug, not a pot. It occurred to me that the decline of the teapot does not represent – as it does in the South – laziness and indifference, but a small manifestation of Yorkshire arrogance: we-know-how-to-make-tea-here-and-you-can-bluddy-lahk-it. There is something very Texan about this attitude. The half-dozen tea rooms in the county run by Bettys are an exception. But Bettys was founded by a Swiss immigrant called Frederick Belmont.

  Fifty minutes and several valleys away is Hebden Bridge, which has been named (meaningless statistic alert) as the fourth funkiest town in the world and the most individual in Britain. It is also said, more convincingly, to be Britain’s most lesbian-friendly town. I saw only one shop – William Holt greengrocer – that looked as though it had been there more than five minutes. Its neighbours included the Old Treehouse Children’s Hairdresser (First Haircut: £10 including certificate and lock of hair) and Home Oh! It was hard to get a decent cuppa here too, because the cafés were obsessed with fruit-flavoured quasi-teas. If Kate Fox is right and Yorkshireness is an inversion of Englishness, Hebden Bridgeness has become an inversion of Yorkshireness. In its way it seemed to me as sad as Thurcroft.

  In the licorice fields at Pontefract

  My love and I did meet

  And many a burdened licorice bush

  Was blooming round our feet…

  I had thought this verse was a Betjemanesque joke and that the liquorice fields of Pontefract were as real as the spaghetti trees of southern Switzerland. Then I found myself on the outskirts of Pontefract, in the office of Chris Marshall, managing director of Tangerine Confectionery, ‘the leading UK independent manufacturer of sugar confectionery and branded popcorn’.

  ‘Do you know what those are round the flagpole?’ he asked, waving his arm towards the window.

  ‘Well, they look like roses,’ I said.

  In my defence, I had my reading glasses on. And I had never before seen a liquorice bush. The dozen or so round the flagpole, he thought, were probably the largest collection of them left in Pontefract, Britain, or indeed western Europe – although Marshall, a third-generation liquorice man, was planning a small plantation in his own garden.

  Liquorice came from the Middle East, where it was prized for its multifarious medicinal qualities. The Cluniac monks apparently brought it to Pontefract in the Middle Ages, discovering by chance, said Marshall, that the area’s sandy soils helpfully mimicked the plant’s natural home. The taste for liquorice as a sweet came later, and eventually the town had seventeen local manufacturers and a hundred acres of liquorice fields.

  A hundred acres did not sound a lot to me but essence of liquorice, distilled from the root, is said to be the sweetest natural substance on earth, and a little goes a very long way. Which means it is easy to transport. By the late Victorian era, when there were seventeen different makers of Pontefract Cakes, and demand was growing, it made sense to have new plantations in Turkey, where land and labour were cheaper and the weather more trustworthy.

  The history of all the British confectionery brands that seem a changeless part of our lives is like a game of pass-the-parcel. And mostly the parcel has now been passed right out of Yorkshire. Rowntree’s (owned by Nestlé) have gone from York. So have Terry’s (owned by Kraft). Mackintosh’s (Nestlé again) have gone from Halifax. But there are still two liquorice factories: Tangerine and the old firm of Dunhill, now owned by Haribo. But there are no liquorice allsorts made in Pontefract. Bassett’s (owned by Kraft) make theirs – over-sweet to my taste – in Sheffield. Tangerine, who do supermarket own-brands, make theirs in Blackpool, where the late tycoon Garfield Weston built a new factory simply because he happened to love liquorice allsorts.

  I love them too, and their health-giving qualities are undeniable:

  Red hair she had and golden skin,

  Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,

  Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d

  The strongest legs in Pontefract.

  And then there is rhubarb. The rhubarb triangle, north of Wakefield and south of Morley and Rothwell, was once as mysterious as the drowning grounds of the Bermuda Triangle or the opium fields of the Golden Triangle. And its borders wavered depending who you asked. Now the EU has given Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb protected status, like Shetland Wool or Cornish Clotted Cream, with its boundaries clearly defined and the full might of Brussels waiting to descend on any producer from outside the area who falsely claims to be in it. The EU couldn’t care less where all the opium comes from.

  Rhubarb originated in Siberia, and the climate north of Wakefield proved equally favourable, for reasons that might seem obvious to anyone who has been there in winter with an east wind blowing, but more specifically arose from the area being both a frost pocket and in a rain shadow from the Pennines. There were once 200 producers, and special rhubarb expresses to Covent Garden. Now there are only eleven. ‘It’s extremely hard work and some would say only stupid Yorkshire people would do it,’ said Janet Oldroyd-Hulme. ‘We go on to the land at a time of year when most other farmers are off it.’

  Mrs O-H is the fourth-generation boss of the splendidly Yorkshire-sounding firm of E. Oldroyd & Sons. She has her sons in the business, and a sixth generation being groomed. The principle handed down through the years is that exposure to light thickens and toughens the stalks, and that getting the plant out of the ground and into a darkened shed makes it sweeter and more tender. Thus, the growers insist, they can produce better rhubarb than anything that might come out of my garden. And they can get it into the shops in midwinter, when there is precious little else available that is both English and fresh.

  There is a magnificent rhythm to the rhubarb grower’s winter as each type succeeds another: from Timperley to Hammonds Early to Reed’s Early Superb to the champagne varieties to Stockbridge Harbinger to Stockbridge Arrow to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In the war, when sweets were rationed, kids used to chew on sticks of rhubarb to get a sugar hit. But when the good times returned, rhubarb evoked bad memories and was bracketed with cabbage and sprouts. It is indeed a vegetable, even though it’s eaten as a fruit, making rhubarb the exact reverse of a tomato. However, it is back in fashion, and champagne rhubarb is on every bistro menu though it has nothing to do with champagne.

  But there is a problem, resulting from climate change: before it is taken into the sheds, the rhubarb needs frost to get the glucose going in the roots; only then can the growers raise the temperature to trick the plant into thinking it’s spring.

  ‘Climate change is shrinking the growing season,’ said Mrs O-H.

  ‘You mean, it’s the exact reverse of everything else?’

  ‘Yes. My dad used to take the Timperley into the forcing sheds in early November. You couldn’t do that now.’

  I was in her office on a mild November day, without even a hint of frost. The previous winter the ground had been so frozen that they couldn’t dig the roots out, so that was no good either. There are other unhelpful changes. In the old days, the sulphates from all the sooty chimneys could be used as fertiliser. And the leftovers from the woollen mills were useful too, the ‘shoddy’: there was nothing like Pennine shoddy, she said, especially if it had the daggings – the pooey bits – still on it. Now the wool comes from all over, and weird Antipodean plants have been known to sprout in the fields as a result.

  Just behind Oldroyd’s field of early Timperley was a heap of what looked like sand and ash. But to the touch it felt woolly, if a bit coarse. It was shoddy. Or to put it the Yorkshire way: that’s shoddy, is that.
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br />   The most prominent building in Dewsbury is an old mill, five storeys high and recently restored. ‘ESTD 1856,’ says the sign. ‘MACHELL BROS LIMITED. SHODDY & MUNGO MANUFRS.’

  Shoddy and mungo were both essentially recycled wool, the bottom end of the market. Hence, obviously, the adjective ‘shoddy’. The noun has gone the way of Machells (pronounced May-chells), whose mill has predictably been turned into flats. Very desirable, one might think: centre of town, short walk to the station, easy commute into Leeds but far cheaper. The flats have not even been sold. They are owned by a housing association. ‘Nothing wrong with a housing association,’ said the Dewsbury journalist Margaret Watson.

  Absolutely not. But if, as one would have expected, the Machells flats had been sold to yuppies from Leeds, the pub next door, the old Railway Tavern, would not be shut, it would be a wine bar. The next building would not be a snooker hall-cum-loan shop. The next two buildings would not have been pawnbrokers (‘WANTED. GOLD AND SILVER!!’). And the rest of town might not be so full of pound shops broken up by the occasional amusement arcade. The only thriving business in the immediate vicinity was the Iqbal Hijab Centre. Nothing wrong with that either. But in the complex history of race relations in Britain, Dewsbury stands out as an unusually disastrous example.

  This is a handsome stone town, a county borough – and thus answerable to no one between here and Whitehall – from 1913 to 1974, full of pride and good-natured rivalry, based on proximity and rugby league, with its neighbour Batley. We are in the Heavy Woollen District, where prosperity depended on the rougher end of the wool trade.

  The mill owners began to run out of willing labour before they began to run out of customers and thus began to advertise in Pakistan. And the newcomers began arriving, to initial good-natured curiosity. And arriving and arriving and arriving. And then the original inhabitants began to disappear either to the distant edges of the borough or right out of it, leaving behind the newcomers and a white underclass.

  When I drove into Dewsbury, there was a low afternoon sun; hunting a parking space, I accidentally turned down a one-way street. I was put right by four young Asians driving the correct way, who angrily waved me backwards. I acknowledged and started to reverse. But they kept coming towards me and, with solid traffic on the main road behind, I was stuck. I wound the window down and said, with uncharacteristic mildness: ‘You might at least let me get out of this.’ ‘You shouldn’t have fooking got into it, should you?’ snarled the driver. Well, welcome to fooking Dewsbury.

  When I mentioned this to one white Dewsburyite, he rolled his eyes in a what-do-you-expect-of-the-Asians kind of way. Yet the incident did not strike me as particularly Asian; it did strike me as rather Yorkshire, and very Dewsbury. It’s a bad-tempered place. It didn’t feel in any way dangerous, though. By 8 p.m. the centre was like one of those American small towns where almost everyone has fled to the suburbs, leaving behind a tiny residue of drunks, dogs and the occasional passing freight train. Here even the drunks were missing: most of the pubs in Dewsbury have shut down. One of them, the White Hart – formerly the haunt of the Masons and Rotarians – has become a Sharia Centre. There is no cinema, not so much as a bingo hall. Even McDonald’s looked deserted.

  It’s not that much livelier in daylight: Marks & Spencer pulled out years ago; and the confident Victorian town hall has been a shell since Dewsbury county borough and the town were subsumed into an amorphous Huddersfield-centred splodge known as Kirklees. The market itself was thriving, although there were few young shoppers, and no one under eighty at the tripe stall.

  Dewsbury did still have two weekly papers. I met two of the journalists. Margaret Watson, who joined the Dewsbury Reporter in 1958 and rose to be deputy editor, was still writing her column, ‘The Way We Were’ (sample headline: AUSTIN FRIARS HAS A RICH AND INTERESTING HISTORY), and is a local legend. She is kindly and friendly but fearful that I might be about to criticise her beloved Dewsbury. When I met her, she had a book coming out: Dewsbury in Food and Photos.

  Danny Lockwood used to edit the Reporter and now edits an independent rival the Press (sample headline: GUN TERROR). He played amateur rugby league for Great Britain; on his website he calls himself ‘Yorkshire’s no. 1 columnist’; he is shaven-headed, voluble and a very Yorkshireish Yorkshireman. He was about to publish a book too, called The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury. Margaret and Danny are very fond of each other, a sort of mother and wayward son. Their Dewsburys are rather different. Danny took me round his version of it. It is not a cheerful one.

  He showed me the estate where in 2008 a woman called Karen Matthews got herself involved in the abduction of her nine-year-old daughter, Shannon, one of her seven children by five different fathers. It was a case that transfixed the nation and, more than anything, created the image of Dewsbury as a dump. These are the new slums, identifiable not by the state of the buildings but by the state of the gardens, the worn-down faces of the women and the hopelessness of the teenagers.

  We passed Dewsbury Minster, on a site used for worship for about 1,500 years. ‘If the chips had fallen right, that would have been the cathedral, not Wakefield,’ I said. ‘The chips never fall right for Dewsbury,’ he said bitterly.

  Then he showed me Savile Town, an old area now almost wholly Asian and home to Markazi Masjid, a site used for worship for just over thirty years. Unlike the minster, it can hold 4,000 worshippers and furthermore is likely to get them. It is run by the Tablighi Jamaat, an organisation that appears to be fundamentalist in the sense of urging that followers adhere to the lifestyle of Muhammad, even – according to some accounts – to the point of brushing their teeth with a twig and sleeping on the ground. There have been moments when it has clearly brushed with terrorism, but most experts see its main characteristic as a flinty austerity.

  It is very keen on recruiting young Muslims but does not proselytise among unbelievers. And Dewbury Muslims are more than normally wary of unbelievers. Hence the sign outside: ‘UNAUTHORISED PERSONS NOT ALLOWED. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’. Very un-minsterlike. But we were greeted by a friendly young man called Imran with a long beard, shalwar kameez, Timberland boots and a Glasgow accent. He asked if we would like to look around. Perhaps he was unaware of local race relations. Yes, please, I said. And, after an interval, we were admitted. Danny was gobsmacked and, not being universally popular in this part of town, rather uneasy. This was not his Dewsbury at all. I am not normally more gung-ho than a rugby league international.

  We were given a brief tour of the downstairs area, the main prayer hall being blocked off by a security fence. It was a place governed by clocks, like a City of London trading room, though these clocks showed the prayer times. Inside one large room, a group of acolytes sat cross-legged on the floor listening to a lesson that was in turn being relayed by loudspeaker to the sleeping quarters.

  This was another large room, with maybe a hundred rugs and blankets on the floor. People stay here for a month or more, Imran told us. There was no furniture except a couple of washing machines in the far corner. It reminded me of an airport lounge during a strike by French air traffic controllers or a particularly ferocious blizzard. By now there was a certain amount of whispering and pointing going on, and Danny was growing very uneasy indeed. One sensed that if there were a secret crypt here to match St Wilfrid’s at Ripon, we might not be invited to view it. So we said polite goodbyes.

  But I couldn’t get away from the thought of the Ripon crypt and the monks who would have been awestruck by Wilfrid’s holy relics. They were probably much like these young men: intense, ascetic, God-fearing, credulous, biddable, naïve, half-crazed by unutterable longings. And it seemed to me that Yorkshire might have gone full circle.

  August/November 2011

  Mather’s Black Beer ceased production in 2013: it had previously benefited from a complicated quirk in the way duty was calculated. The Treasury closed the loophole in 2012, forcing a huge price rise, with predictable results (especially in Yorkshire). Ba
rnoldswick has so far successfully resisted Tesco; opposition included town centre shopkeepers boarding up their windows as a sign of what would happen. In 2014 Margaret Watson, happily, was still writing her column (‘Mill apprentice’s tale brings back memories’) and the Press was still purveying its less rosy view of Dewsbury.

  In May 2014 voters in Yarm, near Middlesbrough, having spent half a lifetime in areas variously described as Teesside, Cleveland and Stockton on Tees, voted 1,288 to 177 to return to Yorkshire once and for all. The referendum was unofficial and the turnout was 24 per cent. The figures seem to convey accurately the sentiments of those who do care and the wretched indifference of the majority.

  In July 2014 the first two stages of the Tour de France were held in Yorkshire. An estimated 2.5 million people hung around for hours to glimpse a few moments worth of Lycra, which was weird. Gary Verity of ‘Welcome to Yorkshire’ enthused beforehand: ‘There are millions of people round the world who can’t point to where Yorkshire is today on a map … after this weekend everybody will know where Yorkshire is.’ Unfortunately, people still could not point to Yorkshire on a map, the bloody fools having gone and moved it.

  Footnotes

  1 I wrote that sentence before Savile was exposed as a mass sexual predator in 2012; I have retained it as written, on grounds of perceptiveness.

  2 Not for his reputation, it wasn’t.

  8. Life on the edge

  SUSSEX

  On 5 November I arrived in town at lunchtime, as advised, before the roads closed for the duration. Already, occasional explosions rent the air. Workmen were boarding up the windows of shops, nearly all of which were planning to close early. Waitrose was packed, pending its 4 p.m. shutdown. Friends acknowledged each other hurriedly, usually with a single-word greeting: ‘Mad!’ The atmosphere was that of a town in the southern United States given warning that a Category Five hurricane would score a direct hit just after nightfall.