Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  This appeared in The Times under the headline: ‘RUTLAND PEOPLE NOT A LOT OF IGNORANT HOBBLEDEHOYS’. Perhaps more tellingly, the Lord Lieutenant, Mr Codrington, CMG, MC, of Preston Hall, happened to have dinner with the prime minister, Harold Macmillan – probably at Buck’s or the Cavalry Club – and told him Rutland was taking things badly. The matter was fixed and Rutland survived for another decade. The system was ever corrupt. But sometimes benignly so.

  It was an era, however, when it was not possible to stand in the way of what was deemed to be progress. The creation of Britain’s largest man-made lake – what became known as Rutland Water – took 3 per cent of the county’s not many acres, despite all the protests. And the next inundation of local government reform was unstoppable. Rutland was merged with Leicestershire, though merger was hardly the word. There were ninety-three seats on the new county council and Rutland had two of them.

  Yet the idea of Rutland never went away. Indeed, it grew stronger. The year after Rutland was formally abolished, Eric Idle’s Rutland Weekend Television, a spoof series about Britain’s smallest TV station, began on BBC2. In the early days of CAMRA, Ruddles’ Brewery in Oakham became seen as the epitome of a rural family-owned brewery that cared about its beer. Naturally, hardly anyone in the county cared who emptied their bins. They did care about being made to write ‘Oakham, Leicestershire’ on envelopes or being told they lived in Leicestershire on news bulletins. Signs did not always stay where they had been erected.

  There were obvious political undercurrents – Leicestershire often being Labour; Rutland very un-Labour. In neighbouring counties, even among the gentry, Rutland is thought of as rich. There may have been a racial tinge too, Leicestershire’s ethnic make-up being very different; perhaps also a sense that Rutland sounded better for property-price purposes. But one can be over-cynical. There was also an enormous affection for the place – because outsiders liked to know it was there, because residents liked being there.

  Local opinion suggests that, had it been a bit bigger, Rutland might never have come back. It was being so ridiculously bijou – one-third the size of Westmorland – that made it so loveable. It was Ruritania, Fredonia, Erewhon, Passport to Pimlico. It had no business existing; it therefore seemed all the more important that it should.

  In the 1990s the mood in government became more sympathetic, and Rutland saw its chance. And it found an improbable ally: the city of Leicester, which was also anxious to escape from Leicestershire County Council. And together they succeeded. Brian Montgomery was chairman of the district council, which was permitted to attend to minor matters during the occupation. ‘I remember the night the decision went through. We left Westminster when Big Ben struck one. We got back at 3 and had champagne. A bit like winning the Cup at Wembley.’

  Soon the Post Office, which by then had postcodes so didn’t care, agreed that letters could be addressed to Rutland again but declined to create a Rutland postcode. A pity: one could have fun with that –

  RU1? IM2.

  RU2? 00H!

  However, buyers’ remorse set in quickly. Maybe Rutland was a bit hobbledehoyish in its negotiations. ‘We gave Rutland to Leicestershire with no debts and all its assets,’ said Roger Begy. ‘We got it back with £13 million in debts and very few assets.’ Very soon the county had the highest council tax in the country. This has not changed significantly. Even the good news can seem bad. The council had just reduced short-stay car parking charges in the towns from 40p to 20p. Underneath the notice in Uppingham marketplace was a bad-tempered scrawl: ‘Subsidised by all council tax payers’. The public toilets in Uppingham close at 5.30 p.m., which is either an extreme way of saving money or based on the assumption that only weirdos would be out any later.

  Yet the notion of Rutland as idyll remains. ‘A picture of a human, peaceful, slow-moving, pre-industrial England, with seemly villages [what a lovely word: seemly], handsome churches, great arable fields and barns,’ wrote Professor W. G. Hoskins in his introduction to the 1963 Shell Guide. ‘One would like to think that one day soon at each entrance to this little county, beside a glancing willow-fringed stream, there will stand a notice saying Human Conservancy: Abandon the Rat-Race at This Point.’

  It is true that when I saw three local papers alongside each other in the Oakham newsagents, the Rutland Mercury headline was

  DOCTORS IN PLAN FOR NEW SURGERY

  the Rutland Times led with

  KATIE CLOSES IN ON TALENT SHOW DREAM

  and the Leicester Mercury had

  POSTMASTER ABDUCTED IN ARMED RAID.

  But I reckon you could find a Rutland-sized patch in every county in England as quiet and handsome and dreamy and seemly as this one. It just wouldn’t constitute a separate county. And it is certainly possible to over-romanticise this place. I was keen to find Whitwell (population: 41), which in 1980 asked to twin with Paris (population: several million). When the mayor of Paris declined to accede to this reasonable request, Whitwell went ahead unilaterally, dragooning a passing Frenchman to represent his government and wave to the crowds from a 2CV while a celebration was held, complete with can-can dancers.

  The restored council later played along and agreed to put up official signs saying ‘Whitwell Twinned with Paris’, which still stand. The joke is somehow infinitely funnier because it happened in Rutland rather than anywhere else. I am not sure the French got that.

  I really wanted to adore Whitwell. It turned out to be a strung-out, litter-strewn, main-road village; and the Noel Arms, headquarters of the great jape, has no remembrance of it in its barn-like bar. It does have a sign in the Gents reading: ‘JOINING THE NOEL AT WHITWELL REWARD PROGRAMME WILL ENABLE YOU TO START SAVING MONEY, RECEIVE EXCLUSIVE OFFERS AND EARN REWARDS.’ I left before my sandwich arrived, which still meant I was there a long time.

  Close by, though not as close as it was – unless you are flying crow-class – is Hambleton, where the clock on the old post office has no hands, and thus time stands still, which is sadly inappropriate. Upper Hambleton is now a wealthy village on a peninsula overlooking Rutland Water. I would have liked to visit Nether Hambleton. It suffered a different fate. It drowned, so that others might drink.

  Nowadays Rutland Water is perceived as a great success: a major destination for fishermen and sailors. Hambleton Hall has become a much-lauded Michelin-starred hotel. On another smaller, artificial, peninsula, on the eastern shore, there is another lost village, Normanton, which was destroyed in 1764 because the local plutocrat Sir Gilbert Heathcote wished to enlarge his park. He pulled down the old church, too, and built a new one as a private chapel, with a baroque tower, which probably looked ridiculous even then. The church was spared when the valley was flooded, but it was shored up with rubble and concrete so the floor comes up to the windows. It has been deconsecrated but occasionally stages weddings.

  Pevsner called this remnant church ‘absurd and disproportionate’, which is spot on. It looked to me as though it is slowly sinking into the deep. I was just thinking this might be a more humiliating fate for an old building than demolition – the equivalent of keeping a brain-dead patient on life support – when I found a small plaque: ‘This church has been preserved entirely by voluntary effort … as a memorial to the county of Rutland.’

  But Rutland turned out not to need a memorial after all. And heaven be praised for that.

  February 2012

  In June 2012 Rutland Council’s strategic director for places, Aman Mehra, was found dead after being sent home from his job. The coroner’s verdict was that he hanged himself. No connection with wider council matters has emerged. At the start of 2013 the council decided to sue the three remaining Anti-Corruption Group councillors. At the end of the year Private Eye awarded Rutland Council the title Legal Bullies of the Year in its Rotten Boroughs Awards. The magazine reported that, before turning on the rebel councillors, Rutland had prosecuted Martin Brookes the blogger for ‘harassing and stalking’ the chief executive, Helen Briggs. The case was throw
n out; Judge John Temperley said: ‘Freedom of expression is an essential function of a democratic society.’

  10. Buckethead and Puddingface

  HUNTINGONSHIRE

  It is just coming up to the top of the hour and on HCR 104FM, Huntingdon Community Radio, the host of Drivetime, Bill Hensley, is about to hand over – after the news, weather and jingles – to tonight’s host of Over to You, Bill Hensley. If anything goes wrong, no doubt it will come to the ear of the station manager, Bill Hensley, who might wish to discuss the subject with the founder and managing director, Bill Hensley.

  Huntingdon Community Radio does have other presenters. It must do: it runs twenty-four hours a day, broadcasting live from 7 a.m. to midnight. The schedule is similar to that of a typical BBC local station: undemanding music and chat by day, specialist music in the evening, a bit of variety at weekends … the presentation somewhat rougher, but the staffing decidedly more generous. HCR has more than a hundred on its books and even has Huntsford, a thrice-weekly soap opera (omnibus on Sunday afternoons), set in a hairdressing salon.

  True, no one gets paid: in BBC local radio, abolition of salaries is thus far merely an aspiration. But under the terms of the licence, there are adverts (£2.50 + VAT for a thirty-second spot) and sponsorship, Hunts-ford being proudly sponsored by the Right Cut, Drivetime by Fire and Safety Solutions, Saturday Sport by Huntingdon Town Football Club, the weather by Coversure Insurance Services.

  It seemed extraordinary to me. And so did Bill Hensley. Crikey, what a fireball. Just short of sixty, with crew-cut grey hair, he presented his show in a loose-fitting blue short-sleeved shirt. It was surprising he did not have a row of biros in his breast pocket. One meets characters like this in Minnesota and Kansas, rarely in England. Aside from running this radio station, he was a Huntingdon town councillor, parish councillor in the village of Warboys, director of the Red Tile Wind Farm Trust, chairman of Hospital Radio Hinchingbrooke, chairman of the Huntingdon & District Sea Cadets and a trustee of the Huntingdon Commemoration Hall. He also had a full-time job as sales manager of an electronics company. In his spare time, when we met, he was getting divorced. He was also, very much by the way, chairman of the Huntingdonshire Society, the organisation devoted to the restitution of the county as a living entity. This has been a rather less successful operation than Huntingdon Community Radio.

  Huntingdonshire traditionally was England’s second-smallest county. It became briefly bloated in the 1960s when it merged with the Soke of Peterborough, previously part of Northamptonshire. But come the big change of 1974, the whole kit and caboodle became part of Cambridgeshire. In 1995 the Local Government Commission which brought back Rutland specifically rejected Huntingdonshire’s claims because there were objections in local government terms and ‘there was no exceptional county allegiance’.

  No one I spoke to disagreed with that assessment. This is Rootless England, the epitome of the Greater South-East, forty-five minutes from King’s Cross, the crossroads of the A1 and the frantic A14. A place where people settle because it’s easy to escape. When Rutland’s identity was snatched away, people cared enough to conduct a little low-level sabotage. Here there were just a few sad letters to the Hunts Post. Membership of the Huntingdonshire Society, according to its chairman, had dwindled from fifty or sixty to ‘about ten’. So how come community radio has been so successful in a place that struggles to find any sense of community?

  Two reasons, said Bill Hensley, the first of them being Bill Hensley: ‘It’s successful because I have made it successful and I’ve pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.’ How have you got all these sponsors? ‘I’m a salesman, remember.’ All true, I’m sure: I loved his un-English lack of false modesty. The second derives precisely from the fragile sense of neighbourliness. ‘We get little old ladies ringing us up late at night: “What time is it?” “Ten o’clock.” “Is that morning or evening?”’

  Ours was a disjointed conversation, which must be the norm with Bill. We had to break off for his links, for on-air interviews with representatives of the swimming club and a fair trade campaigner. He also had to nip down periodically to open the front door; I wouldn’t have been surprised had he simultaneously chaired a meeting of the Sea Cadets. Smalltown England needs Bill Hensleys to galvanise it. But mostly they move on.

  Huntingdonshire has sent three people to rule over the nation. Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector 1653–8) has a museum devoted to him in the old grammar school room in Huntingdon where he studied. It is dark and gloomy, which might have pleased him, but open on Sunday afternoons, which would not. There was Richard Cromwell, ‘Tumbledown Dick’, who lasted less than a year as his father’s successor, but did marry a woman called Major, which might make him a distant kinsman of the third, John Major, MP for the area for twenty-two years and prime minister for seven.

  There is a statue of Oliver on the Market Hill in St Ives. He is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a ferocious expression and is pointing with his left hand, as though to an imaginary piece of litter. John Major rates only a bust on the first floor of Huntingdon Public Library, tucked away next to the map cabinets. The locals say it makes him look like Eric Morecambe, which is a bit to do with the big glasses and his air of mild amusement, and a bit to do with the general view of his term of office. Major completely cocked up the privatisation of the railways, but was otherwise not a nuisance, an admirable trait in a national leader and one he might have inherited from Tumbledown Dick. He is not otherwise commemorated except in the signs for ‘Major Roadworks Ahead’.

  He did, however, enjoy the greatest night of vindication known to perhaps any British leader, at least since Charles II came back to replace the Cromwell dynasty. On election day in 1992, after eighteen fraught months as prime minister, Major was assumed to be on his way to defeat and a place in history on a par with Tumbledown Dick. That night he stood on the podium in Huntingdon with one of the largest personal majorities ever recorded, 36,230, knowing he would be back in Downing Street. Unfortunately, on the podium alongside him was Lord Buckethead.

  This was not a real Lord Buckethead of Buckethead Hall, owner of as many acres as a small county could reasonably offer. This was Lord Buckethead of the Gremloids Party, who had infiltrated himself into the election and received 107 votes, which, in a notably bizarre campaign, did not even put him bottom of the poll – he was eighth out of ten. Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party came fifth, almost beating the Green candidate. Sutch had, however, been comprehensively out-loonied. And thus it was, as the pictures of a triumphant Major went round the planet, there – far more arrestingly – was a man with a bucket on his head. It never happened to Oliver Cromwell.

  Very flat, Huntingdonshire: itsy-bitsy hills, big arable fields, hardly any hedgerows. It was probably the most invisible county – Rutland at least having a reputation – even in the days when it was officially a county. In the north it shades into Fenland and there is a village called Ramsey Heights, which must be some kind of joke, like the little Don Estelle character in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum being known as Lofty. Maybe Lord Buckethead is the local grandee.

  The county probably has Britain’s lowest point, amid the birches at Holme Fen, about nine feet below sea level. Holme Fen Posts, which measure how the peat has shrunk since the Fens were drained, is usually cited as the spot. But there is no marker, no flags, no one taking selfies to celebrate the achievement of their descent. Huntingdonshire doesn’t make a fuss. Also, one deep winter pothole and there would probably be a new lowest point.

  Rupert Barnes from the Huntingdonshire Society recommended a couple of villages: Ellington and Woodhurst. I could sort of see what he meant. Ellington has some very fine porches – but it was right next to the horrendous A14 and threatened by wind farms and seemed to me wholly unliveable. Woodhurst (Best Kept Village in Huntingdonshire, 1999) is more obviously good-looking and a splendid example of an Anglo-Saxon ring village, something that would be difficult to notice except from a hot-air
balloon. More obviously still, it was, on a Friday morning, utterly deserted. No school, no pub, and the building with a fading General Stores sign had a couple of plant troughs blocking the front door. The fields of winter wheat were presumably being tended by one man and an extremely large tractor. Rural Huntingdonshire does feel unusually depressing.

  It was, however, market day in St Ives and the joint was jumping. This has been a market town since shortly after Huntingdonshire, under Danish occupation in the late ninth century, began to acquire the foetal characteristics of a county. ‘Morning, Sheila,’ I heard the man on the flower stall shout. ‘Did you wear your bikini yesterday?’ (It had been unseasonably warm.) I never heard the response but I like to believe that pre-medieval market traders had equally cheeky banter in their repertoire. They bridged the Ouse here to bump up the market trade in 1107, and the stone bridge, which came three centuries later, still has a tiny mid-river chapel, available for (very small) weddings.

  The chapel is dedicated not to St Ivo, who gave his name to the town, but to St Leger, who died after horrible tortures in the seventh century and is somewhat better known as a horse race. That’s held in Yorkshire. The name St Ives more often conjures up Cornwall. This whole county seems condemned to obscurity. Take the largish village of Stilton, once a major coaching stop on the Great North Road. Stilton cheese got its name because the owners of the Bell Inn there sold it to travellers. The current landlords are now trying to make Stilton themselves, but have been banned from calling it Stilton because EU law insists that it can only be made in the East Midlands.

  The A1 bypassed the village in 1958 and Stilton High Street must now be the widest cul-de-sac in England. Pevsner said the village was ‘in a sad state of dereliction’, though lately it has started to cash in on its name. But it did seem to be the epitome of Huntingdonshire, the county that cared too little about life to fight for it.