Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Lightly disguised by their confusing title, the Devonshires are Derbyshire. It is a sort of grand duchy, like Luxembourg, and they are the hereditary, not rulers exactly, but distributors of largesse and centres of attention. Their memorials dominate Derby Cathedral. In some circles, their activities are the main topic of conversation: Is the 12th Duke, ‘Stoker’, a patch on his dad? What has the Duchess done to that restaurant? How is the dear old Dowager? (Debo, the last of the Mitfords). I expect there are some dinner tables where people still gossip knowingly about Georgiana, the Regency beauty and wife of the 5th Duke, or Bess of Hardwick (1521–1608), serial-marrier and matriarch of the dynasty. ‘The people of Derbyshire are extremely proud of the Devonshires,’ said Neil Hallam, who is a hardbitten kind of journalist, ‘because they put themselves about. If you ask them to the opening of a WI tearoom, they go.’ The late Duke certainly put himself about, when he was out of the county, in a different kind of way. He was and is still regarded with great affection, both within Derbyshire and, I believe, by several London ladies d’un certain age.

  The beauty of Derbyshire owes a huge amount to the family’s good taste. The estate village of Edensor (pronounced Ensor) is a marvel; built circa 1840 for the Chatsworth workers, it combines the unity of architectural theme of the best estate villages plus remarkable individuality. It is as if all the most charming Victorian country railway stations had been collected from their various branch lines and dropped in a single place. The different styles of chimney are peculiarly fascinating. It is only when you learn that Edensor was built because the previous village was spoiling the ducal view that one is reminded that the Devonshires did not get where they are entirely by philanthropy and their devotion to the physical process that produces dynasties. We shall return to this point.

  If Chatsworth is a more convincing focal point of Derbyshire than either Derby or Matlock, this does not make it a one-dimensional county. It is more protean than most. The alluvial flatlands of the south are hard to distinguish from north Leicestershire or south Nottinghamshire. The pinched ex-mining towns of the east are a world away from the Peak. A journalist from The Times walked into a pub in Heanor in the 1970s and asked for a dry white wine. ‘Are you taking the piss?’ said the landlord. ‘It’s not fooking Christmas.’ Dry white is easily obtainable, however, in frigid, genteel Buxton. And the mills along the Derwent Valley (or, more relevantly now, along the A6) have been declared a world heritage site by UNESCO – in the words of one local, mingling delight and astonishment, ‘on a par with the Taj Mahal’.

  George Brown, deputy prime minister in the 1960s, an unforgettable yet seemingly forgotten politician who was MP for Belper, once expressed bemusement about the county: ‘I can’t make head nor tail of Derbyshire. Every time I think I’ve got it pinned, I find another bit where everybody’s totally different.’

  It is full of surprises, full of quirkiness, full of eccentricity. There is, for instance, Matlock Bath, the only inland seaside resort I have ever encountered. It has an esplanade complete with amusement arcades, aquarium (the old Victorian baths, now handed over to the carp), chip shops, a sort of beach pavilion, and pubs and cafés where you can sit outside and admire the view. Which is the traffic on the A6. There is the river behind that, but it is inaccessible and almost invisible. There is even a kind of Sunday afternoon passeggiata, which comprises the motorcyclists strolling up and down admiring each other’s machines. In the autumn there are illuminations, just like Blackpool.

  There is Chesterfield, an unprepossessing kind of town, given distinction by its crooked spire and Queen’s Park, the loveliest of all county cricket grounds. (In the days of its best-known recent MP, someone said the word Chesterfield was famous for the four Cs: ‘cigarettes, chairs, the crooked spire and Tony Benn.’) And then there are the pubs. The Rutland Arms, Bakewell, is famous for Bakewell pudding, which was supposedly invented in 1820 when the cook got muddled as to the recipe for jam tarts. (Bakewell tart was invented much later, probably a long way from Bakewell.) To some, the pub is better known because it once had a chef who pissed in the soup.

  Nearby is the Barley Mow in Bonsall, home of the world hen-racing championships, and once named as the world capital for UFO sightings, mostly around chucking-out time. And there are other pubs I found, in remote corners of the Dark Peak, including the one where I was immediately greeted by a baby ferret. I daren’t name these places because (a) I may have imagined them and (b) if they do exist, the very act of mentioning them could cause them to implode and begin serving the pork scratchings on a bed of braised cabbage with a roast pepper coulis.

  On a muggy, midgy Sunday morning John Beatty walked me up from the centre of Hayfield, past the Bowden Bridge car park, alongside the Kinder Reservoir, until we rounded the bend. There ahead of us was William Clough – a place, not a person – and, above it, Kinder Scout, highest peak in the Peak and the scene, in 1932, of one of the most famous and most effective acts of civil disobedience England has ever seen.

  If altering county boundaries ever made sense, there was a longstanding case for Derbyshire, which is not short of mountains, handing Kinder over to Lancashire as a gift to the populace of Manchester. On a clear day (even rarer in the smoke-ridden Manchester of 1932 than now) it can be seen from the higher points of the city. It stood taunting the substantial portion of the citizenry whose delight was to escape and tramp the mountains. An obsession with fresh air ran strong in Manchester, an antidote to the grimness of everyday life, summed up in what has become the ramblers’ anthem, written by one of the participants, Ewan MacColl:

  I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler, from Manchester way.

  I get all my pleasure the hard moorland way.

  I may be a wage slave on Monday.

  But I am a free man on Sunday.

  Several hundred walkers had arrived from Manchester to walk on Kinder, traditional common land which at that time was maintained as a private grouse moor with no public access. It was owned, natch, by the Duke of Devonshire. The intention of the trespassers was very clear: it had been signalled in the newspapers well in advance. The events of the day are matters of dispute and interpretation, along with the precise agenda of the organising body, the British Workers’ Sports Federation. But after its leader, Benny Rothman, twenty years old and barely five foot tall, had fired up the group with a speech on a rock in the car park, everyone marched to the clough, where there was a confrontation with a platoon of ducal gamekeepers who had appeared over the ridge. Five ramblers, including Rothman, were jailed for up to six months on charges that included grievous bodily harm (an obvious exaggeration) after a ridiculous trial, in one of those mad acts of martyr creation to which embattled authority has been addicted from at least the time of Pontius Pilate.

  The motives and methods of the trespassers were much criticised at the time, by older and more deferential ramblers. The case, however, was hardly disputed. As Christopher Hobhouse put it in the 1935 Shell Guide to Derbyshire: ‘A very large proportion of the forty miles of open country between Manchester and Sheffield is denied to the teeming population of these towns for the benefit of ten or twelve sportsmen. There is, of course, nothing whatever to be said in defence of this state of affairs.’

  The martyrdom sealed the outcome, since Kinder is no longer a private grouse moor and the right to roam is enshrined in legislation – and at appropriate intervals ever since the occasion has been marked with a ceremony on the spot. In 2002, for the seventieth anniversary, there was no Rothman, who had died a few months earlier. There was, however, someone else: the 11th Duke of Devonshire, then eighty-two. Since he was only twelve at the time of the trespass, he had an alibi. He did not use it.

  He rose gingerly. ‘I am aware that I represent the villain of the piece,’ he said. ‘I am only too happy to take this opportunity to apologise for the conduct of my grandfather seventy years ago. The great trespass was a very shaming event for my family. But from that great evil and those appalling sentences has co
me great good.’ He said he loved to sit in his study and watch the ramblers crossing Chatsworth Park. ‘I like to think that I have tried to redeem that evil.’

  Amid the moors towards Sheffield is the village of Eyam (pronounced Eem). It would attract visitors in its own right had nothing ever happened here. But in 1665 it did. A box of cloth arrived from London, where the plague was raging. The recipient was dead within days. Within weeks, the disease had spread across the village. The rector, William Mompesson, persuaded his parishioners to isolate themselves so the plague could spread no further. It meant that most of the villagers would die: about 250, or three-quarters of the population, according to the usual estimate.

  The most moving version of the story I have found is, surprisingly, in Arthur Mee’s The King’s England, the ‘New Domesday Book’ of the 1930s. His team of writers were obliged to use a style that was consistently florid, upbeat and cringe-making. But someone rose to this occasion: ‘This village of grief and despair was a place of quiet heroism, the heroism of a little band who stayed to serve, of a panic-stricken people who in the very face of death resigned themselves to follow the path they were asked to tread.’

  There are heartbreaking vignettes at every turn in Eyam. There is Cucklett Delf, where Mompesson brought his diminishing flock as the plague took hold, preaching from a rock to each family group, isolated from each other. Here one village girl, Emmott Sydall, would call plaintively to her lover, Rowland Torre from Stoney Middleton, until she herself fell victim and her calls were silenced. There was the woman from Riley Side who buried her husband and six children. And there was Catherine Mompesson, the rector’s wife, who tended the sick until her own death, shortly before the disease faded away in November 1666. ‘The passing bell ceased to toll, and the graveyard ceased to take the dead,’ said Mee.

  I had been to Eyam before and thought it was a ‘thin place’, in the mystical sense I learned at Little Gidding. It is the quintessence of Derbyshire self-sufficiency: the villagers understood what had to be done and did it (as usual, with a little help from the Devonshires, then mere earls, who arranged provision of supplies at the parish boundaries).

  It is hard not to feel desolate on hearing this story. But Eyam is doing its best to wreck it. It had just acquired a new set of interpretative boards, which introduced the story thus: ‘Eyam was not a good place to be between 1665–1666.’ This is one of the few sentences on these boards that is not finished with an exclamation mark: ‘The First Plague Victims Lived Near Here!’ ‘Eyam Stocks – still in use today!’ ‘Follow the Eyam Visitor Code!’ ‘We Like to Celebrate – it’s a Tradition!’ This is a place to come and be humbled by our forefathers’ self-sacrifice, not be patronised by a subliterate dolt.

  In Clay Cross, on the back of an electricity substation, there is a heroic-looking mural, of the sort often found in Ulster. It depicts a motley collection of protesters and the slogans ‘Clay Cross UDC will Not Implement the Act’ and ‘People’s March for Jobs 1983’.

  This a little confusing, since Clay Cross Urban District Council did not exist in 1983. It had been abolished nine years earlier. The abolition was not personal – it was part of the general stuff-up of local government – but it might have been. The act that Clay Cross refused to implement was the 1972 Housing Finance Act, which insisted on rises in council house rents. In a way Clay Cross kept its promise, but only because it was about to disappear anyway.

  The mass trespass is memorialised in the Bowden Bridge car park, on the wall of what used to be New Mills police station and in the hearts of everyone who climbs Kinder. Clay Cross has this absurd mural, scrunching together all the Left’s lost battles. All the town’s intransigence has ever achieved was sending to Parliament, as part of the Bolsover constituency, Dennis, the clownish brother of the leading Clay Cross rebel, David Skinner. And there, for more than forty years, Dennis Skinner has sat, below the gangway on the Labour benches, making fatuous interjections.

  The town and most of the people have the weary, run-down look common to old pit villages. But Clay Cross – with fewer than 10,000 people – now has a vast 24-hour Tesco Extra that overwhelms the place, ensuring the aged and lame, who seem to make up most of the population, have to walk a great deal further from the bus stops than they did to get to the old Co-op. There cannot be a smaller town in the country with a bigger Tesco. There’s irony for you.

  Near the mural I got talking to one ex-pitman, a bit too old now for a job on the checkout. ‘That used to be a through road,’ he said, with an air of resignation. ‘But all roads lead to Tesco.’

  We got on to the subject of the Devonshires, as one does in Derbyshire. ‘Oh, Chatsworth is a lovely place,’ he said. ‘I met the old Duke once. Very nice gentleman. But it’s a business, isn’t it, Chatsworth?

  ‘Got to make a living,’ he added, almost breaking into song. ‘Everybody’s got to make a living.’

  August 2012

  18. Damsons in distress

  WESTMORLAND

  The Westmorland County Show, which dates back to 1799, takes place at Lane Farm, Crooklands, on the second Thursday of September and I was assured that the 2012 show, the 213th, would happen come hell or, what was far more likely, high water. War and pestilence have forced it to be cancelled, but never the mere weather.

  ‘Bring your wellies,’ warned the nice young man from the Westmorland Gazette. ‘It always rains.’ But I was travelling up by train, and one feels a prat changing at Crewe and lugging a pair of wellies across the bridge. Also, I wanted to fit in. My experience of agricultural shows is that they offer farmers a chance to dress up: get out their loudest clashing checks; a tie, yellow or green, whichever; and their best brown brogues, ready to schmooze with the nobs and the tractor salesmen. So I brought my own second-best brown brogues, the ones acquired at Bicester Shopping Village (see Chapter 14).

  Which is when I discovered that here they wear wellies, and that one also feels a prat with trench foot. Even so, it was worth it. The Royal Show in Warwickshire, mother of all agricultural beanfeasts, is now defunct. Many of the old county shows have merged or declined, and village shows of ancient tradition have gone on life support after being rained on several years in succession. But this one is just amazing. The catalogue runs to 232 pages and the list of exhibitors went from the ‘Able to Enable mobility centre’ to ‘Zoca Active’. The Freemasons had a stand; maybe MI5 did too.

  In a way it is insane to hold an event on this scale on just one day – you can’t hope to get round everything – and a weekday at that. But in another way that’s what makes it so special: this did not feel like a show for farmers at which townies’ money was welcome; it felt like a genuine gathering of the entire community of Westmorland. Only one dimension was missing – the county itself.

  Westmorland encompassed the southern Lake District from the early thirteenth century until it became one of the three small counties to be wholly subsumed in 1974. Rutland fought back and ultimately returned; Huntingdonshire had insufficient sense of its identity to care; Westmorland accepted its fate as it phlegmatically accepts the weather. Everyone dutifully put Cumbria on their letterheads and took orders from distant Carlisle, and then the ex-county set about memorialising itself.

  The little old county town, Appleby, became aggrandised into ‘Appleby-in-Westmorland’, almost as many letters as people. The Westmorland Way now stretches ninety-five miles from Appleby to Patterdale. The newish shopping centre in Kendal is ‘The Westmorland’. Posthumously, the county has acquired a flag: red and white, with a golden apple tree superimposed. The name persists on the hospital and the Westmorland Gazette, one of those rural weeklies popular enough to survive Armageddon, never mind the internet. The Westmorland Motor Club had a stand at the show, as did the Westmorland Red Squirrel Society.

  There is a Westmorland Arts Trust, Badminton Club, County Football Association, Cricket League, Geological Society, Horticultural Society, Music Society, Orchestra and Youth Orchestra. The Westmorland Dams
on Association represents the growers of the Lyth and Winster Valleys. And the Westmorland Step and Garland Dancers perform all summer and practise every Monday in winter. There is also a Westmorland Association, designed to celebrate all aspects of the historic county, but they failed to respond to enquiries, a sign of being either busy or useless. (The latter, I think.)

  There was even a character at the show called Denis Westmorland, there with piles of his CDs, a dozen different ones, and his three British bulldogs. He plays accordion and writes and sings localish songs, though more in the village-hop than the folk tradition, and not quite my taste. Still, the name!

  ‘Is it real?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied.

  ‘Are you from Westmorland?’

  ‘No, Cumberland. There’s a whole colony of Westmorlands near the racecourse in Carlisle.’

  ‘Any in Westmorland?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  This actually makes sense. Place names as surnames developed from medieval migrant workers, because their home village, town or, less often, county got used as a nickname (the cricketer John Hampshire was a Yorkshireman, and Martin Kent opened the batting for Australia). There wouldn’t be much point calling someone ‘Westmorland’ in a pub in Kendal; it would be like saying ‘Hey, Taffy!’ in Aberystwyth.

  Still, he is not much of a traditionalist, Denis. On his CD Songs and Music of the Lakes and Cumbria, the songs included ‘My Cumbria Home’, ‘County of Cumbria’, ‘Thwaites of Cumbria’, ‘Fells of Cumbria’ …