Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  The epicentre of it all is on the mainland, at the village officially known as Hamble-le-Rice, where the River Hamble meets Southampton Water, flowing past a forest of moored boats, their sails stowed, their masts naked, with the delicate tracery of birch trees in winter: hundreds upon hundreds of them, stretching as far as the eye can see, and emitting, on a breezy afternoon, the strange music of marinas – the dink-dink-dink of halyard on alloy mast.

  It occurred to me that it would be extremely difficult for this lot to go anywhere: the river’s not wide enough; the Solent’s not wide enough; even the Atlantic would start having traffic jams. ‘Absolutely,’ said one expert. ‘Even on the busiest day no more than 10 per cent would go out. And some of them never go anywhere at all. They get damaged if you do that. Some people just leave them there and invite friends round for drinks.’ A bit like having a country cottage, but not a secluded one.

  About eighteen miles from Hamble, as the motorcar flies, is Hambledon, a very different kind of place. Just outside the village, on the windswept expanse of Broadhalfpenny Down, cricket grew, in the late eighteenth century, from a rustic pastime and gambling medium towards a sport that conquered the world. Well, a part of it.

  From the 1750s to the 1780s Hambledon was the leading cricket club of all, regularly beating All England, mainly under the leadership of Richard Nyren, who, by happy coincidence, was landlord of the Bat and Ball, next to the ground. Hambledon fell as quickly as it rose, presumably because of the emergence of the upstart club at Marylebone and also because, when it comes to exposure to the prevailing westerlies, they would have been far more sheltered had they played in mid-Solent, or indeed mid-Atlantic. The game continues, though the history of the ground is chequered. Ditto the Bat and Ball, which fell on temporarily evil times a decade ago when new owners made it clear they cared nothing for cricket and tried to rename it ‘Natterjack’s’.

  Both ground and pub have recovered, the field now being sympathetically owned by Winchester College and run by a trust. And by happy coincidence the last Sunday game of the season was taking place the day before the Brambles match: it was an old-fashioned clubbable contest between the Brigands, the notionally naval team who have made their home at Broadhalfpenny, and the Stragglers of Asia, whose origins lie with old Far East hands. Some people are disappointed when they go to Hambledon, but I wasn’t, despite the customary keen wind. The ground is well kept and pretty and hospitable, the tea was lovely and, just before I left, the Pilgrim Morris Men from Guildford started performing a stick dance in front of the pub. Ah, Merrie England!

  Hampshire is no longer the centre of world cricket, though they do now stage occasional Test matches in an inaccessible ground on the edge of Southampton. However, from the post-war resumption of the game in 1946 until his retirement in 1980, the very idea of England was embodied in the voice of a Hampshire man, John Arlott.

  Arlott’s cricket commentaries had both a poetic quality and a relevant discursiveness that on their own would have made him one of the outstanding radio broadcasters of all time. But the crowning glories were his voice and accent, always described as a Hampshire burr, which became throatier and more pronounced as the decades rolled by. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone who talks like that now. He came from Basingstoke, most Londonised of all the Hampshire towns, and, as he once remarked: ‘My mum’s the only person left in Basingstoke who was born there. And she doesn’t go out at night.’ However, there are those who believe there never was anyone in Hampshire who spoke like Arlott and that the accent was substantially his own invention.

  He was and remains a hero of mine: a man of broad and humane sympathies. When I finally met him, shortly before I was to inherit his role as cricket correspondent of the Guardian, I was so overawed I couldn’t speak. As a writer, Arlott was as distinctive (if not as brilliant) as he was a broadcaster. His policy was usually to enthuse about what he loved and ignore what he didn’t like: as a book reviewer, if confronted by drivel, he would say that the margins were generous or the type pleasingly legible. His enthusiasms included cricketers, wine, cheese and Hampshire. Indeed, he helped preserve the county’s own sense of itself, so much so that for The Illustrated Counties of England there can have been no second choice to do the Hampshire chapter. In his essay, he made one especially shrewd point: that in other counties, the main towns and cities recognisably take their character from the county, but in Hampshire this isn’t true. They are on the edges, in a ring, looking outwards, with their own separate and essentially outward-looking preoccupations: the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, merchant ships in Southampton, tourism and retirement in Bournemouth, the army in Aldershot, London overspill in Basingstoke and Andover. He concluded: ‘Thus the true heart of Hampshire does lie, in fact, at its physical heart.’

  Which is surprisingly empty. Driving to Hambledon, the satnav told me to ignore my hosts’ instructions, bypass rural Hampshire’s best-known landmark, the crossroads pub known as the West Meon Hut, and take the back road. I drove for miles, along the edge of the South Downs towards the Meon Valley, past a vague hint of habitation at Beauworth and then miles largely devoid of life, two-legged or four, past sweeping hills turned into largely hedgeless fields of lately harvested grain. I had no idea one could feel so remote on the outer edge of commuterdom.

  I was as awestruck as when I met Arlott. And I kept being amazed by the emptiness. It happened again near Chilbolton above the Test Valley. And then again on top of the zigzag the vicar-naturalist Gilbert White built behind his house at Selborne: nothing visible that might not have been there when he looked out 250 years ago except the white domes of the space tracking station at Oakhanger. And if you think of them as being particularly large puffball mushrooms, there is no need to be upset. Even Hampshire’s most hackneyed gateway, the Fleet Services on the M3, is set among pine trees, lending it a pleasing heathland air; and the gorse-filled motorway verges, bright yellow in springtime, give an unusual lift to the spirits. Welcome to Happy Hampshire.

  Contrast this with Portsmouth, notionally on an island, but one as pinched and cluttered as Manhattan, and with a great deal of associated sprawl. There are green lawns by the Southsea front and there must be a park or two somewhere. But it feels a long way from Hambledon. And though, as Arlott says, it looks out to sea not inwards to Hampshire, that’s only to find out if anyone’s coming. Portsmouth’s job is to keep people out, which is I suppose why it feels so claustrophobic. Southampton is there to let people in and, though not a particularly attractive city, it is greener and more welcoming.

  The Great Local Government Storm of 1974 took Bournemouth and part of the New Forest out of historic Hampshire and into Dorset (although the traffic jams of Lyndhurst were unmoved, as ever). The switch appears to have been popular and accepted: Hampshire being big and Dorset small, the change made Bournemouth the big I-am; and Dorset conjured up nice, cuddly feelings among housebuyers and thus bumped up property prices. The odd thing is that, since it moved, Bournemouth has become a lot less Dorsety and a lot more Hampshire. I had childhood holidays there and there was damn-all to do. Now it’s full of students and St Andrew’s Church in the town centre (‘rock-faced outside with a tall apsidal baptistery’) has been turned into a nightclub, with rock inside as well as out.

  In 1974, the Isle of Wight was also finally detached from Hampshire. Is it a real county? It is a complicated case. It has had a county council since 1890. And postally, it was always treated as separate (pretty silly, putting Hampshire on an envelope destined for the island). But it was not one of the thirty-nine historic counties and until 1974 did not have its own Lord Lieutenant, for whatever that might be worth. There was, quite simply, nothing here, and hardly anyone (23,000 in the 1801 census).

  There was a certain amount of royal patronage, both unwilling (Charles I was locked up in Carisbrooke Castle) and willing – Victoria adored the place and brought in her wake hordes of trippers, including one who reported: ‘This island is a little para
dise.’

  I saw that quote in an advert on one of the ex-London Underground brand-new-in-1938 carriages used by the Isle of Wight’s railway line from Ryde Pier Head to Shanklin. The line also retains old Southern Region station signs and generally cements the island’s image as a 1950s theme park. The paradise quote is attributed to ‘Karl Marx, political agitator’, the assumption presumably being that visitors might get him muddled with Groucho. Karl took his holidays at Ventnor. Tennyson wrote ‘Crossing the Bar’ after crossing the Solent. Keats, Dickens and Swinburne all popped down.

  But a county? Nah. Counties have their origins in the most distant swamps of time and are steeped in folklore even if the current inhabitants are unaware of it. This was a garrison with villages, an early-warning station for Portsmouth, a lookout point. Then it was an agreeable resort. Now what? It was granted a chapter in the Illustrated London News counties book, by Dudley Fishburn, but even he admitted: ‘It is no longer an inspiration or an escape; it is rather a neat and well-ordered corner of calm.’ It is certainly amiably sluggish, with that sense of community that comes from having a lot of the active-retired. But the indigenous architecture appears to comprise flat-roofed blocks of flats with their balconies guarded by bulbous balustrades: a less sunny southern Spain.

  Winchester is Hampshire’s obvious county town, since it is the only place of substance anywhere near the middle. It also has the main cathedral, barely visible even from the city centre; the longest in Europe but not much taller than a Shanklin bungalow, and equally unadorned – ‘all is power at Winchester,’ says Pevsner, ‘nothing grace’. The most fascinating part of this cathedral is the jumble of memorials, mixing two Hampshire traditions, the military and ecclesiastical, with splendid illogicality: Sir John Campbell, Bt, who fell leading his brigade in the assault on the Great Redan at Sebastopol, and Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Merchant, ‘shot by a fanatic at Peshawar, 1899’, are commemorated amid all the prebendaries, clerks of the chapter, minor canons and precentors who stayed at home, leading for the most part longer lives, if less incident-packed ones.

  Jane Austen gets the most attention. There is her tomb in the north aisle, where the inscription does not mention that she wrote anything, and the nearby wall memorial, which does. This is next door to Captain G. B. Gosling, who died in 1906 ‘at Nianguru, Congo State, while on an exploring expedition in Central Africa’. And next door to that, something much newer: ‘In memory of the one thousand nine hundred and five British Officers Gurkha Officers and Men of the 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkha Rifles who gave their lives for this country 1890–1994.’

  Soon after Sir John Campbell Bt and many thousands of his contemporaries died in the Crimea, Aldershot became, as the signs still proclaim, ‘the home of the British Army’. It was chosen because the area was hardly inhabited – the soil being thin and useless – yet handy for London. It remains largely a one-trick town.

  Yet the centre of it did not feel remotely military. It felt to me more like an ex-mining town mysteriously transplanted to the stockbroker belt. I had imagined streets full of squaddies. Not at all. Admittedly, I was there on a weekday and the army does prefer to work office hours, like A&E departments and police stations. What I saw was a succession of sad-eyed elderly men, wrapped against the imagined cold on a fine early autumn morning. These were the Gurkhas.

  One of the convulsions of the brief and troubled premiership of Gordon Brown was caused by the Gurkha Justice Campaign, aimed at allowing Nepalese soldiers who had fought for Britain to settle here. The campaign’s public face was the sparky actress Joanna Lumley, who outmanoeuvred the government at every turn and forced it into a retreat of a humiliating nature not seen on the battlefield since the last time Britain chose to invade Afghanistan. Even while caving in, it looked niggardly and mean-minded towards people regarded by public opinion in heroic terms. It is arguable (and it seems to be seen that way in Kathmandu) that the Gurkhas are essentially mercenaries.

  As the Gurkhas arrived, mainly in Aldershot, a safe Tory seat, the government then did damn-all to help settle them. Classic, really. The English being overtly polite, very little was said, though a post on the Aldershot News & Mail website may be taken to represent a substantial slice of public opinion:

  The Nepalese are ruining our community’s! Taking our benefits and our houses and do nothing to contribute to our communities! Most don’t work and also don’t feel the need to learn the language. They have no comprehension of our basic manors and lifestyles, which causes friction in the Aldershot. If your in our army good on you but why should you get extra’s. My brothers in the army and he gets nothing apart from a basic wage so why should they get special treatment! They should all go settle in there countries and fight to better there countries! The government should concentrate on looking after us English British people. Or they could take up residence with Joanna Lumley im sure she’s got the money and the room for them!

  Part of the argument was that the influx was damaging the education system.

  Even without the Gurkhas, Aldershot appears to be getting the worst of every world. On the one hand, British governments have become addicted to ludicrous wars, with no clear purpose or exit mechanism. On the other, the army keeps being cut back. In times of war, garrison towns normally thrive. Aldershot has managed to suffer even as its residents are sent off to die, often at the hands of their alleged allies.

  Just behind the town centre is Queens Avenue, a long, spacious – in some parts gracious – thoroughfare suitable for a triumphalist parade, if there were ever any triumphs to celebrate. But the horse chestnut trees, like the army itself, were giving off distress signals, long before the calendar would suggest the leaves and conkers should be executing their exit strategy.

  Around them were the forceful and rather handsome Presbyterian and Catholic military churches, the army tailors Glover and Riding, acres of sports fields, boarded-up barrack blocks and a great many signs saying ‘Aspire’. This turned out to be not a slogan but an outsourcing operation set up under the private finance initiative, which is a governmental accountancy scam.

  The Anglican garrison church is some distance away, hidden behind trees, hard by one of the country’s least-known yet most remarkable monuments, the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington. When you start to think about this (which I never had), it is odd that the great naval hero of the Napoleonic War is up there on his column in the heart of London, but the great military hero is commemorated mainly as a boot.

  There is the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, though it is not much noticed amid the traffic. Nearby is a naked Achilles, which is also dedicated to Wellington, somewhat obliquely. Liverpool has Wellington’s Column by Lime Street Station, complete with a list of his victories set out in the manner of stations on an exotic railway journey.

  But his main memorial is here, showing him mounted on his trusty steed Copenhagen, more than thrice as large as life: thirty feet high, twenty-six feet long, set upon a mound known as Round Hill and surrounded by rhododendron bushes. The story is told, very well, on a pair of information boards. In 1846, with great ceremony, this statue was placed at Hyde Park Corner, on top of the arch. But there was a lot of chuntering: the aesthetes thought it was out of scale; Queen Victoria thought it ruined her view. But the Duke was still alive, and old, revered and crabby. So nothing could be done.

  In the 1880s, however, the arch had to be moved because it was obstructing the traffic. With the Duke safely dead, the statue’s enemies seized their opportunity. The Prince of Wales suggested moving it to Aldershot, where it might be appreciated. It was moved, though still not much appreciated, being neglected until a major clean-up and clearance effort shortly after the millennium.

  It stands in parkland, by a football pitch. There was no one about except two elderly Gurkha couples. One of the men, Prem, spoke English more serviceable than my Nepali. Yes, he liked it here. Yes, the people were friendly. Yes, they wanted to stay. Any problems? He thought for a moment,
then channelled Beruke, the Ethiopian I met in Birmingham.

  ‘Too many Gurkha. Too many ex-army.’

  There is another sport in Hampshire, more baffling and impenetrable than even cricket or sailing. Strangers are normally welcome to watch a cricket match or a yacht race even if they haven’t the faintest idea what’s happening. Try turning up at the Houghton Club in Stockbridge and asking where you can see the action. This is an institution that makes the Royal Yacht Squadron look as picky as the Tesco Club. There are just twenty-five members and it has exclusive fishing rights to thirteen miles of the River Test, the most famous trout stream in the world.

  For a non-angler, simply setting foot in the shops of Stockbridge is like entering an alien world: Greenwells Glory; Tups Indispensable; Lunns Particular; Iron Blue Dun. Apples? Potatoes? Implements favoured by sadomasochists? Dry flies.

  Nearly all the world’s chalk streams are in England, most of them in the South-East, the best in Hampshire – the Test, which flows through Stockbridge, and the Itchen being the best of the best. They are gloriously clear, which enables trout – and salmon – to flourish, and creates an arena suitable for the contest between gentleman and fish. Coarse fishing, as the classless version of angling is disparagingly known, is like blind-man’s-buff: cast your rod upon the waters and hope for the best. Fly-fishing is more like hide-and-seek, with a hint of hare coursing thrown in. One minute you see the fish; next minute he’s slithered away to lurk in the luxuriant vegetation. With a dry fly, on top of the water, it is a game requiring infinite patience on both sides: a sport fit for a duke (at least one example belonging to the Houghton Club) or a mega-millionaire (several).

  Such understanding as I have of this sport is entirely due to the patient explanations of Keith Elliott, editor of Classic Angling, which was enough to whet my appetite to learn more. Tricky. Owners of fishing rights on the Test are more adept than the trout at guarding their privacy, except at a very high price. There is a forty-nine-mile path called the Test Way; not much of it goes alongside the river itself. And the shrubs and reeds along the banks are encouraged to grow, the better to guard the arena for the aquatic corrida.