Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Notionally, the aim is to decide which of this year’s cygnets belong to which owners. This is fairly pointless: anyone who has seen a swan will know they belong only to themselves. The Uppers give the cry ‘All Up!’ whenever they spot a family, whereupon they converge on the brood, surround it, truss up the parents and claim the cygnets as their own, according to a complicated formula of heredity. The swans decreed not to belong to the Crown used to get a nick on the beaks – one for the Dyers, two for the Vintners, hence the old pub name the Swan with Two Necks, a corruption of nicks. These days they are ringed instead. The Queen (the ‘Seigneur of the Swans’) always gets the benefit of any doubt.

  Then the Queen’s Swan Warden, Professor Chris Perrins of Oxford University, puts each cygnet in a little hammock resting on coat hangers (‘It’s not high-tech but it works and it’s cheap’), weighs it and measures its head to determine its age. Sometimes a cygnet might have a fish hook attached and this can be removed. If it’s very sick, it can go to a swan rescue centre. Then the party moves on upstream, leaving the swans potentially healthier but perhaps mildly traumatised. There is no means of communicating in Swannish ‘We come in peace’.

  My colleagues on the press launch were photographers, mostly working for local papers, getting a nice shot for the Henley Standard or the Windsor Observer, or, with luck, getting a cracking shot for the nationals of, say, the Vintners’ Swan Marker falling in. This had happened earlier in the week but the snappers were too far away.

  The small-town papers could make more of swan-upping:

  LOCAL FAMILY IN KIDNAP HORROR

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  Swans trussed up: ‘We thought we’d all die’

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  GANG ESCAPES UPRIVER

  These temporary kidnaps should have been a regular occurrence on this fine morning but they weren’t. There were only three uppings all morning and only once, at Earley, did our boat get a really good view. The ride not having been interrupted much by swans, we arrived in Henley, the lunch stop, an hour early. This pattern continued for the rest of the week, Professor Perrins told me later. The stately progress begins at Sunbury and ends at Abingdon, lasting five days and seventy-nine miles. ‘The first two days were very good, Wednesday was poor, Thursday was poor, Friday was very poor,’ he reported. This was an extreme manifestation of a trend over the past few years, which even the Swan Warden cannot wholly explain. He thought the cold March may have been one factor, delaying and inhibiting breeding.

  Nonetheless it seems to tie in with the curious and under-explored history of the swan on the Thames. Their numbers rose after 1900 when gravel pits began to be developed and provided lovely breeding grounds. War was unhelpful: swans were more likely to get eaten. Between the wars they expanded to culling point. Then they shot up again in the 1950s, before falling again because, it was eventually realised, they were ingesting the lead weights used by fishermen. When the lead was banned they surged once more. But now it’s tricky. They are probably being hampered by the creeping urbanisation of the riverbank: the decline of the gentle sloping edges and little beaches that make ideal nests, and the growth of concrete moorings.

  But in another sense the swans are natural townies. They don’t care for London much, but the cygnets, once they leave the nest, increasingly congregate by the bridges of the smaller towns. There is an extraordinary parallel with the behaviour of the human student population. In town they can find company, lark about and eventually, after two or three years, get a mate. And they should acquire a veneer of education, in their case enough local knowledge to find a good site for a nest. In the meantime, there is an infinite supply of nice old ladies who will chuck them bits of bread on the way back from the shops, the avian equivalent of the pizza delivery man.

  Thus it seems possible, as the humans migrate upriver from Middlesex into Berkshire, the swans are moving back the other way and becoming, like the fox, suburban rather than rural. At the end of the week the Swan Marker compiles a report on the swan population of the Thames. But swan-upping seems to lead to theories rather than hard evidence. Is it any use? ‘The only historical records we have of swans anywhere in the country are from the swan-uppers,’ says Professor Perrins. ‘It’s not high science but it’s useful and no one else does it. It does no harm, it does some good.’ And it is jolly good fun and the continuation of ancient tradition. And that, in Berkshire, is being rapidly eroded.

  In 1998, long after the great carve-up of 1974, Berkshire County Council was abolished, as happened later in Bedfordshire and Cheshire, although the county – for ceremonial purposes – was deemed to be still in existence. The Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire at the time asked a Downing Street official where Berkshire now was exactly. ‘You are Berkshire,’ he was told.

  Perhaps the average Costco-haunting Green Park screen slave is unaware that Reading is even meant to be in Berkshire. But at least Berkshire is in Reading, to be found in a small but agreeable office shared with the county archivist. Berkshire’s name turned out to be Mary Bayliss, which is a plain, un-Lord Lieutenanty kind of name, though it did disguise the fact that her father was Viscount Bridgeman and himself a onetime Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire.

  Mrs Bayliss is a pleasant, conscientious, discreet woman, looking nothing like as close to the retiring age of seventy-five as she claimed, who had emerged through the arcane process that governs appointment to her arcane post after several decades as a magistrate and a lifetime of good works, rendering her well suited to her quasi-royal duties.

  She was only mildly discommoded by having to deal with six ‘unitary authorities’ rather than one county council, though its absence meant that there was no one whose job was to cherish the county, promote it and maintain the signs on the borders which have now started to vanish. Her prime responsibility is for the ‘arrangements of royalty on official visits to Berkshire’. This is slightly more onerous and interesting than in most counties because the royals are on hand and it is not unknown for the Queen to pop out after breakfast in Windsor, open a surgery or a school, and be back home for elevenses. The Lord Lieutenant is not expected to be present if she pops out to Sainsbury’s, or for events in Windsor Great Park or Ascot Racecourse, which count as her back garden.

  Still, this is not just any old county but, uniquely, Royal Berkshire, its status giving it the right of audience; its incarnation, Mrs Bayliss, was able to deliver a loyal address in which she told Her Majesty how proud Berkshire was to have provided a royal bride, Kate Middleton of Bucklebury, aka the Duchess of Cambridge. Occasionally, the Lord Lieutenant is called upon to deputise for royalty by presenting minor gongs and, she says, ‘I do see it as part of my job to try to keep the county together,’ which is harder than it ought to be.

  The White Horse stands above the village of Uffington – home of Thomas Hughes and John Betjeman – on the edge of White Horse Hill, overlooking the Vale of the White Horse. Unlike other chalk figures, the horse’s 3,000-year-old antiquity is not in doubt. But it is oddly stylised and anatomically bizarre, as though designed as a logo by some Bronze Age whizz kids. That may be somewhere near the truth: one explanation is that it was cut by the Atrebates, the tribe whose territory evolved into Berkshire, as a standard to rally their forces against their enemies. It is thought that the Atrebates were the allies of the Romans against the recalcitrants north of the river. Later the Thames would be the frontier between Wessex and Mercia. It was probably always a boundary. It still is, in London (‘Sarf of the river, guv!? At this time of night!?’).

  And the horse served as a symbol, the symbol, of Berkshire until the 1970s. Its limbs being oddly shaped and disconnected, the horse never looked as though it was going anywhere – not even along the brow of the hill towards the long barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy, where, so the legend goes, the god of smiths will reshoe any horse for a groat. Then it was decided that the Thames no longer constituted a proper boundary, and the horse was captured by Oxfordshire. Indeed, the whole ankle section of the Berkshire boot
was detached, including even the old county town of Abingdon, leaving Berkshire as merely a feeble slipper, never a good move orthopedically, and in this case the first step towards rendering the entire county meaningless. In its favour, the change slightly eased the arrangements for rubbish collection in villages west of Oxford.

  The Flora of Berkshire has the discreet subtitle ‘Including Those Parts of Modern Oxfordshire That Lie to the South of the River Thames’. Its author, Mick Crawley, Professor of Plant Ecology at Imperial College, likes to describe himself as the leader of POFLOB, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Occupied Berkshire. He calls the boundary change ‘Mercia’s belated triumph’, adding, ‘It robbed Berkshire of its county symbol, along with much of its botanical diversity.’ I did hear the phrase ‘Occupied Berkshire’ a few times while I was there.

  POFLOB is of course just a professorial joke. But there was correspondence in The Times in 1974 that had very chilling echoes. The paper had reported on the last-ditch, unavailing efforts to prevent the transfer of the White Horse and then published a letter from the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, wife of J. B. Priestley: ‘A small, harmless thing in a world of great and terrible things?’ she asked. ‘Not at all. This disregard of people’s feelings, of the power of symbols to give us meaning and identity, is slowly destroying us.’

  There followed a strange and convoluted response from the Conservative MP for Abingdon, Airey Neave, suggesting that since Uffington was moving counties, the White Horse had to go too otherwise his constituents in Uffington would ‘violently resent’ its removal from the parish. (He ignored the obvious solution of not meddling.) Five years later Neave was brutally murdered, blown up in his car by an Irish Republican splinter group, weeks before his ally Margaret Thatcher would become prime minister and almost certainly have made him her Northern Ireland Secretary. He was victim of a dispute where people really did ‘violently resent’ the imposition of ill-judged boundaries from outside.

  In Berkshire the changes merely encouraged the county’s drift into anonymity, driven by incomers, forcing up property prices and pushing out old biscuitmen and other relics. Berkshire has been undergoing Londonisation for centuries, but the process has taken an unusual path, very different from that of other commuter counties. In one sense, it began early: courtiers and other riff-raff have been hanging round Ascot and Windsor for centuries. But, against that, royal influence kept the railway away from Berkshire’s south-eastern corner until the late 1850s: the trains to Waterloo are still much slower and feebler than the Paddington services direct from Reading, which, with its proximity to Heathrow, the M4 and M25, is the best-connected town in a generally ill-connected country.

  Of course, east Berkshire is full of commuters. But west of Reading there are very few stations. You could commute from Reading itself, but what would be the point? It has not, as Betjeman feared, become a suburb of London but an alternative honeypot within the general sticky gloop of the South-East. So to some extent has Newbury, HQ of that twenty-first-century behemoth, Vodafone.

  Pevsner called Berkshire ‘half home county, half West Country’. Betjeman, writing in The English Counties in the late 1940s, saw Berkshire, ‘this battleground of the centuries’, becoming once again ‘a prominent seat of war … in the latest battle, that between the old agricultural way of life and the new industrial one’. That isn’t quite what has happened. The old way of life has been smothered all right, but not by industrialisation or even commuterisation, but by a more subtle process. That has spread from the Home County side towards the west, where Berkshire shades picturesquely into the chalkiness of Wiltshire and Hampshire.

  If anyone still reads Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written by Thomas Hughes of Uffington, they probably skim the opening chapters describing Tom’s pre-boarding school life beneath the White Horse. It includes this fogeyish grumble:

  O young England! young England! you who are born into these racing railroad times … You’re all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not … All I say is, you don’t know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis … We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries.

  He was obviously addressing the kinds of boys who went on to Rugby. Now the country folk and their ways are going too. The yokels used to scour the chalk outlines of the White Horse like affectionate stable lads and make a party of the process. They are all but gone now. Instead Berkshireness may be defined by one family. As the Evening Standard once memorably put it, ‘Prince William is known to love the middle-class ordinariness of the Middletons’ lives and frequently enjoys kitchen suppers at Carole and Mike’s £4.8 million home in Bucklebury.’ Not every girl in Berkshire actually marries a prince, but a lot of them would be plausible contenders.

  ‘The fact is that the area is almost entirely populated by wealthy people,’ says Professor Crawley. ‘The scenery is going to stay good or maybe get better, if they knock down the Didcot power station. You won’t have wind farms here because they’ll fight them. The countryside’s affected by more insidious things.’ No one sees the nitrogen pollution that’s in the very rain, rendering the flora ever less diverse, more post-industrial, more Green Parkish. Berkshire’s most distinctive fauna – the ground-nesting nightjars, woodlarks and Dartford warblers of the heathland near the Surrey border – can only be protected in official reserves because their most virulent enemies are not the wicked humans but their doggies.

  The last fragile bloom of pure Berkshire eccentricity was the artist Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959), who was obsessed with women, Jesus, his home village of Cookham and himself. He appeared to be working towards bringing all these themes together in his unfinished masterpiece Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. Spencer liked to tell people he felt ill crossing the Thames to Bourne End. Since he was actually quite well travelled, I am inclined to think this was all part of his shtick. Alas, Berkshire has no one left even to play the game now.

  The towns and villages of west Berkshire used to be dotted with racehorse stables, taking advantage of the springy downland in a county with three racecourses: Ascot, Newbury and Windsor. Most of the stables have gone: Wantage is not even a one-horse town. The great horsey villages of East and West Ilsley are down to one yard each. And so on. In a county of ordinary middle-class £4.8 million houses the land is just too, too tempting.

  Even in the mini-Newmarket of Lambourn, only one trainer is left on the High Street: Harry Dunlop at Windsor House. ‘I don’t think it’s sad,’ says Dunlop. ‘It’s probably a natural progression. The village is obviously expanding. The important thing is that new yards are being built up the road closer to the gallops.’ About thirty trainers remain, not so much in the village itself, but mainly in Upper Lambourn, where they are less prone to irritate the school-run mums by clogging up the morning traffic.

  I fell in love with Lambourn, partly because the Lambourn Valley looked amazing and partly because it is a true working village where the horsey business mixes seamlessly with real life – Goff’s Bloodstock office next to Cream Hairdressers; Racing Welfare opposite the George; retired stable lads shuffling into the pub via the Co-op to whisper rumours about the favourite in the 3.30 and yarn about the day their colt won the St Leger. The pubs have suffered a bit because the cast has changed. The Irish stable staff were replaced first by East Europeans (who mainly drink at home) and now by South Asians (who hardly drink at all). The normal reasons apply – they want less money and come to work more readily – plus an extra one: they weigh less.
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  Christina, Harry’s sparky wife, kindly drove me up to Mandown, where the gallops are concentrated. They are under the control of the Jockey Club now, bringing both investment and protection. She showed me the all-weather canters and the straight mile, which arrows its way in the direction, appropriately enough, of the White Horse. At least the racehorses have not yet been rustled by Oxfordshire.

  At the top of the hill we looked down on the gallops belonging to the champion jumping trainer Nicky Henderson, one-time master of Windsor House but now with his own private domain at Seven Barrows. His last lot of horses were doing their morning work, while in the fields all around the farmers were frantically working to get their harvest home.

  It was blazing hot for September and the scene looked timelessly idyllic. But English idylls are never timeless. These fields used to be full of sheep – East Ilsley once had the largest sheep fair in England – but in wartime the farms switched to arable and mostly stayed that way. West Berkshire was famous for elm trees, but they all died just after the local government reform, as if they had themselves been uprooted. And the forecasters were warning that summer would be gone by the following morning, hence the farmers’ rush. Trainers always feel vulnerable: a star racehorse is always just one bad stumble away from the vet’s rifle. But at that moment this seemed like England in excelsis.

  I went down to Seven Barrows, to the barrows themselves – Neolithic long ones, dating back to 3500 BC. I wandered for a couple of hours along the Ridgeway, with Didcot power station my constant companion. I slipped into horseless Wantage, with its statue of King Alfred.