In Essex the sea is always murky. All the estuarial muck heads this way out of the big city, metaphorical as well as literal. In 1949 a local wildfowler was hunting for supper on the marshes when he saw an odd-looking shape. It turned out to be the torso of one Stanley Setty, a small-time racketeer and spiv who had been stabbed to death with an SS knife, cut in pieces and dropped from a great height: a small plane, it turned out. The murderer, Donald Hume, had got muddled between the marshes and the open sea. An easy mistake.
On the wall, I met June and Phil, from the North-East Essex Badger Group.
‘Lot of badgers round here?’
‘Oh yes,’ said June. ‘We’re very pro-badgers, but when they undermine the sea wall they’ve got to be moved on. The whole peninsula could be at risk.’
For the sea also gets muddled between its space and ours. On 31 January 1953, just over three years after Setty was killed, the Memorial Hall on Canvey Island, commemorating the war dead, was officially opened. The MP performing the ceremony told the gathering that people were at their greatest in adversity. Within hours they were to face adversity of a kind they had never known. That night there was a high spring tide and a severe storm. Nearly 2,000 people died in the Netherlands, more than 200 at sea and more than 300 on the east coast of England and Scotland. Fifty-eight were lost on Canvey, four more than died in the war, to go with the thirty-five at Jaywick and eight at Harwich. On Canvey, nearly all the dead were under six or over sixty. In a country where nature is meant to behave gently, it was the worst natural disaster of modern times. People in coastal Essex use the floods as a chronological reference point, whether they are old enough to remember them or not, the way the rest of England talks about before and after the war.
Hidden away, shielded by trees, beside St Peter-ad-Murum is the Othona Community, a Christian retreat founded by Norman Motley, an RAF chaplain. He was hoping to build reconciliation and understanding after the Second World War, an event whose trauma, disruption, horror and heartbreak have been sanitised by the British through decades of being wrapped in heroic myth. It offers tea and empathy to all-comers and seems a haven not so much of religion as of common sense.
But somehow the spirit of St Cedd has found a wider application. Essex became a centre of heterodox thought of all kinds. In the 1830s a reformed drunk from Rochford called James Banyard founded the Peculiar People, a literalist sect with a belief in divine healing, which did not help its spread, owing to the mortality rate of its adherents. The sect still exists, its views somewhat toned down, under the less striking name of the Union of Evangelical Churches, still fifteen of them, almost all in east Essex. Southend has surprisingly few pubs, supposedly because of the nonconformist influence.
In the twentieth century other groups made their way east to practise beliefs ranging from the primitive to the avant-garde. In Essex, land was cheap and plentiful, yet still close to London. There was room to pray or sing or strip off without offending the neighbours the way you would in Kent or Surrey. The capital was certainly spreading this way, but here the bourgeoisie were not in the vanguard. This was the lee side of the smoky city, and thus inherently undesirable.
The working-class first started to move north-east towards places like Walthamstow in the late nineteenth century; the Great Eastern Railway, out of Liverpool Street, offered particularly cheap workman’s fares, making it possible for the very people whose homes in London had been demolished by the railway companies to commute back in again.
After the First World War the London County Council was given permission to build the Becontree housing estate in the little parish of Dagenham. This was a novelty, since it was outside the LCC’s own area. In 1935, fourteen years after the first tenants moved in, the population on the estate reached 100,000. By that time Ford had opened a factory with its own Thames port and there was soon work for everyone who was not too fussy. The choice was football (Alf Ramsey, Martin Peters, Jimmy Greaves and Terry Venables) or Ford. And that remained substantially true until late in the century, when the Ford factory began to be run down and then partly demolished.
The first inhabitants of Becontree, with its inside loos, little gardens and privet hedges, were pioneers of a kind. That was even more true in the new towns and, above all, the plotlands. It was the Wild East.
The river! The river! Billy Bragg urged me never to underestimate the importance of the Thames. ‘The river is the key to understanding Essex,’ he insisted. ‘It’s made it very outward-looking and given it the ability to absorb people. Other counties don’t have the same speed of change.’
And I kept finding, even well away from England’s Mississippi, curious echoes of America. In the next-door county there have been cases of people being ordered to paint their houses Suffolk Pink. In rural Essex the palette seems more vibrant, the rules more relaxed. The Recorder’s House in Thaxted (‘a remarkable sight’ – Pevsner) is now painted Pugin Red from the Dulux Heritage catalogue: the planners retreated from opposition, apparently because the village backed the owners. Elsewhere, there are lilacs, rich greens and a general sense of anything goes. Surprisingly close to a city like Chelmsford, one can find secretive houses down remote lanes that might belong to Romany-blood hustlers or shabby-chic intellectuals but clearly not routine commuters.
And everywhere there is this sense of restless pioneering. From the Peculiar People to the habitués of the Sugar Hut, this is a county full of folk breaking free of old constraints and following new rules, whether from the Gospels or the gossip mags. Looking east from the M25 at the Dartford Crossing, you get the ugliest view in England: industrial riverside Essex looks much like northern New Jersey. But from other perspectives this county, like nowhere else in Britain, has the characteristics of godly Utah and hedonistic Nevada. Maybe the Murder Triangle equals the Badlands.
And quite often Essex villages give off little architectural hints of New England. The wooden clapperboard houses are of course very American – but maybe it’s the other way round and America resembles Essex. After all, as they like to say in Essex, the Mayflower was launched in Harwich (well, maybe, say scholars). In Great Easton I passed a striking white building with a cupola. It might have been a Massachusetts Baptist Church; it turned out to be the 1980s-built showroom of P&A Wood (world-famous in rather refined circles), repairers and restorers of vintage Rolls-Royces. A Silver Ghost 1920 4-Door Open Torpedo Tourer at £550,000, anyone? In Great Bentley there is a massive village green that belongs in a far more spacious land. Even Great Wakering (it’s a Great place, Essex), now an ugly sprawling village, seemed to me American in its very mindlessness.
Furthermore, just outside Clacton is St Osyth, where Lee Wick Farm was for many years recognised as the driest place in Britain: an average of just under twenty inches’ rain a year. According to my weatherman friend Philip Eden, Essex is in two separate rain shadows: of the Welsh mountains for westerly winds and of the Pennines when they are more northwesterly. The winds descend the lee side of a mountain range, making the air less humid, hence less rain. So if the answer is not St Osyth it will be somewhere nearby.
It’s a title Lee Wick Farm is unlikely to get back, simply because Robert Faulds, the previous farmer, has now retired and given up the daily routine of measurement. (You have to be in it to win it.) But the figures don’t lie, says the current farmer, Robert Clarke. ‘In my experience, it’s either boggy-wet or dry like concrete,’ he says. ‘Some years I think we’re officially classed as desert. We’ve got no irrigation so we have to plant drought-resistant potatoes, and barley never grows as well as it does elsewhere.’ These are not problems that often face farmers like Gavin Bland in Cumberland. But twenty inches a year is exactly what they get on many ranches in South Dakota.
It was no coincidence that Billy Bragg chose the A13 to Shoeburyness for his parody of Route 66. And come to think of it the A12 is the most frightening road I have driven since I last tackled the Washington Beltway (excluding a back alley near Naples that turned out to be
a footpath). The A12 is not well enough engineered to cope with the number, speed and murderous intent of the motorists.
All of Essex’s infrastructure seems to be creaking. The trains are jammed solid; Chelmsford’s big new estates are built on flood plain and there will be tears one day, insist knowing locals. Yet even this Little America contains multitudes. Maybe it’s the element of American-style risk that gives Essex its vibrancy, its edge. Who knows what trick that inscrutable brown river – he must know somethin’, he don’t say nothin’ – and unpredictable sea might pull next?
And, to push the analogy even further, there is something, just like America, about all the Ess-excess that makes more respectable counties nudge each other and roll their eyes. The centrepiece of Basildon’s wind farm-cum-shopping centre is a fountain incorporating a bronze statue of a mother and child. The mother, arched beyond horizontal, is cradling her infant; both are naked. Close to, it is very beautiful. Basildon was so proud that it turned the statue into the town crest. Unfortunately, when reduced to a miniature, the image is less clear; it looks like the activity that produced the child. Poor old Essex: it just asks for trouble.
Until I was eleven, my grandparents lived in Westcliff-on-Sea. Every few weeks we would make the four-hour pre-motorway drive from our home near Northampton to see them. My father was usually less than delighted; I was thrilled. Grandpa would habitually accompany me to Southend Pier, where we would take the little train on the one-and-a-third-mile journey to the pier head and play the old mechanical pennyslot machines, which usually involved flicking a ball-bearing and trying to get it to roll into the hole that won you both the penny back and another go.
Those outings, I suddenly realised as I walked past the old Peter Pan playground, took place more than half a century ago. But the pier has been even more ravaged by the years than I have. Born in 1829, it reached its full world-record length on its hundredth birthday and continued serenely until it got to 130. Then, as old bodies do, it became accident-prone.
1959: major fire at shore end, destroying Pier Pavilion
1971: child injured, forcing rebuild of the walkway
1976: fire destroying most of pier head, including the amusement arcades
1980: threat of closure
1986: (just after railway rebuilt) tanker slices through structure, leaving seventy-foot gap
1995: bowling alley burns down
2005: pier head goes to blazes, again
2011: barge crashes
2012: fishing boat crashes
But, by golly, it was resilient. And in July 2013 the Duke of Kent, looking across the estuary to his own domain, opened the new prefabricated (and, so the council keeps repeating, iconic) Royal Pavilion at the pier head.
And so, on a brisk but pleasant November afternoon, I took the train once again. It is diesel now, not electric, and the carriages have got smaller – not my imagination – though this was not a problem, since on both journeys I was the only passenger. A few well-wrapped tourists, mainly Asian, were doing the walk, which misses the point, I’ve always thought. And, about three-quarters of a mile out, there was a lone figure in the water, carrying something long and thin.
At first I thought he was taking a dog for a rather wet walk. Then I decided my old eyes were playing up again: it must be a buoy. Then I wondered if it was another bloody Antony Gormley statue. All wrong: it was a bait-digger, apparently. The Southend tide goes out so far that fishermen are often sighted in waders at the end of the pier, hunting for bass and herring.
The iconic Royal iconic Pavilion contains a very un-iconic café, serving tea nowhere near the standard of the iconic Sugar Hut, and a large empty room with chairs stacked at the sides.
‘What’s it used for?’ I asked someone official.
‘Weddings, conferences, concerts, anything really.’
‘What’s there for kids to do?’
‘Not a lot. They can have ice cream sometimes. Not today.’
Well, they can visit the lifeboat station. Or read a book. I was told amusement arcades are a fire risk. But not the old penny slots, surely? Can’t they bring in the company that runs the retro funfair at Weston-super-Mare?
Oh, Essex! You’re awright, innit? Please be yourself, you bundle of contradictions. Give us a bit of the old razzle-dazzle, even vajazzle. Don’t try and turn the whole county into frigging Frinton. I know the rest of us take the piss. But, honestly, we love you just the way you’re meant to be.
November 2013
The eleventh series of TOWIE was shown in 2014, but it was announced that future series would be aired on something called ITVBe. Next stop: the knacker’s yard.
36. Percy and the parrot
SHROPSHIRE
In the weeks before the five-ringed circus came to London in the summer of 2012 the Olympic Games’ country cousin was also celebrating. It was the twenty-seventh time the Olympics had been staged since their reinvention in 1896. Shropshire could do better than that. This was the 126th Annual Wenlock Olympian Games.
The event at Much Wenlock was established by the local doctor, William Brookes, to ‘promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants’. In 1890 a young Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, came to the town to watch the sports and talk to Brookes about his ideas on physical education. Six years later he started his own version in Athens, which became rather famous.
De Coubertin’s Olympics recognises the connection: one of the mascots chosen for the 2012 Games was called Wenlock, though this was an honour the town could have done without; it was a hideous one-eyed thing that could give even a robust child nightmares, the product, as one columnist put it, of a ‘drunken one-night stand between a Teletubby and a Dalek’. Or merely the usual ghastly issue of a marketing meeting.
Much Wenlock gets no rights in return. It has to stick to the word ‘Olympian’ not ‘Olympic’; it cannot touch the five rings – the self-selecting International Olympic Committee being very keen on what it considers its intellectual property rights. But no one can stop the town running, jumping, swimming and performing such not quite Olympic activities as bowls, cricket and gliding.
The athletics took place at the William Brookes School just twelve days before the opening ceremony of the so-called real Olympics. The town was full of people, not all of them young, in tracksuits and tight black running shorts, exuding an air of good health and Brookesian enthusiasm. The sport, however, was somewhat inhibited by the running track, which was a figure of 6 rather than the traditional oval, and more suitable for racing whippets than humans.
In this of all years, so close to the great London fiesta, I thought there might be more outside interest. Much Wenlock’s equivalent of the opening ceremony was a parade through the town led by a little boy in princely robes on a white pony. He looked as pleased as a prince too. It was not a very grand parade, and was watched by a few dozen townspeople and a Japanese camera crew who appeared to constitute, discounting myself, the full complement of the global media.
At first I was puzzled. Then I thought how very Shropshire that made it. In theory Much Wenlock is not especially distant from London. But this is the only English county without a direct train to the capital; the roads are pretty convoluted too. Campaigners are trying to get a train from Shrewsbury restored, but as one local put it, ‘It’s not that they actually want to go to London. It’s just they think they have a right to go.’ A few Scottish-border villages perhaps excepted, nowhere in England feels more remote from London. And the same applies in reverse; if the Wenlock Games took place in Surrey, there would have been camera crews everywhere. Shropshire gets ignored by the world. The world’s loss.
Even Shropshire’s bard went there only occasionally. Next to Hardy of Dorset’s entire canon, no writer’s work is seen as the embodiment of a single county so much as A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Yet he saw it mainly from a distance, from a viewpoint near his home in Worcestershire, whence he stared at the Blue Remembered Hills of t
he county next door.
Housman himself shed little light on his connection with Shropshire. The scholarly consensus is that he was traumatised, first by the death of his mother on his twelfth birthday and then by his homoerotic longings. Read in this light, the undertones of the sixty-three poems that make up A Shropshire Lad become overwhelming. Shropshire was Housman’s own imaginary land of lost content.
Originally he planned to call the work ‘The Poems of Terence Hearsay’ but was talked out of it. And, in the words of Jim Page of the Housman Society: ‘A Bromsgrove Lad just wouldn’t have worked, would it?’ Housman was some way into the sequence before he was persuaded to make Shropshire the motif, hence the curiosity that one of the most famous of the poems, ‘Bredon Hill’, is set miles away. But what is most overwhelming is the way that, in the reader’s mind, he seems to have captured the landscape:
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
I walked along the Edge on a still day in late November. Many of the trees remained in leaf. They were gently decaying after a happy summer and a douce autumn, preparing to fall off their perch in their own good time. And what more can you hope for from life, be you leaf or human? This seems a very Shropshire way to get through our mission: passive, uncomplaining, contented. The wood was not in trouble. The Wrekin was not heaving. It was not the land of lost content. If anything, it might be the land of found content.
It is not necessary to be an acknowledged poetic genius to manipulate the evocative power of Shropshire place names. ‘As soon as the train left the platform my mother would begin her recitation: “Condover, Dorrington, Leebotwood, All Stretton, Church Stretton and Little Stretton, Marshbrook and (pause for effect) Wistanstow Halt.” It was a litany of delights.’ That was Julian Critchley, recalling a visit to his grandmother in Wistanstow in his well-liked but ill-remembered autobiography, A Bag of Boiled Sweets. Critchley was a journalist turned liberal-minded Conservative MP who, once preferment had finally passed him by in the Thatcher years, allowed full rein to his humorous subversive tendencies.
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