Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Wistanstow Halt existed for just twenty-two years: opened 1934, closed 1956. Driving north from Craven Arms on the A49, I saw a turn to Wistanstow and, on a whim, took it, passed over the railway bridge close to where the station must have been and found a perfectly formed village, essentially a single street. Not the county’s most obviously beautiful. But there, huddled together, was everything required to take one from cradle to just short of the grave: nursery and school, community shop, church, village hall, a pub with its own brewery, defibrillator – even a 3G signal to call the final ambulance and maybe email the next of kin.

  The shop, in the old forge, had been part-funded by the actor Pete Postlethwaite, who lived nearby. It was very welcoming and, though not overstocked, happy to accommodate its regulars’ special requests. There didn’t seem any urgent need ever to leave such a place. I met one woman, an incomer, who rarely did. Critchley himself ended up here and indeed there are worse places to spend eternity than Holy Trinity churchyard, though myself I would prefer to be buried by the oaks rather than the leylandii. Wistanstow felt, as Critchley’s mother had intimated, like the epitome of Shropshire. Housman’s ashes have a grander resting place, in the churchyard of Ludlow’s quasi-cathedral, St Laurence’s. There is a stone in the north wall with the lines:

  Goodnight; ensured release,

  Imperishable peace,

  Have these for yours.

  Not Housman’s most memorable. I might have gone for:

  Leave your home behind you,

  Your friends by field and town.

  Oh, town and field will mind you

  Till Ludlow tower is down.

  Shropshire was not always a model of rural calm. In 1709 a Quaker industrialist called Abraham Darby took over a run-down blast furnace at Coalbrookdale and began to experiment with the use of coke rather than charcoal in the manufacture of iron. Perfecting the process took three generations and most of the century, but its moment of glory came in 1779 when the grandson, Abraham Darby III, produced the dynasty’s showpiece, the iron bridge over the Severn.

  England was running short of wood, but the seams of coal were staring at the Darbys from the steep banks of the river. It was a revolutionary discovery. What would become known as the Ironbridge Gorge was for a time the innovative centre of the world, the Silicon Valley of its day. It was a honeypot for factory owners and for workers.

  But the first three Darbys all died young, and the family fortunes fluctuated. The whole Ironbridge phenomenon was short-lived too. The east Shropshire coalfield was small and by the mid-nineteenth century the area began to be outcompeted by areas like the Black Country, which had more space and more coal. Just when most of England was becoming industrial, Shropshire became post-industrial. Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale became relics. Neil (later Sir Neil) Cossons was brought in to make something of its heritage in 1971. ‘The gorge was a scene of complete decay and dereliction,’ he recalled. ‘If you said you lived in Iron-bridge, you were looked at with pity. The whole place was populated by old people.’

  But the remnants were there, and Ironbridge ‘Birthplace of Industry’ became what must be the most popular destination on Britain’s longest river. In landscape terms, the gorge has regenerated itself and become wooded again. And the architecture has a touch of class because the Georgians were stylish even when building factories. The bridge itself is exquisite, though long ago declared too fragile for traffic. You could not replicate Ironbridge’s current success in the average ex-pit village. Nonetheless, there is a huddled, claustrophobic feel, as in the Rhondda; there were too many cars for comfort even in late November.

  This is a problem of success. There are now ten – ten! – museums in this little valley, plus the modern versions of ancillary industry: teddy bear shops and curio centres. The only sign of continuing industrialisation came from Ironbridge power station, on the opposite bank, emitting smoke but in a wispy, lazy Shropshire kind of way. It was due to close by the end of 2015. In the meantime, this remnant of the world’s first industrial powerhouse was burning coal from places like South Africa, Poland and Colombia and biomass from Louisiana. The English run the museums. I don’t suppose they have ten of those in the whole of Colombia.

  As a failed superpower, Shropshire settled back into a very happy torpor. Not much happened. The twentieth century made only one major incursion into the landscape: the building of Telford New Town for displaced Brummies which subsumed several undistinguished coalfield towns from the 1960s onwards. Telford was particularly helpful to the Ironbridge Project because it meant there was money sloshing about.

  In 1974, the great local government mash-up left Shropshire unscathed. Instead of revelling in its escape, a rare survivor of the April Fool’s Day massacre, it opted for self-harm instead. The word ‘Salop’ had long been used as the county’s abbreviated form, as an adjective – ‘Salopian’ – and also as the official name of the old county council. No one took much notice. But in a fit of national compliance, the new county names were now being adopted for all purposes, postal addresses included. The new council decreed that Salop was in and Shropshire was out, and the populace found that the place they thought they lived in had in effect ceased to exist.

  In Old English, the area was known as Scrobbesbyrigscir, derived from Shrewsbury. When the Normans arrived, they had understandable problems pronouncing this, hence Salop. Later, Latinists argued that the title Shropshire County Council was tautologous. Actually, ‘shire’ and ‘county’ are not the same, but it was the sort of argument that could win the day in the 1880s, when county councils were being set up, and Shropshire was full of parsons with Oxon and Cantab after their names and too little to do. It was somewhat more surprising that it had any credence in the 1970s.

  The new Salop lasted just six years. A campaign led by Colonel John Kenyon of Oswestry forced the council to vote 48–6 in favour of reverting to Shropshire. One of the issues raised was the meaning of salop in French, something that must have post-dated the Normans, and its possible deleterious effect on the tourist trade. This point was drawn to my attention by Shirley Tart, the doyenne of Shropshire journalism, who has spent her life trying to deal with the very same problem in good humour. According to my Collins Robert French-English Dictionary, ‘un salop: bastard, sod, swine; une salope: bitch, cow, tart’.

  The locals – especially older ones – do use the word Salop sometimes, but not as a synonym for the county. It is their way round the problem of pronouncing the county town: Shrows-bury, which is considered posh; Shrews-bury, a bit common; or even Shoes-bury, dead common. Country folk often say, ‘I’m going up to Salop today.’ Shrewsbury football fans are even said to chant ‘Sa-lop’ occasionally.

  Differences of opinion in Shropshire tend not to be too vituperative and I have not come across a county quite so comfortable in its own skin. The post-2010 coalition government liked to distinguish between ‘strivers’ (good) and ‘skivers’ (bad). The mainly Tory voters of Shropshire fit into neither category: this is a county for the conscientious but unambitious. It has had people who go off into the world and make names for themselves, but this does not always turn out well. The trouble started with Old Parr, Thomas Parr of Alberbury: born 1483, so it was said, died 1635. For nearly all that time, he appeared to be doing rather well on a diet of ‘green cheese, onions, coarse bread, buttermilk or mild ale (and cider on special occasions)’, with none of that new-fangled tobacco but a good deal of old-fashioned sex: he married at eighty, committed adultery at 105 and remarried at 122. There is no evidence that any of these numbers were remotely correct, but he was obviously knocking on a bit yet absolutely fine, until, having allegedly passed the 150 mark, Parr was discovered by the Earl of Arundel. His lordship insisted on taking him to London to be exhibited at court, where he took ill and died. The royal physician William Harvey proclaimed that he had been seen off by London’s rich food and pollution.

  You see what happens when Shropshire men get above themselves? There was Rober
t Clive of Market Drayton, who conquered India, then slit his own throat. Captain Matthew Webb of Dawley, the first man to swim the Channel, who drowned in Niagara Falls. Andrew Irvine of Shrewsbury School, who really got above himself and disappeared on Everest. And what about Andy Lloyd of Oswestry, who in 1984 became the first Shropshire-born cricketer to play for England since Victoria was on the throne? He remains the only England opening batsman never to have been dismissed. That’s because he got bonked on the head by a West Indian fast bowler after half an hour and was never picked again. You see? Best to stay home. Shropshire probably still murmurs disparagingly about Charles Darwin of Shrewsbury and his crazed ideas about monkeys.

  I exaggerate a bit. But Shropshire can seem a bit small-minded and backward. This is one of several counties where incomers snigger about the natives who, when they say tomorrow, mean mañana but without the same sense of urgency. There is an obverse to this: a powerful sense of community. Shirley Tart’s newspaper, the Shropshire Star, did not even exist before 1964. In the heyday of the evening papers, no one thought it worthwhile to give Shropshire its own.

  Fifty years on, provincial press circulations are falling fast and the Star is not immune. But even in 2013 its sales were still above 40,000, in the top six nationally, above the local papers in such trivial places as Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow. It is partly a sign of good, solidly rooted management. It is also a comment on the place, a sign of an ageing, stable community where people know and care about their neighbours. That’s Shropshire.

  Readers of fiction persistently refuse to accept its essential premise: that the characters and locations do not exist. A great deal of time is wasted by analysts of P. G. Wodehouse’s work trying to pinpoint the exact location of Blandings Castle, home of Lord Emsworth and, far more important, his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings. Evelyn Waugh once told a radio audience, ‘The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled’, and the books do refer to Shropshire, which indeed has Edenic characteristics.

  But Shropshire is also completely inconsistent. The biggest of the inland counties, it veers between the soft and the muscular. North of Shrewsbury it is relatively flat and meadowy, morphing gently into the Cheshire plain. But the south is startling, which makes it the reverse of the two counties to the east, Staffordshire and Derbyshire, where all the drama is in the north.

  South Shropshire can feel Alpine: passing through Church Stretton one day with the Long Mynd under snow, I could swear I heard the tinkling of cowbells. On the other side of the Mynd is the most challenging drive in the country: the 1 in 4 ascent, with a sheer drop to one side, from Asterton up to the gliding club on the summit. I thought the bell was tolling, not tinkling, and the wind on the moorland plateau was savage. This bleak and beautiful landscape bears puzzlingly little resemblance to the English Midlands. The answer to the puzzle must be that, deep in its soul, this is not the Midlands but Wales.

  Upland Shropshire gives the county a very un-Midland elemental power; the last fair before Christmas at Church Stretton used to be known as Deadman’s Fair, because so many farmworkers failed to cope with the journey home through the snow and the alcoholic haze. But above all, this is not a county of mountainsides, nor even of farms, nor small villages. It is a county – the county, along with Lincolnshire – of small towns, now almost all forgotten by the railways, and often by major roads, and to some extent by time itself.

  David McKie of the Guardian once described Bridgnorth as the ideal-sized town: ‘large enough to be varied and interesting but small enough for the locals to know which of the traffic wardens is the most vindictive’. Personally, I prefer towns small enough for the locals to know that the traffic warden only appears on alternate Tuesdays. And Shropshire has a lot of candidates, hardly known to the outside world. Much Wenlock is delicious, and has its name in its favour. Newport is trafficky but stylish – the Shell Guide described it in 1951 as ‘the centre of the district where two-bottle squires are still said to live’; the southern approach to Market Drayton, heading towards the hillside church, is pregnant with promise that is not entirely fulfilled by the town centre.

  Bishop’s Castle was once the terminus of what may have been the second most eccentric branch line in England, surpassed only by the heroically mad Potts Line west out of Shrewsbury. It misses its railway badly, since the streets are steep and narrow and barely adequate for a horse and cart, never mind a juggernaut. It also misses Ron Davies’s ironmongery and the greengrocer and even the market, dating back to 1249 but now removed – perhaps for ever – to nearby Lydham, where access is less complicated. Bishop’s Castle does have a deli and a sprinkling of bookshops, being the westward edge of what one resident calls ‘the brown rice belt’. This is centred on gastro-Ludlow, where traffic wardens are perforce very active indeed. South of Bishop’s Castle is Clun, a town so remote and secluded it never did get a railway. In this least angry of towns is the improbable last resting place of the eternally angry John Osborne. Bishop’s Castle looks down on Clun as being a bit, well, clun-nish.

  I think my favourite of all Shropshire towns is probably Ellesmere, in the deep north, a place – I confess – I had never even heard of until arriving with my family, on a enchanted summer’s evening, by narrowboat along the Llangollen Canal, and discovering not just a town with an air of quietly assured permanence but the eponymous and lovely mere: 113 acres of it.

  Bishop’s Castle, Ellesmere and Clun are all tight against the Welsh border, as is Oswestry, a railway town that no longer has a railway. It did have the golfer Ian Woosnam, who liked to call himself Welsh. (‘Where is Wales?’ demanded an American journalist after Woosnam won the 1991 Masters. ‘Is it in Scotland?’) The border, created after Henry VIII decided to blunt the power of the Marcher Lords in 1536, is more like a coastline than a political frontier, full of peninsulas and inlets. It is far less obvious than Offa’s Dyke, built to keep the Welsh out of Mercia, or the Offa’s Dyke Path. Only rarely do even two of these three lines run close to one another.

  The oddest manifestation of the border comes in the large village of Llanymynech, where it runs along the main street, though not down the middle, the roadway being in Wales. The line then lurches eastwards, to bisect what used to be the Lion Hotel. Thus, in the days when Welsh pubs closed on Sundays, drinkers were obliged to head for the back bar. The Lion had closed by the time smoking bans came in. These took effect in Wales three months before England, thus leading to a temporary exodus from the Dolphin on the Welsh side to the Bradford Arms over the road. As the Welsh Assembly gets more powers, there will be more such weirdness.

  As it is, one of Shropshire’s most famous characters lives just in Wales, in Church Stoke, which occupies a phallus-shaped protuberance of Montgomeryshire (in England for ecclesiastical purposes) north of Bishop’s Castle. His name is Sam and he watches over the front entrance of Harry Tuffins. Harry Tuffin’s mini-chain of supermarkets began here in 1955 and spread, mainly across Shropshire. Harry died young, in 1976, and most of the expansion occurred under his son-in-law Roy Delves. There were shockwaves across the county when the family sold out, in a complicated deal, in 2012. They were matched by the shock a year later when Sam disappeared.

  Sam is a twenty-five-year-old African macaw, the stores’ mascot and Roy’s pet. ‘Roy was devastated, he was,’ said the woman on the checkout, with genuine affection for both boss and parrot. There was a quick and happy ending. A man from Staffordshire was seen loading him into a van, quickly traced and sentenced to 100 hours’ community service. This was not Sam’s first adventure; on a previous occasion he was found in a pet shop in Shrewsbury. But, so soon after the sale, it seemed like another blow to the comfortable certainties Tuffins inspired in their customers. The shops are low-ceilinged, unflashy, in the style of both Poundland and a market stall. There is a hint of good-natured hustling behind it. Sam’s presence is not just a nice touch, it’s retailing genius. His presence turns a child’s trip to the superm
arket into a delight. Mine too. I asked him if he regarded himself as English or Welsh. ‘Ullo,’ he replied. ‘Ullo.’

  The real epitome of Shropshire man was another incomer, not as ravishingly coloured as Sam but more reliably articulate. To anyone in Britain throughout the third quarter of the twentieth century, Percy Thrower was more than that: he was the personification of the affable, knowledgeable man of the soil. He came from Buckinghamshire but just after the war, aged thirty-two, was appointed parks superintendent of Shrewsbury, a town whose parks were much admired and whose flower festival (its prizes much coveted by Lord Emsworth, among others) was ranked second only to Chelsea.

  Thrower made Shrewsbury even more famous by becoming famous himself. Long before Alan Titchmarsh and the woman with no bra, he was the face of BBC gardening, first on Gardening Club, then, when colour TV demanded more reality than a fake greenhouse in a studio, Gardeners’ World, often set in the large garden of Percy’s own bungalow, the Magnolias, at Merrington.

  He exuded the air of a countryman of his generation: tweed suit, tie, pipe, Labrador. He had the attitudes of his generation too, witness his response when asked about chemicals in gardening: ‘DDT … that’s not too dangerous.’ And he knew his worth as well: his BBC career ended in 1975, when he opted to do commercials for a gardening subsidiary of ICI. He died in 1988, as boss of the Percy Thrower Garden Centre, which is still there, on the edge of Shrewsbury, though now without much family involvement. Thrower was not wholly a cliché: on nights alone in London he would visit casinos. But maybe rustic non-censoriousness is also part of this county’s mixture. The old Sunday Times journalist Maurice Wiggin once wrote a piece about Shropshire, theorising: ‘Perhaps it is because the landscape is fey that it builds resilient and down-to-earth people.’