The Village News

by Tom Fort

  It has a primary school, which judging from the playground racket on a Tuesday seemed in good heart. What used to be the school is the village hall, where the youth club meet every week and there is bingo and table tennis, and the odd jumble sale and quiz night, and the Friendship Club. There is a handsome sandstone and brick pub, the Red Lion, which was closed for quite a while but was then taken over, done up and reopened by a development and building company which has its offices in Myddle (run, so I was told, by a family who used to be local farmers). There is no cricket or football club, but there is a village shop – although for how much longer may be in doubt, given its meagre and unappetising stock and the volume and flow of complaints from the bloke serving behind the counter about lack of village support.

  The life of this place was once an open book, sufficiently so for it to be written down. It and its parish and its outlying settlements were engaged in a shared enterprise. Everyone had a part in it, whatever their station. But that shared enterprise ended a long time ago. The common stream has split into a multitude of separate, minute trickles. Some come together temporarily for particular purposes – the Friendship Club, the History Society, the school playground – but then go their own way again. Others stay apart for good.

  In a way the story of Myddle now is that there is no single story any more.

  12

  MAKE-BELIEVE

  Askrigg, North Yorkshire and Rippingale, Lincolnshire

  After twelve years, seven series and eighty-seven episodes, the chairman of the parish council in Askrigg – the double for the fictional village of Darrowby in All Creatures Great and Small – said he was delighted it was all over. The myth-making power of the BBC had caused Askrigg an existential identity crisis. In one dimension it was as it had always been, a village of stone houses and cottages set in one of the loveliest of the Yorkshire Dales. In the other it was a fictitious construct given over to the antics of a trio of veterinary surgeons with posh accents dressed in tweed jackets and corduroys watched by a gallery of Yorkshire country folk, all mysteriously beamed in from a bygone age.

  No wonder fans of the show were confused. They came on pilgrimage from all over the world and were perplexed to find that the Drovers’ Arms was not the Drovers’ Arms at all, but the King’s Arms. The surgery where James Herriot treated Mrs Pumphrey’s Pekingese Tricki Woo was not a veterinary practice, but a care home for humans. They, and the residents of Askrigg, would sometimes wonder which world they were in.

  Looking towards Askrigg church in the 1960s

  All Creatures Great and Small was a TV phenomenon. It regularly pulled in 20 million viewers on Sunday evenings, that sacred slot in the nation’s telly week. The opening sequence that accompanied the credits set the tone to perfection. A black car from an earlier time was shown bowling along a lane through misted fields, then through an antique village and over an antique stone bridge. At the wheel was Siegfried in battered tweed hat, with James at his side, the two of them hooting with laughter at some absurdity of life while a golden retriever of mature years stared inscrutably out the window. With Johnny Pearson’s chirpy theme tune bouncing along in perfect harmony, it was an irresistible invitation to lean back on the sofa behind drawn curtains with the lights low and a mug of tea or cocoa to hand and slip back into an age of innocence.

  The programme tapped into two wellsprings of notional Englishness: our love of animals and our intensive nostalgic reverence for life in the country. It belonged in that imprecisely dated golden age when the business of life was simple. People worked hard, knew their places, were not troubled by intractable social problems, stress, anxiety, depression or the threat of nuclear holocaust. They were grumpy because they were Yorkshire, not because they had anything to be grumpy about. Deep down they were happy because they were able to comprehend their world and where they belonged in it.

  One of the many strengths of All Creatures was that it was not, on the surface, overtly sentimental. Animals got ill, suffered and died. Largely because of the perfection of the casting of the main characters, it was able to sustain the illusion that it portrayed real professionals doing an authentic job. In almost every episode Siegfried, James or Tristan endured discomfort and were exposed to humiliation. These regular experiences were larded into the laughs and the joy. The vets were put upon, stretched, mocked and exploited; but deep down they were valued, even loved, because the community needed them.

  The books were as remarkable a cultural phenomenon as the eighty-seven episodes. There was a touch of hyperbole, but no more, in the comment in Graham Lord’s biography of their writer, Alf Wight, that he was famous ‘even in the remote kampongs of south-east Asia and in the wilds of Africa’. It helped that he was Alf Wight and defiantly remained so, despite accumulated sales of around 50 million. Even after the publication of the sixth volume of Herriot adventures, The Lord God Made Them All, he continued to work in the practice in Thirsk which he had joined forty years before. When he finally retired in 1989 – six years before his death from prostate cancer – he was seventy-three.

  The trick of All Creatures was to present and maintain a plausible version of real life while being nothing of the kind. It is revealing that Wight should have been deeply distressed when Christopher Timothy – who played James so wonderfully well – left his real-life wife and children for Carol Drinkwater, his on-screen wife. Adultery did not figure in the world Wight invented. Nor did vindictiveness, mean-spiritedness, depression, deception, abuse of wives and children, hatred between neighbours, alcoholism, cruelty to animals – all of which must have been happening somewhere close by as Alf Wight went on his rounds.

  The brand created by the genial, good-looking, hard-nosed Glasgow-born vet was extraordinarily potent. The Dales ceased to be individual valleys and became Herriot Country. Visitors in their legions went on Herriot tours with Herriot guides who knew every twist and turn of every story. Walkers walked the Herriot trail, motorists used Herriot car-hire firms. Teashops and restaurants blazoned their Herriot credentials.

  At the heart of it was this village, Askrigg/Darrowby, where the surgery looks across at the church with the Market Cross on the triangle in front, and the Drovers’ a little way up the hill. The butcher’s is A. Bainbridge and Sons, the cinema is the Plaza. The local bobby – variously named PC Blenkiron, PC Smith, PC Leach, PC Goole and PC Hicks – pedals the same beat on the same period bicycle in the same period helmet performing the same comic function: to be benign, literal-minded, slow on the uptake, solid, gullible, utterly reliable. Callers seeking an appointment at the surgery ask the operator for Darrowby 85 (later expanded, daringly, to Darrowby 385 to hint at a changing world). Visitors arriving by train alight at nearby Rainby Halt (actually filmed at Finghall on the Wensleydale Railway). News and trenchant opinion are to be found in the Darrowby and Houlton Times.

  In Askrigg/Darrowby everyone knows everyone and everyone’s business. The skies are generally grey and the streets are damp with drizzle. The people are dressed for the weather: women in hats and skirts and sturdy shoes, farmers in caps and mud-spattered rough trousers, vets in tweed jackets and sleeveless pullovers and corduroys or flannels, a shapeless hat or yellow waistcoat allowable. They all walk purposefully because they have purpose in their lives, but almost never so purposefully that they do not have the time to stop and gossip, because we all know that gossip is the lifeblood of village life. The shopkeepers know every customer’s foibles; there is no urgency to be served or to get out of the shop. The barmaid at the Drovers’ serves the regulars without being asked; she knows their tipples as well as she knows their names.

  Askrigg/Darrowby is a proper village. It is self-contained and self-dependent, peaceful but not comatose, busy but never frenetic. Its people are warm and friendly at heart, but only once you get past the deep, instinctive suspicion of outsiders. They are generous despite the ingrained reluctance to part with ‘brass’. They enjoy an unthinking oneness with the settlement and the fields and fells that
enclose it.

  What period is this? Alf Wight joined the practice (in Thirsk) in 1940, left to join the RAF, returned after the war and worked until 1989. He wrote the books between 1970 and 1981 (Every Living Thing, published in 1992, was a rather meagre sweeping up of leftovers). His gaze is backward but the period on which it rests is imprecisely defined. Siegfried’s Hillman is an early 1930s model, but could easily be ten or twenty years old. James Herriot’s arrival in Darrowby is dated 1937. There is no obvious division between pre- and post-war phases; the saga just goes on, although Wight’s original stories were all used up by the end of the third series and the BBC had to persuade him to allow them to devise more.

  All Creatures is timeless. Its existence (or non-existence) depends on it being entirely sealed off from the rest of the world, both spiritually and in time. The conditions in that outside world – threatening, troubling, rapidly changing – cannot be allowed to break the seal.

  By a pleasing chance there is a history of the real Askrigg, precisely dated and rooted in its landscape setting. It is presented in a book called Yorkshire Village, a shining example of scholarly and elegantly written local history by two adoptive Askriggians, Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby, which was published in 1952.

  Yorkshire Village is a conventional narrative of the story of the settlement from its pre-Norman origins to the immediate post-1945 period: its gradual ascent to the status of thriving township in the eighteenth century and subsequent gentle decline back to being a farming village. Its most vivid chapter is one in which the two lady historians give a kind of real-time close-focus succession of snapshots of the surface of village life observed by them on an ordinary working-day morning from the village hub, the Market Cross.

  It begins with the church clock sounding eight o’clock. The district nurse goes to her car, the caretaker of the Conservative Club crosses to the door to open up. Men turn up Pudding Lane on their way to work at the mill. The roadman and his wife get into a taxi in their best clothes (‘a wedding, we surmise’). The dairy manager enters the yard, one of the workers behind him clacking in clogs. ‘A soft-footed slouching figure, labourer, stone-waller, rabbit-catcher, handyman skilled at many jobs, passes along with a bag of mushrooms in his hand.’

  The departure time of the first train of the day approaches, and a woman on her way to work in Hawes walks off to catch it, followed by a girl running. The postmen are off with the mail – two to the outlying districts, one with the letters and parcels for the village. The newspapers arrive from Northallerton and the newsagent is soon off on his rounds.

  The tempo picks up. The milkman, dustman, builder, a farmer, the decorator are seen about their business. It’s nearly nine by now: housewives with baskets over their arms make their way to the shops, and visitors staying in Askrigg buy their newspapers before going back for a leisurely breakfast. The blacksmith, the gamekeeper, the village bobby and the stationmaster’s wife are among those making for the butcher’s. At nine the bus draws up outside the grocer’s and takes on five passengers. ‘It is the signal for the orderly and less frenzied routine of the day to begin.’

  Marie Hartley devoted her working life to studying and recording the traditional Dales life. Joan Ingilby was the second of her long-term collaborators, after the death of her friend Ella Pontefract. As well as writing, the three women assembled a great hoard of agricultural tools and accessories, cooking implements, domestic utensils and furniture which became the basis of the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby remained productive into old age – Joan dying in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine, and Marie in 2006 at the age of 100. They had lived long enough to see their village reclaim its own identity from the mythical incarnation represented in All Creatures Great and Small.

  Although they respected and celebrated the old ways, they were commendably unsentimental about their passing. In Yorkshire Village Hartley and Ingilby recorded the huge changes in living conditions in their time: piped water, flushing lavatories, electric cookers in place of the kitchen range, stone floors replacing wooden ones. The shops now stocked tinned foods, factory-produced cakes, sliced bread – ‘at most six housewives bake their own bread and no one regularly makes oatcakes,’ they observed. A laundry van came to take linen away; a fish-and-chip van called on Fridays; there was no longer a village dressmaker. ‘In the old days,’ they wrote, ‘the women rose at four o’clock to finish the washing of the blackleading before breakfast; if it was “all work i’ them days” it is no longer so today.’

  That was the early 1950s. In its eighteenth-century heyday Askrigg and its market – granted under Elizabeth I – flourished. There were dyers, hosiers, knitters, weavers, lead-miners, blacksmiths, masons, glaziers, plasterers, shoemakers, a cooper, a glove-maker, a slater, gardeners, grocers, butchers, bakers, tailors, haberdashers, drapers, a barber, an apothecary and more besides. In 1801 its population peaked at more than 750. Decline set in as neighbouring Hawes went from strength to strength, but it was gentle and relative.

  By the time Hartley and Ingilby were writing Yorkshire Village change was accelerating rapidly. Sixty years later the shops they noted have all gone, as have the trades and crafts. There is a village shop, a delicatessen-baker-post office-gift shop and two tea rooms. There are several B&Bs, and – hearteningly – three pubs (the King’s Arms, the Crown and the White Rose). I could find no evidence of club cricket or football, but there is a village hall and a busy church, a primary school and a splendid outdoor centre run by a local charity.

  Two significant additions to Askrigg’s commercial life were signs of the times. Building on the excitement generated by Yorkshire having hosted Stage 1 and 2 in the 2014 Tour de France, there was a cycle business on Main Street offering new bikes, repairs, hire bikes and guided tours of the Dales (now relocated to Hawes). Close by, in what used to be a milking parlour, was the Yorkshire Dales Brewing Company, the cherished child of Rob (I didn’t catch his other name but I gathered he was in IT before the beer-making mania possessed him). His regular ales include Askrigg (‘crisp golden ale with strong hoppy finish’), Butter Tubs (‘dry bitterness of a good session ale’) and Muker Silver, named after a brass band from the Swaledale village of Muker (‘bittered with Hallertau Northern Brewer hops bursting with Styrian Goldings’).

  At the brewery I bumped into a large man called Miles, who was ordering supplies for his vinyl record shop-cum-bar in Skipton. We repaired to the King’s Arms for a pint or two of the bitter bearing the pub’s name (Rob told me he had produced 480 different beers in the ten years since he started the business). The bar is much as it was in its incarnation as the Drover’s, the main room dominated by a massive stone fireplace. The passage is an All Creatures memory lane, lined with photographs of James and Tristan at the bar counter, Siegfried in tweed jacket and tie, James and wholesome Helen, her hand on his sleeve – all poignantly youthful.

  But Askrigg has moved on. The pub is now owned by a superior timeshare company called Holiday Property Bond, which has spent a fortune converting the former stables and outbuildings behind into a complex of twenty-nine highly dinky holiday apartments. A steady flow of the company’s bond holders helps keep the pub and the village shops in business. There are still Herriot pilgrims – mainly German, Dutch and American – but the flow has thinned to a trickle. It is another sign of the times that neither the barmaid at the King’s Arms nor the girl who sold me my pork pie at the deli had ever watched an episode.

  *

  Almost twenty years before the publication of Alf Wight’s first volume of Herriot stories the BBC’s Home Service broadcast the first episode of a serial about rural life called The Archers. Today, twenty-five years after the last episode of All Creatures Great and Small was shown, The Archers is still going strong, and it’s a fair bet that the everyday story of country folk will last as long as BBC Radio itself.

  It has embedded itself in the national consciousness and helped shape our awareness of what village life and ag
riculture are. Its longevity is a testament to the vision and talent of all those who have helped make it, but more so to the power of the medium itself. Television can never match the pervasive influence exercised by radio. It requires a conscious act of engagement to sit down and watch, but the radio very easily becomes part of the flux of life itself, a companion through the waking hours.

  Even so, for a daily serial to span two generations and nearly 18,000 episodes without ever facing a serious threat of being taken off air is astounding. It has managed it by evolving with society itself. It is middle class and middle-aged, of course it is; but even that broad sector of society has changed and changed again, shedding its skins. The trick of The Archers has been to keep step with that change, and to avoid becoming a vehicle for nostalgia and sentimental pastoralism.

  All Creatures had, first and foremost, to comply with the strict requirements set down for Sunday-evening viewing. It had to be comfortable, cosy, gently escapist. It succeeded superbly by excluding the difficult aspects of community life. The Archers has done the opposite, embracing the darker side. Unfaithfulness in marriage, sexual abuse, hatred between neighbours and family members, crime, cheating, feuding, alcoholism, depression, class antagonism, mental decay, disease, death, sudden terminal accidents – these are the staples of The Archers menu, along with the shop and the panto and the cricket and the other froth. Collisions between countryside forces – conservation versus agribusiness, organic versus intensive, nimby versus developer, old village versus incomer – are readily and expertly worked into the storylines.