Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  I met Boycott once, at a Test match, and he was gloriously entertaining. I was with my son, who was twelve at the time, and Kevin Pietersen, England’s star batsman of the time, was out caught. ‘Pietersen’s shot was bad, wasn’t it, Geoffrey?’ said my lad. Boycott, while delicately holding a cup and saucer, said, ‘Bad? It was a pile of shit.’

  Being from Yorkshire is often offered as an explanation. You could make a speech at a wedding that ends, ‘I can’t see it lasting, surely she could do better than this steaming ugly hideous sphincterous disfigured idle moron,’ and someone would say, ‘Oh well, he’s from Yorkshire. They don’t mince their words,’ the way you might excuse someone who suddenly throws a chair out of the window by saying, ‘He was in Vietnam. He has good days and bad days.’

  Clearly, not everyone from Yorkshire behaves like this. There are shy people from Yorkshire and tactful people from Yorkshire and even depressed people from Yorkshire, and if someone from Yorkshire works for the Samaritans they can’t spend all night barking, ‘I’m not surprised thou wants to top thyself, thou’s nowt worth living for, thou daft bugger.’

  But there is a sense of identity, that has resulted in furious campaigns whenever an attempt has been made to redraw the county boundaries, for example. This must add to the sense of ‘defending the community’ when it’s perceived as under attack from ‘outsiders’. Sheffield was the most militant town in Britain at the time of the French Revolution, the Luddites’ strongest base was in Yorkshire, miners’ leader Arthur Scargill came from Barnsley, and in the 1970s the news often referred to the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’. During the 1984 miners’ strike there was a sense across much of the county that Yorkshire, rather than just the miners of Yorkshire, was under threat.

  But Yorkshireness doesn’t necessarily drive the county’s people in a socialist direction, as their distrust of outsiders can stretch to a suspicion of anything vaguely modern, and can be used to justify an earthy racism. For example, Yorkshire county cricket matches were often venues for the abuse of Asian players. Of Britain’s major cities it was Leeds where the National Front had most success in the 1970s, and the same was true thirty years later with the British National Party.

  But while there’s a definite sense of Yorkshire, it contains multiple unfathomable rivalries, possibly more than any other county. Maybe this is because most of it is made up of small distinct towns, which grew up around a mill or a pit during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. So there are a million semi-jokey hostilities (such as the Skipton view of Keighley as a ‘sink of evil’).

  The book Huddersfield Voices, written by a local author, tells us: ‘Huddersfield is as it was, not as elegant as Leeds but at least not as ugly as Bradford.’

  There are probably academic tomes, considered as seminal works among Yorkshire professors and published by university presses for eighty quid, that go, ‘In comparison with Pontefract, Rotherham’s shite. And if thou’s reading, Professor Whitworth CBE, Dean of Leeds University, work of thine on cotton exports int’ 1830s were double shite, and I’ll tell thee that to thy face if thee dare come near Ponty.’

  Huddersfield seems classically Yorkshire, especially when approached from the west across Emley Moor, past the fields where Last of the Summer Wine was filmed and a huge telecommunications mast that’s visible from all West Yorkshire.

  The greatest Luddite battle took place near Huddersfield, when stocking-makers threatened with unemployment shot dead one of the wealthiest mill owners, William Horsfall. After this incident there were more troops sent to Huddersfield than had been at Waterloo.

  Another consequence was that shortly before going to Huddersfield for a show, I asked on Twitter if anyone had a comment they’d like to make about the town, and a few people from the area mentioned the Luddites. Then someone wrote on Twitter, ‘Go on Mark, you slag off the Luddites as much as you like, it’s not like they’ll be following you on here.’

  Now, there’s one thing the town seems proud of above all else, which is its role in inventing rugby league. Rugby was originally played in the public schools only, and it was considered a fundamental rule of the spirit of the game that no one should be paid for playing it. Then in 1895 a meeting took place in the George Hotel in Huddersfield, at which representatives from twenty-two northern clubs formed a different style of rugby, with payment allowed, to attract working-class men to play the sport.

  This meeting seems to be known about by every resident of the town. They refer to it with gleeful enthusiasm, and seem astonished that you didn’t know about it, as if you went to Calvary and said, ‘Did anything of note ever happen here?’

  The hotel itself has been moved, and is now opposite the station, by the much less revered statue of Harold Wilson, who was born in the town. Inside it is a shrine to rugby league, so much so that it’s officially recognised as a museum. The walls opposite the reception are covered in huge framed photos of generations of men diving through mud, and you’re directed to a room full of trophies and newspaper cuttings of classic matches from Daily Mirrors and Daily Sketches over the last hundred years.

  Amongst these snippets are a framed front page of the Daily Mirror depicting VE-Day, and one of the moon landing. So it looks as if someone’s put together their top two hundred events of the twentieth century, which in their opinion were VE-Day, the moon landing and 198 games of rugby league, including a scrappy win for Castleford at Widnes which just edged out the First World War.

  Then there are more rooms and corridors and staircases, all packed with mesmerising framed jerseys and photographs, so you find yourself thinking, ‘Ah yes, dear old Bobby “Battleship” Armworth,’ before remembering you’ve never heard of any of these people before. But it’s beautifully captivating, like being shown pictures of an extended family by a proud grandparent. It’s pride from below. Any town might be lucky enough to provide a Prime Minister, but to invent a sport and then sustain it for more than a century takes the dedication of thousands of people.

  The influence of rugby league is also evident in Huddersfield Voices. For example, there’s an account by David Gronow, Secretary of Huddersfield Rugby League Players’ Association, with some charming tales, such as, ‘In a match against Wigan they singled out Tony Johnson, a police officer and the only coloured guy on the pitch. They gave him some stick; every time he ran they clobbered him with a forearm smash. Tony laughed about it afterwards, it was just good-natured violence.’

  As you’re pondering the implications of this, he says that his favourite coach was Maurice Bamford: ‘Maurice wasn’t too fond of his mother-in-law, who’d had a pacemaker fitted. Maurice found out that microwaves, in the early days, could interact with pacemakers. So he offered to poach her an egg in one and within no time she wasn’t well and had to go home. Maurice said the microwave was worth every penny.’

  She probably laughed about it later, saying it was just good-natured attempted murder.

  About twenty miles north is Keighley, and then Skipton, which is so dominated by cattle-farming that the theatre is a cattle market. In the daytime the cows are paraded and sold, then the farmers depart and a hose is brought out to wash away what the beasts deposited and you do the show on the platform where a few hours earlier the auctioneer was taking bids for cattle. So the shows are accompanied by the sweet but all-encompassing aroma of a thousand cowpats. It would be comforting to think the cattle are aware of this, thinking, ‘I may be off to slaughter, but a bit of me will still be here. Let’s see if they can concentrate on Chekhov while that’s wafting past.’

  Around the backstage area, instead of the usual signed posters for An Evening with Bill Beaumont and a one-man show about the life of Dr Goebbels, there are huge photos of prizewinning bulls, and trophies for ‘1986 Friesian of the Year’. Just outside the auditorium, where you would normally expect a little café and maybe some exhibits from a local artist, there’s a shop selling fishing rods and wellington boots.

  The area where you
wait behind the curtain to go onstage is the start of the pens where the cattle go once they’ve been bought. So you’d have to worry if a panto was on there – the poor sod in the cow costume would only have to take a wrong turning and he’d end up in the abattoir, forlornly screaming, ‘Don’t mince me, I’m Keith Chegwin.’

  You get some idea of the dominance of farming in the town’s history from a local book that explains the impact of the Road Traffic Act of the 1930s: ‘The Act took much of the fun out of buses. No longer could operators accept calves, crates of hens and piglets on their buses, when the driver’s reward might be a brace of rabbits.’

  So even the bus fares were paid in animals. You imagine the conductor saying, ‘Have you nowt smaller? I’ve no change for an ox.’

  Back in 1877 animals were held in higher esteem than now. A travelling circus advertised: ‘For the first time in Britain come and see Tipster, the world’s first clairvoyant educated talking horse.’ Which suggests how hard to please they are in Yorkshire – it has to be an educated talking horse, otherwise they’d go, ‘That horse ain’t worth seeing. I asked it if it’d read much Russian literature, and it said, “I can’t say as I have.” Well, I don’t call that conversation.’

  Now, with delicate green barges drifting along the canal, the High Street has a market running its whole length, and at the end of it there’s a castle. There seem to be about forty butchers, one of which has two huge smiling cartoon pigs on the front, who seem to be in a chirpy mood considering all their mates have been hacked to pieces and laid out to be sold indoors.

  It feels as if everyone should be talking in Yorkshire ITV Sunday-night drama language. For example, although there’s a curry house, you expect it to be full of farmers resting their arms on the table and saying, ‘I tell ’ee what, Betty love, I’ll have a bowl o’ your piping hot dopiaza if you don’t mind, to warm me toes.’

  Even in a brothel in Skipton, you imagine, the clients take off their mud-spattered overcoats and say, ‘Hello, Elsie love. I shan’t be after full session tonight if thee don’t mind. I’ve to be up at dawn to take lamb to vet’s at Otley. So just hand relief’ll do me fine, if that’s a’right with thee.’

  Recently Skipton’s Yorkshireness has helped to retain the town’s independence, keeping out almost all the chain stores and being declared 2008 High Street of the Year by whoever decides these things. Everyone seems aware of this achievement, and its implications.

  The main streets feel constantly busy. The market’s open almost every day, and there’s a constant gentle flow of Yorkshireness in all directions. The chatter of people who’ve met unexpectedly or gathered round a market stall seems almost quaint, because it couldn’t happen in the same way in a pedestrianised precinct.

  And yet it isn’t contrived to attract coach parties and American tourists (although the Brontë sisters lived nearby in Haworth, and Jim, who runs one of the canal-boat rides, told me he enjoys saying in his commentary, ‘See that tree there, that’s where Emily Brontë lost her virginity,’ because Americans believe him).

  For the genuine twee, effete, fake-cosy Yorkshire experience you must embrace the delights of Harrogate. Wander round the town centre there and you have to assume that in the local diet, when you need something quick and wholesome to sustain you through a day of physical labour, nothing beats a jar of asparagus chutney garnished with locally-produced satsuma curd in a jar with a frilly bit of yellow cloth tied over the lid. When someone in Harrogate rolls out of the pub in need of some late-night starch to soak up the beer, I imagine they queue at the late-night deli for a slice of stilton that takes forty minutes to wrap in chequered paper with a ribbon tied round it.

  Harrogate developed into this sort of place when it became a spa town in the late seventeenth century, after local entrepreneurs convinced wealthy people that the water from the town’s mineral springs had healing powers, and that if they bathed in them their vacuous lives might last a bit longer.

  The novelist Tobias Smollett wrote an account of a visit to Harrogate in 1766. He described how the visitors spent their time at exquisite balls and playing cards, adding: ‘The water is said to have effected so many cures. I drank it once, and it cured me only of the desire to ever do so again. Some people say it smells like rotten eggs, others compare it to the scourings of a foul gun. The only effects it produced were sickness, griping and insurmountable disgust. I can hardly mention it without puking.’

  Bathing in this natural stinking steaming sulphuric potion regularly made healthy people feel ill, but somehow the local tourist board marketed the spa as an attraction rather than a punishment for witchcraft.

  So it was visitors from outside the county who fuelled Harrogate’s prosperity and secured its image.

  But nowhere is one-dimensional, and Harrogate has also been the centre of militant protest. In the 1930s the council approved a change to the town’s main park, in which some of the grass would be replaced by a flowerbed. The local population were at last driven to take up arms. A committee was formed to coordinate the opposition to this breach of human rights, and angry meetings were held across the town. When these were ignored the movement developed a guerrilla wing, and invaded councillors’ squash matches. Still the elitist fascist flowerbed went ahead, and there were probably marches with demonstrators chanting ‘Rhododendrons OUT!’ and carrying placards that read, ‘They say hydrangea, we say don’t put the simplicity of the park in danger.’

  This was Harrogate’s Civil Rights movement, but the campaign seemingly went down to defeat when the flowerbed was finally installed. But then came a dramatic development, when a local businessman who’d funded the campaign got his chauffeur to drive his Rolls-Royce across the flowerbed, ruining the whole thing. Maybe this is what the protest movement needs more of, employing staff to carry out guerrilla activities. Direct action would be so much more convenient if you could simply tell the servants, ‘Once you’ve swept out the scullery could you nip into Harrods and do in a couple of windows to oppose cuts in public services, there’s a good chap.’

  Harrogate’s history allows it to retain an independence from cloned chain-store dominance, but in a less attractive way than its neighbour Skipton. A traditional jazz band stands by the unfeasibly immaculate green and plays ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ all day on a Saturday. I suppose they must play other tunes as well, but it always feels as if that’s what they’re playing. Opposite their pitch is the famous Betty’s Tea Rooms, where the queue in the morning generally takes an hour to get to the front of.

  The reward once you’ve been admitted is the opportunity to buy a scone for £4. You might think that would be an unlikely candidate as one of the things people are prepared to queue that long for, but for some reason it’s up there with seeing the dentist on Christmas Day and voting in a country’s first election after thirty years of military rule. When people queue to buy something it’s usually to get a bargain, but the long line at Betty’s seems to have misunderstood the jubilant types who appear on the news on Boxing Day with their new coat, so that if a news reporter was around they’d screech, ‘I waited outside all day, but it’s worth it because I got this AMAZING toast and marmalade and it’s normally ninety pence but I got it for EIGHT POUNDS FIFTY, so I’m THRILLED.’

  To add to the surreal nature of Harrogate, it now has a major conference centre, so living there must feel a bit peculiar, because every time you’d pop out for a pint of milk you’d find yourself surrounded by huddles of carpet salesmen or orthopaedic surgeons wearing name tags and carrying folders.

  This is all part of the complex and contradictory nature of Yorkshire, which at least would never be fooled into paying to be dunked into its own stinking cauldrons, as the whole county would say, ‘Healthy, is that? It’s a pile of shit.’

  Nottingham

  One of the most surprising starts to any book I’ve read is the opening lines of A Centenary History of Nottingham. It’s a six-hundred-page academic study, with graphs depicting ma
tters such as the growth of lace exports from the city, but the first words of the introduction are: ‘Visitors tend to come in search of the people’s hero Robin Hood, to buy the famous lace, and to stare at the pretty girls.’

  Does that really happen in Nottingham? Do coach parties arrive, take pictures of Sherwood Forest, buy a gift in the lace museum, then have two hours set aside for going ‘Wahoooooor, you don’t get arses like that in Luton,’ before light refreshments and the return journey?

  I felt it would be hard to take anything else this book said seriously. Maybe a table of average incomes in each parish in the 1950s would be followed by, ‘I tell you what’s not average though, the tits on the barmaid in the pub by the station. Anyway, let’s get back to post-war wage rises for the semi-skilled.’

  This seems to be part of a pattern. William Cobbett, the radical reformer of the early nineteenth century, wrote that his interest in Nottingham was stirred by ‘Tales of Robin Hood, and rumours of its sprightly and beautiful women’.

  As well as this, it seems to be believed by many people in the town that there are several women in Nottingham for every man. When I first heard this, in the 1980s, I was told the ratio was eight to one. Since then I’ve been informed by people from the city that it’s a variety of figures. When I asked for comments from Nottingham residents, one poor sod sent me a message saying, ‘I moved to Nottingham because I heard there were three women for every man, so now some bastard must be going out with six women.’

  The claims are so obviously untrue that you feel like dragging anyone who makes them to the main square, and making them count the numbers of each gender as they go past. In fact the percentage of women in Nottingham must be lower than in any other town, because the rumours about how many women there are must have attracted thousands of single blokes.