The worst of Times

There’s a letter, indeed the featured one, bold type ‘n’ all, in today’s Times.

On-line (though not in print) the correspondence is sub-headed:

The metropolitan liberal elite show contempt for the population of rural England and the democratic choice some of them have made

It is all a response to a piece by David Aaronovitch. As far as Malcolm’s comprehension goes, Aaronovitch was presenting the “modernist” case, particularly in one respect:

Prime Minister’s Questions … had begun with a warning about the almost imminent collapse of A&E services in England and bad unemployment figures across the UK. Yet of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.

But they are all MPs and all honourable men, I thought, so this difference in perception is probably mutual. Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.

And it suddenly occurred to me that this difference in perception helps to explain the divided nature of Boris Johnson. When he is being touted (as periodically he is) by right-wing Tories as an acceptable successor to the backsliding Cameron, Boris can appear something of a shire hero. But when he’s actually talking seriously about the future of Britain, he’s a full member of the metropolitan elite.

Yes, Malcolm thinks he has a grasp on that.

So here comes Michael Patterson of Swineshead, Lincs:

Sir, David Aaronovitch seems shocked by the realisation that, outside London and the great cities and university towns, there exists an England that does not buy into the cosy liberal certainties of “an outward-looking, open-minded polity” (“Unshackle London from the backward shires”, Opinion, May 16).

He cites Boston, Lincolnshire, where the immigrant population — virtually all from EU countries — is now about 10 per cent. An unremarkable proportion in a capital city perhaps, but in this traditional market town a change that has come about within ten years, putting enormous pressure on housing, schools, the NHS and policing.

Mr Patterson suggests whom to blame:

[Aaronovitch] is largely right to suggest that these immigrants are filling agricultural jobs that locals are no longer willing to do. He seems to view the latter’s interests as unimportant in comparison with an immigration policy that is bringing about a radical change in the character of British society without the explicit support of the people.

Hold your horse, Mike!

That’s not the whole story, at all, at all.

The essential fault, if there is one, lies with agribusiness, and — at one remove — its unwholesome dependency on the big supermarket chains. Which makes us consumers and our demand for cheap food — at two removes — also culpable.

The economics mean that the whole food-chain relies on the gang-masters. Let’s hat-tip another Tory, worthy in one respect: the MP for Boston and Skegness is Mark Simmonds, Mr Patterson’s elected representative. Simmonds may feel a hunted man with the UKIP surge on his patch; but he deserves respect for his extended campaign to make gang-masters fully responsible.

Lincolnshire immigrants

Malcolm feels a letter to The Times coming on. Like all his other great thoughts, it will likely go unpublished.

He would wish to express sympathy to Lincolnshire folk threatened by alien incursions.

In his North Norfolk youth he recalls similar griefs being expressed.

Even after thirty years in the neighbourhood, one particular social out-cast was regularly denounced as a “furrener” [Sc. "foreigner"]. He was a yeller-belly, an incomer from Lincolnshire, one of the scab-labourers brought in by the local farmers to break the farm-workers’ strike of April 1923.

What goes around, comes around.

Forelock-tugging time?

How does this sound for a realistic policy on home rentals? —

In addition to restoring security of tenure to every decontrolled house, we are appointing rent officers and rent assessment committees for fixing fair rents. The new Act also gives basic protection to almost everyone in his home, including the lodger and the worker in his tied cottage. Today it is a crime not merely to evict without a court order but to harass or to persecute anyone in order to force him out or force his rent up.

It’s from the 1966 Labour Manifesto. The preamble to that seems almost more pertinent in the present context:

The 1957 Tory Rent Act inflicted injury on hundreds of thousands of families by decontrolling their homes in a period of intense housing shortage. Labour was pledged to annul this social crime.

Back to the future

Malcolm reflects on that, if only because his entry into leftist politics was at a time (the end of the 1950s) and a place (Norfolk) when tied cottages — particularly for farm workers — was a very live issue.

In case anyone missed it, it’s about to come back again. Hidden behind Caroline Spelman killing off the Agricultural Wages Board is her other announcement: the Agricultural Dwellings Housing advisory committee would also be dissolved. All of which might, being generous, make sense if the workers on the land had the clout to negotiate a proper wages-and-conditions agreement. But, of course, it will always be cheaper for the agribusinesses to import cheap immigrant labourers and house them in caravans and Portacabins. With, if not the complicity, at least the active encouragement of the supermarket chains.

Only a cynic (perish the thought) would draw a direct line between a “free market” in former tied cottages, a chronic shortage of affordable housing, Iain Duncan Smith’s “welfare reforms” and ‘Gids’ Osborne’s budget, promising second homes on the back of government loans.

Duncan Smith, lest we forget, is possessed of a a £2m+ Tudor home (with ample spare bedrooms, five acres of gardens and a swimming pool), by courtesy of a very wealthy wife, heiress to the Cottesloe millions and 1,300 acres of Buckinghamshire.

It goes with the squirarchical mind-set

In the next few days anyone in social housing with that mythical (but Big Brother designated) “spare bedroom” faces a cut of 14% in benefits. Oh, no! It’s not a tax! Anymore than cutting the 50% tax rate for multi-million earners (those deserving bankers and plutocrats) is a benefit!

Let’s take Mr and Mrs Whatsit, who have lived in social housing for thirty-odd years, since they married. There they raised two strapping sons, who have done well, moved out, and left that “spare room”. As a result Mr and Mrs Whatsit, both heading towards retirement, but young enough not to come under Iain Duncan Smith’s oh-so-generous OAP waiver, are faced with a major cut in their income, or the unlikely prospect of finding smaller accommodation — there are 180,000 families in the Whatsits’ position, but just 70,000 one-bedroom flats available.

Now, here’s the suggestion: why was there not an incentive — rather than a fine — to persuade the Whatsits to move? Especially since we now know that Osborne has squoodles of money available for second homes:

The Budget included a £3.5bn Help to Buy programme under which the Government will provide up to 20 per cent of a deposit and the buyer only 5 per cent for a new-build home. The Government made clear that could not be used to buy a second home but failed to do the same for a separate scheme to underwrite £130bn of mortgage lending for any property.

But, then, when did a functioning Tory prefer to persuade rather than to coerce?

Who owns Pythagoras?

Or photosynthesis? Or 9 x 7 = 63?

Daft, isn’t it?

Then we hit upon this, from Stephanie McCurry, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement:

It has become increasingly difficult to say anything new about the American Civil War or even just to tell a different tale … [with] … a marketplace with seemingly inexhaustible demand for another version of the familiar story and the understandable desire of experts to shape public history.

As a well-bred Belfast girl, Professor McCurry will know all about the problem of who owns history. And that ‘history’ is not just a recital of Great Dead White Men.

The lustre of lucre

Note, though, she also brings in the commercial aspect: the gurus who have cornered the media market in their particular expertise. Tudors without Starkey? Unthinkable! The last word on Hitler? Well, Kershaw must be into the quarter-finals!

A couple of weeks on from the Old Vic production, Malcolm’s mental sound-track goes on full volume:

From Ohio, Mister Thorn
Calls me up from night till morn:
Mister Thorn once cornered corn and that ain’t hay!
But I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my fashion —
Yes, I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my way!

Read between Cole Porter’s lines, and Lois would do anything for her Great White Men.

More hay

So, this afternoon, there was Malcolm at the old-reliable London Pride in the Famous Royal Oak (well, it’s famed within a quarter-mile of Muswell Hill’s St James’s Lane). He has Professor McCurry flitting about his consciousness when he reaches the Comment & Debate page of the Guardian, and another contender for Ms Lane’s transient affections:

Harvardian Ferguson
Says I’m really quite très bonne:
If that’s the Harvard ton, and he’s really on … Okay!

… well, mainly on his own status and importance. As here:

It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

Only someone living in a dreaming Oxonian spire could be unaware of how badly this has turned out, despite the best efforts of thousands of hard-working teachers. I know because I have watched three of my children go through the English system, because I have regularly visited schools and talked to history teachers, and because (unlike Evans and Priestland, authors of rather dry works on, respectively, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) I have written and presented popular history. 

The new national curriculum is not flawless, to be sure. It runs counter to the advice I gave Gove by being much too prescriptive. The 34 topics to be covered by pupils between the ages of seven and 14 already read a bit like chapter titles and, if there is one thing I hope we avoid, it is an official history textbook (even if it’s written by Simon Schama).

Nothing like putting the boot (alongside a personal puff) in, Niall!

The rest of the piece has at least three other conditional clauses (if … if … If), four rhetorical questions, and rather more subjective first person singulars than is truly tasteful.

Yet, Ferguson has a point

It isn’t that history doesn’t sell. As Prof Steph (see above) opened that TES review:

Last December, thousands of Americans filed into cinemas to watch Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. While Congress was stuck in its usual deadlock, a disgusted public was momentarily delivered by the large-screen image of a heroic figure and a heroic America. As the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed and slavery abolished, people cried. They applauded.

Meanwhile, as both main UK channels (and many others) exploit shamelessly, costume drama and a bit of pseudo-history writ small (Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife) put bums on family sofas. Rescuing ‘Richard III’ (perhaps) from under the Nissans and Fords of the Leicester car-park played a PR blinder.

So a kind of “history” excites, enthuses, entertains. What is ‘taught’ in school fails miserably by comparison.

But what should it be? Let’s try and decode Ferguson:

If you want to understand what’s really wrong with history in English schools, read schoolteacher Matthew Hunter’s excellent essay in the latest issue of Standpoint. As Hunter rightly says, it’s not just the defective content of the old national curriculum that is the problem. It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

and (this is the on-line version, [not all of which made it into print]):

Among other things, the national curriculum explicitly aims to ensure that all pupils “know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history: the growth and decline of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires”; that they “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”; and that they “understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims”.

[At key stage 1, children will be introduced to "basic concepts" such as nation, civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace. At key stage 2, they will study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome.] As for “the essential chronology of Britain’s history”, to which Evans and Priestland object so strongly, it is a model of political correctness: not only Mary Seacole makes the cut, but also Olaudah Equiano – hardly escapees from Our Island Story.

What is missing there is: who owns history?

For those “basic concepts” are intensely and inescapably partial and ideological. Try a couple of thought experiments:

• Reconcile Cromwellian England into an approved primary-school perception of monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace.
• And how does the average eight- or ten-year-old meaningfully study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome? In the Goveian world-scheme, were Greece and Rome essentially slave-societies, or is the slavery thing a mere incidental to the cultural glories?

What sticks in Malcolm’s craw is, about the only time Roman slavery cropped up at Wells County Primary School, it involved Pope Gregory I and his Non Angli, sed angeli. Which may feature as every-window-tells-a-story in St Mary, Docking, as elsewhere, but as far as a critical observer can determine is as verifiable as Star Trek.  And, no, it’s not in Bede.

Two remaining issues

They’re in Ferguson, and implicit in the more cerebral McCurry:

• What is the authentic ‘scheme’ (which is what — in any sense of the word — a syllabus amounts to) for that overview of English and European history? Is it Anglocentric or Eurocentric? At the age of fifteen Malcolm switched from GCE “English and European history” to Irish Leaving Certificate “History”; and it was a painful re-appraisal, indeed.
• What is Ferguson’s gold standard of ‘historical knowledge’? Can he kindly provide, as a solid example, one single, absolute, indisputable, uncoloured ‘fact’? For, were he to do so, a whole phalanx of equally-eminent ‘historians’ would happily exhibit how that ‘fact’ could be, and has been ‘spun’. As Malcolm’s pert Young Piece never fails to repeat, a historical ‘fact’ is one which has been cited by a quantum (say, four) of historians. And a ‘historian’ is … precisely how qualified?

End piece

Consider, then, how Stephanie McCurry, in her shrewd Ulster way, presents ‘values’  rather than certainties, a basis of ‘interpretation’ rather than Ferguson’s ‘facts’, humanely and self-effacingly, warning but with a populist touch, and so concludes her extended review:

Civil War history is a growth industry. For authors, the opportunities are great, but so are the temptations — to repetition, over-reaching and jockeying for market share. There are valuable new interpretations emerging from the field, including a focus on the Civil War as a humanitarian crisis, and there are important voices cautioning against an embrace of war stories as the romanticisation of war itself. But in the fever of sesquicentennial commemoration nothing sells quite like President Lincoln and the war for emancipation. It makes the fantasy of Django Unchained to make the public focus even for a minute on the other America, the one that for so long had no problem with holding people as slaves.

Revisited: The backside of a cottage’s history

Suddenly it makes sense.

There was an uptick on Malcolm’s visit-stats for a post from May 2010. These things come and go, but they do tickle the wondering-buds: why?

Well, today’s Times bricks and mortar (the Friday property porn supplement, and on page 3, too) supplies a likely cause:

Stiffkey, Norfolk, NR23

Detached period cottage

What you get Two bedrooms, bathroom, study (or third bedroom), kitchen, sitting room, former wash-house and gardens.

Where is it? In the village of Stiffkey, a mile from the North Norfolk coast.

Upside The cottage, which was owned by the author Henry Williamson in the 1930s, has a garden that goes down to the river and is thought to have inspired his book Tarka the Otter.

Local residents remember Williamson using the wash-house for writing.

The cottage has a light, modern feel and some pretty period features.

Downside Only two bedrooms upstairs but there is scope to extend the house with planning permission. The house backs on to the coast road, which can be busy.

Price £495,000

Contact Bedfords, 01328 730500, befords.co.uk

Compare and contrast

… that puff above, with Malcolm’s previous post.

Note the missing detail about the back wall, which runs alongside the A149 coast road.

As for the Local residents who, so clearly, remember Williamson using the wash-house for writing, they’d need to be in their eighties.

Whatever Williamson was writing, holed up in his wash-house, was more likely to be columns for Oswald Mosley’s fascist rag, Action, than about any otter.

Tarka the Otter (which is firmly rooted in North Devon, not North Norfolk) was published in 1927, well before 1936 when Williamson bought Old Hall Farm in Stiffkey.

As it so often says on estate agents’ publications:

Reasonable endeavours have been made to ensure that the information given in these particulars is materially correct but any intending purchaser or lessee should satisfy themself by inspection, searches, enquiries and survey as to the correctness of each statement.

Particularly so in this case.

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon.”

Full citation:

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

That’s Sam  Gamgee (the ultimate Tory cap-doffer) of The Lord of the Rings.

Now, tell, Malcolm: what was it, in the following, that nudged your memory of that, when you read this:

My old friend Bruce Anderson has penned what sounds like an extraordinary piece for this week’s issue of The Spectator. He has attacked a Conservative leader, and seemingly in strong terms. “Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept,” he writes. Bruce is a friend of the Prime Minister’s. It will be interesting to see if he has used any caveats later in the piece, such as saying that it is not Cameron’s fault or emphasising that it can all be turned around. We’ll see.

It should worry Cameron that such a loyalist and good friend holds that view, as he is someone who has supported Cameron from even before the days when his leadership campaign consisted of David and Samantha Cameron, the Goves and three other people. While Bruce has some modernising friends, he often has good instincts for what the wider Tory tribe will tolerate. He understands Tory history and the shires.

That’s Iain Martin, a young’un, but already a doyen of the Telegraph. Any other mental disturbance, such as the title of that piece, In the Tory modernising bunker it’s all getting a bit Berlin, April 1945, is entirely your own problem.

On Malcolm’s second thoughts, it’s obviously that final word: shires.

There’s the problem!

The Tory Party has entrenched itself in the green suburbs and the counties of old England. It’s been a long process;, but it was John Major — MP for Huntingdon, not surprisingly — who put it in to words:

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.

A Malcolmian humilation

Aw, shucks! Malcolm remembers it well!

Look at those surnames. You could make the register of Malcolm’s primary school there.

The Sea Scouts lined up at Wells War Memorial, to be inspected by the Earl of Leicester, with his Home Guard medal. The Great Man doing the proper thing, stopping half-way down the line, to address a whippersnapper (who promptly saluted, on instruction, and responded,  again as instructed): “Yes, y’r Lordship!”.

Thereafter followed, not contempt, but a kind of Hummph! from his Dear Old Dad.

Sadly for Malcolm’s self-esteem, Dear Old Dad, one generation from the 1912 Yorkshire miners’ strike, and despite being an inveterate reader of the Beaverbrook press, held no admiration for those as has dominance o’er us. A Dear Old Dad, who, moreover,  had done his bit up in the Mediterranean and up the Aegean in an MTB, while other didn’t.

Moving on

Does this really need explaining?

• The Tories remain a party which believes the fox-hunters deserve priority, while suburbanites are wakened, once a year in the early hours, by the urban vixen in orgasmic howl, and marvel they are still so close to nature.
• The Tories remain a party where half the parliamentary vote goes against single-sex marriage, while most of us either are or live alongside, by the standards of Mother Church, irregular liaisons.
• The Tories remains party where Euroscepticism is the norm, while most of us work for multi-nationals, take our holidays in EU countries, and actually enjoy an evening at the local Spanish, Greek or Italian restaurant.

No future?

Not unless the Tories leave the Shire.

Divided loyalties: being Hiberno-English

A long while since (5th September 2008, since you didn’t ask), Malcolm put up a post on being Anglo-Irish. For some reason, that still attracts a fair number of “hits”. This, then, may be the logical  counter-part.

J’ai deux amours

Josephine Baker famously had two loves:

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris.

If Freda McDonald — barely two generations from slavery — had a hard life, growing up in St Louis, she found fame, fortune and a distinguished personal history as Josephine Baker in her adopted France.

Therein lies the rub

In this 21st century, many of us have two identities: one on the birth certificate, and one in the life we live. There’s little particularly “new” in this:

• Arthur Wellesley got himself born in what is now the Merrion Hotel, Dublin — but is the archetypal English Iron Duke;
• David Lloyd-George arrived in the world in the Manchester suburbs, but is forever “the Welsh Wizard”;
• Éamon de Valera originated in New York, but re-made an Ireland in his own image;

— and so on.

Malcolm’s eldest has a surfeit of air-miles and is quadri-lingual in English and American, Tottenham and Noo Joisey. Even daughter number 2, the Earth Mother, manages to switch effortlessly between south Saxon RP and narrow-vowelled Anglian North Yorkshire.

Your nationalism quiz

Yesterday’s

Times

,

at its fullest fluffy Murdochian populism, was rattling on:

A new version of the Life in the United Kingdom handbook, published yesterday, aims to prepare would-be Britons for the citizenship test. The guide focuses on history, tradition and what it means to be British and has ditched more mundane sections on the practicalities of life in the UK …

The 180-page guide, costing £12.99 is unashamedly patriotic, with a red, white and blue cover and pictures of the Queen and of crowds waving the Union flag at the Last Night of the Proms and on the Mall. Sir Winston Churchill is pictured alongside quotes from his wartime speeches but only two post-war prime ministers receive separate biographies: Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher.

The new edition finds a place for Monty Python, Morcambe and Wise and Torvill and Dean, but migrants will also be expected to know about important figures of English literature including Sir Kingsley Amis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.K.Rowling.

Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

On the other hand, the side-bar was a Commentary by Matthew Syed, and it went a way to re-entering normality. Syed refers back to background:

My father arrived on these shores in 1966 as a Muslim, Pakistani, and harbouring deep suspicions about British cultural assumptions. Almost half a century later, he is a monarchist, Radio 4 aficionado and just about the most patriotic Brit I know. With the exception of his Christianity, to which he converted, Britishness is perhaps the most important and cherished affiliation of his life.

My maternal grandfather, who died last week at 98, lived a very different life to my father. Born in the Rhondda Valley at the outset of the Great War, he worked down the pits from 14 then spent a lifetime serving others, first at a home for deprived children and then as warden of an old people’s home. the one thing he shared with dad was a deep love of nation, but he interpreted Britishness in a fundamentally different way.

Not deep. Not philosophical. But neither, reading between the lines of that Times piece, is Life in the United Kingdom [£12.99 at all good bookshops, or around £7.99 if you're Brit enough to order on-line — a nationality test in itself]. Syed scores by being domestic, humane, direct, down to earth — even dignified, in the best sense. All the good things the official line seems to miss.

For an example, today’s Clare in the Community (Harry Venning’s unfailingly reliable weekly cartoon for the Guardian‘s Society section) is an instant education in ‘Britishness’, and — unlike the nostrums in Life in the United Kingdom — transcends the regional cultural divides that Syed glosses in that final phrase above:

What are little boys made of?

Everyone differs: we are an unregimented, frequently-bolshie and mutually-incompatible lot, each with our peculiar passions. What is it that makes Malcolm’s academic and professorial Little Brother traipse out fortnightly to stand with perhaps 5,000 other stalwarts and watch Notts County? The heterogeneousness is an essential part of belonging anywhere on this archipelago.

Unlike Syed, Malcolm was denied personal knowledge of either of his grandfathers: one tends his plot eternally in Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2; the other died of miner’s lung around the time the (first) Great Slump arrived. Did either of those have a deep love of nation, an overwhelming sense of being “British”?

As for the royalist thing, Malcolm recalls (and can date) 15th February, 1952. He doesn’t remember the funeral of George VI — apart from the oddest early-adopter, television hadn’t penetrated north Norfolk. He does know it was a day of national mourning, and so a Friday off school. Dear Old Dad spent much of the day double-digging the long vegetable garden, and none too chuffed. When pre-adolescent Malcolm murmured a triteness about it being “Sad about the King”, the parental snort was followed by “Why, what did he ever do for me?”

Was that the germ of a young republican?

Two loves? Well, two affections.

For Malcolm neither north Norfolk nor dirty Dublin quite amount to “‘loves”. The former has changed, not wholly for the better, over the years as the have-yotties and weekenders made the coast a transplant of Camden Town — Hampstead-by-the-Sea is further south, at Southwold. Dublin has changed even more, though there remain vestiges of the old scruffiness. West Cork has gone the way of the gentrified English coast. Once away from the “gold coast”, the rest of County Down is not wholly spoiled — but could one transplant and enjoy living there?

Despite all the confusions, that double pull recurs and endures. After all, when GCE English History and English Literature immediately leads into the Irish Leaving Certificate, a cultural trauma persists for life.

Par eux toujours,
Mon coeur est ravi.

Succession planning

There now follows a Malcolmian gripe.

The BBC website has this:

The number of young police officers in England and Wales has fallen by nearly 50% in two years.

There were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10 but only 4,758 in 2011-12, figures obtained by the BBC show.

In Cleveland, North Wales and Staffordshire the fall in the number of officers aged under 26 was more than 70% over the period.

Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment.

But this data, obtained in a Freedom of Information request by BBC Radio 4′s The World This Weekend, shows how much of that fall has been among younger officers.

That is disturbing for any number of reasons, including:

• the tighter budget constraints, which may or may not be a “good idea” when pressures in society are reaching new levels of tension;
• the growing imbalance in the police service, limiting recruitment and promotion;
• that it required yet another of those FoI requests to extract information from officialdom: if the Home Office have the figures — and clearly they did and do — they should be up front, available and in the public domain. How else can equal opportunities be assured?

Malcolm makes two reliable predictions:

• Sooner or later an intelligent sociologist (such creatures do exist) will unearth the information that the heralded drop in crime is only a drop in reported crime. If police stations are closed, if there are fewer boots on the ground, if contacting the police involves being bounced around from call-centre to clerical officer and — with luck — eventually to a real, live copper in the same county, then there will be fewer reported crimes. Surely it cannot be true that, on some nights, the whole county of Norfolk , all two thousand square miles, is “policed” by just four or five cars?
• In the not too distant future officialdom will suddenly wake up to a yawning age-gap in the personnel of the police service. This is not a trivial matter.

When Malcolm became a teacher in the mid-’60s, he entered a staff-room where the generational divide was all too obvious. There were the post-war entrants to the profession, highly experienced, excellent teachers, military-brusque, but many already reaching and anticipating retirement. Thanks to the poor pay for entrants (it was about the same as the lowest professional grades of the Post Office, and far less than the Hong Kong or Rhodesian police), recruitment under the 13 years of Tory rule (1951-1964) had been slow and unreliable. To that we may lay ome — by no means all — the washy-washiness of state education in the 1970s.

Somewhere in there the teaching profession became, for better or worse, the exclusive province of female teachers in primary schools, and an obvious and attractive social advance for ethnic groups in all levels  — and thereby unrepresentative of the wider society.

Further down that BBC report we find:

Olly Martins, the PCC for Bedfordshire, which saw a 58% fall, said the implications of this trend were very worrying.

“To secure policing by consent, and thereby be as effective as possible, forces need to look like the communities they serve.

“This is particularly true when it comes to the need to engage with younger people, who are disproportionately represented both as victims of crime and among its perpetrators.”

In the side bar, Martin Rosenbaum, “Freedom of information specialist”, repeats that:

It raises questions about how representative the police force is, especially given the issues about relations between the police and young people in some areas. And it also can’t help with the concerns about the level of physical fitness among the police.

Society will be paying for this extended recession — and by no means just in monetary terms, and far, far beyond the politics of policing — well into the next generation.

Well, Wells: what a reputation!

There was Malcolm, leafing idly through Daniel Defoe’s A Tour in Circuits, Through the Island of Great Britain, published 1724, but apparently a report of a peregrination in 1722 (and, with a bit of effort, available free on-line).

The work is arranged in epistolary form: “letters” about the different parts of the country. Defoe clearly warms to Norfolk:

Add to this, that there is no single county in England, except as above [i.e. the West Riding of Yorkshire], that can boast of three towns so populous, so rich, and so famous for trade and navigation, as in this county: By these three towns, I mean the city of Norwich, the towns of Yarmouth and Lynn; besides, that it has several other sea-ports of very good trade, as Wisbich, Wells, Burnham, Clye, &c.

We shall be this way again in a moment, but — for now — Malcolm noted the description of Norwich:

NORWICH is the capital of all the county, and the center of all the trade and manufactures which I have just mentioned; an antient, large, rich, and populous city: If a stranger was only to ride thro’ or view the city of Norwich for a day, he would have much more reason to think there was a town without inhabitants, than there is really to say so of Ipswich; but on the contrary, if he was to view the city, either on a Sabbath-day, or on any publick occasion, he would wonder where all the people could dwell, the multitude is so great: But the case is this; the inhabitants being all busie at their manufactures, dwell in their garrets at their looms, and in their combing-shops, so they call them, twisting-mills, and other work-houses; almost all the works they are employed in, being done within doors. There are in this city thirty-two parishes besides the cathedral, and a great many meeting-houses of Dissenters of all denominations. The publick edifices are chiefly the castle, antient and decayed, and now for many years past made use of for a jayl. The Duke of Norfolk’s house was formerly kept well, and the gardens preserved for the pleasure and diversion of the citizens, but since feeling too sensibly the sinking circumstances of that once glorious family, who were the first peers and hereditary earl-marshals of England.

The walls of this city are reckoned three miles in circumference, taking in more ground than the city of London; but much of that ground lying open in pasture-fields and gardens; nor does it seem to be, like some antient places, a decayed declining town, and that the walls mark out its antient dimensions; for we do not see room to suppose that it was ever larger or more populous than it is now: But the walls seem to be placed, as if they expected that the city would in time encrease sufficiently to fill them up with buildings.

Fair enough; but the real joy was to get to home turf:

From Cromer, we ride on the strand or open shoar to Weyburn Hope, the shoar so flat that in some places the tide ebbs out near two miles: From Weyburn west lyes Clye, where there are large salt-works, and very good salt made, which is sold all over the county, and some times sent to Holland, and to the Baltick: From Clye, we go to Masham, and to Wells, all towns on the coast, in each whereof there is a very considerable trade cary’d on with Holland for corn, which that part of the county is very full of: I say nothing of the great trade driven here from Holland, back again to England, because I take it to be a trade carryed on with much less honesty than advantage; especially while the clandestine trade, or the art of smuggling was so much in practice; what it is now, is not to my present purpose.

Masham? Presumably Morston. We also have a contribution to the age-old debate of “Clee, Clay or Clye” — presumably now settled, as Malcolm would expect, in favour of  the last variation.

As for the art of smuggling was so much in practice; what it is now, is not to my present purpose, we may fairly cock an eyebrow of derision. Defoe himself was not averse to a bit of fiddling when he could. He had established himself as an undercover man for William of Orange, but when the French wars bankrupted Defoe (he may have incurred debts of some £17,000 from failed tradings) he turned to the illegal stuff. He recovered his finances in part through Iberian wine imports, not all  of which were wholly declared.

Business as usual

It’s not unusual in North Norfolk for a house refurbishment to reveal a hidden closet. That is the clue to a previous occupant’s nefarious activities..

A few years back there was a small privately-published monograph, The Lawless Coast by Neil Holmes, sub-titled Smuggling, Anarchy and Murder in North Norfolk in the 1780s. Holmes’s starting point is St Mary the Virgin at Old Hunstanton, where one finds the memorial stone to two soldiers:

In memory of William Webb, late of the 15th D’ns, who was shot from his Horse by a party of Smugglers on the 26 of Sepr. 1784 
I am not dead but sleepeth here, 
And when the Trumpet Sound I will appear 
Four balls thro’ me Pearced there way: 
Hard it was. I’d no time to pray 
This stone that here you Do see 
My Comerades Erected for the sake of me. 
Here lie the mangled remains of poor William Green, an Honest Officer of the Government, who in the faithful discharge of his duty was inhumanely murdered by a gang of Smugglers in this Parish, September 27th, 1784.

Despite such fine sentiments, two smugglers captured by officialdom were then acquitted by the local jury, in the face of all the evidence.

At Wells there was the classic 1817 encounter — as dramatic as anything in Moonfleet — when John Dunn, the caporegime of Stiffkey, arranged an illicit landing to coincide with a race meeting on the beach.

In passing, could he be perpetuated in the Norfolk doggerel? —

There was old Dunn, young Dunn,
And young Dunn’s youngest son.
Young Dunn will be a Dunn
When old Dunn is done.

Boom! Boom!

The excisemen (there was a detachment based in Wells) were on hand to meet and greet Dunn’s tubs coming ashore, but they were heavily outnumbered. Major Charles Loftus of the yeomanry was in the crowd and recruited to cobble together reinforcements in a mounted charge. Dunn and his gang, with the support of the mass of local folk,  got away with all but half-a-dozen of the barrels.

At Snettisham, in 1822, eighty tubs were landed and seized by the excisemen. Armed with bludgeons and fowling pieces, a mob of locals liberated the contraband, which was swiftly whisked away down the old Peddars Way.

So what was the business?

Tobacco, Geneva gin and … tea. Anything taxed that was in demand, portable and packable.

You may see the old strake of an old barrel, or a bit of well-corroded metal hoop, emerging from the sand-dunes. Scorn them not: it is possible you are seeing a bit of the evidence.

Only when intelligence — the electric telegraph — beat local initiative was the trade constrained but, as recent high-value hauls, mainly of cigarettes — and by legend of human cargoes — have shown, not eliminated.

Recall, too, that once the quiet town of Wells had a reputation for wrecking, violence and cruelty unmatched along the North Norfolk coast:

Cromer crabs, Runton dabs,
Beeston babies, Sherinum’ ladies,
Weybourne witches, Salt’us ditches.
Blak’ney bulldogs, Morston dodmen,
Binham bulls, Stiffkey trolls,
— Wells bitefingers.

The sublime Allan Smethurst

We start with the station ident. of Anglia Television, in its original monochrome. Remember: all those sophisticated computer manipulations, of which the BBC and others are so fond, started here: with a silver hunting trophy on a roundtable, rotating to the sound of Handel (adapted by Malcolm Sargent). A quick trip down memory lane, showing how a decent piece of silverware, representative of sound local values, was corrupted and corroded into yet another of those meaningless corporate logos is available here.

That previous post earned response from Doubting Thomas, this blog’s other reader, reminding Malcolm of:

the Singing Postman’s song about a nice loaf of bread.

Sadly, that reference would go unrecognised and uncelebrated by the vast plurality of the world’s ignorance.

The best resort is the Guardian‘s obituary, just after Christmas, 2000:

The Singing Postman, Allan Smethurst, who has died aged 73, was well known in the late 1960s for his Norfolk dialect songs such as Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy? and Moind Yer Hid, Boy.

Born in Lincolnshire, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Sheringham, in Norfolk, at the age of 11. A George Formby fan and self-taught guitarist, after joining the post office in 1953 he began to write comic, yet closely observed, songs about rural life, which he sang in a heavily accented Norfolk voice. The subject matter ranged from the village cricket match and the ladies darts team to mass-produced food (Oi Can’t Git A Noice Loaf).

Superficially, these were quaint parodies, but they were popular in East Anglia itself, an indication that Smethurst’s compatriots identified with this affectionate portrait of their idiosyncrasies. The Guardian’s Dennis Barker called him “a bookishly melancholy folk-satirist”.

Thet go arn a bit:

Smethurst first found a regional audience through appearances on BBC Radio Norfolk’s Wednesday morning magazine show. The presenter, Ralph Tuck, the owner of a family firm of seed merchants, gave him the sobriquet “the Singing Postman”, and, when record companies showed no interest, financed the pressing of 100 copies of a four-song vinyl disc in 1964. It was distributed in East Anglia, and sold more than 10,000 in four months. The regional press breathlessly announced that the Singing Postman was outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Norfolk record shops.

So click, and enjoy:

That ought to have taken you to the UEA’s film archive, and a short Ralph Tuck feature on Smethurst.

There are all sorts of ironies about Smethurst as “normal for Norfolk”. He was by birth a Yellow Belly from Lincolnshire, with roots in North Norfolk. He worked as that iconic rural postman around Lavenham, in Suffolk. None of the images in the film are of Norfolk: the baker is in Stowmarket, the pub in Stowupland — just to the east of Stowmarket, and the fairground up on the Lincolnshire coast. Smethurst’s accent is exaggerated, rather stage-y — but, when Malcolm’s ear was better, he reckoned he could hear the unconscious shifts around the linguistic map (and the East Anglian accent varies considerably: some count as many as eight Norfolk varieties).

What is also of interest in that short film is listening to the narrator, Ralph Tuck. His is the middle-class, educated Norfolk voice.

Tuck was a comfortably-off seed-merchant (better believe it!) who lived at Reydon, on the Halesworth Road out of Southwold. His house is now a B&B—cum—hotel. As a sideline Tuck had a radio spot on the Norwich local radio station. Tuck’s accent is what one heard much of the time, in banks, across the counter of shops, in ordinary discourse. When local television arrived, Tuck and several others with ‘polite’, even polished regional accents had a clear run. And took it.

And thereby hangs a tale, much more important and enduring than the worthy Allan Smethurst.

Not quite a Malcolmian aside: Anglia Television

British commercial television arrived in London in 1955. The franchise for East Anglia was awarded to a consortium of well-intentioned local businessman and local ‘characters’, and Anglia Television went live on 27th October 1959. From the beginning the station had ambitions, and its launch was marked by a movie-length networked play (filmed at the Associated Rediffusion’s Wembley studios) for the ITV Play of the Week, The Violent Years, with headline stars Laurence Harvey and Hildegarde Knef.

On the other hand, what made Anglia a success was its regionalism. This was the first opportunity many East Anglians had of hearing their voices, their accents unfiltered by metropolitan superiority.

There ought to be a provable direct link between the emergence of local radio and television broadcasting, particularly as the strings were loosening in the 1950s, leading to the rise across Britain of local playwrights and novelists. That’s not romance: it’s strict economics. Not only did ITV double (and by the 1960s treble) the TV channels available, all stations increased their transmitting hours. That meant the providers had to commission many new programmes and features. And that meant the revenue  available for script-writers. In short order the monopoly BBC fees of around £100 an hour for a script was up ten fold. The prize spot for an aspiring script-writer was a place on the Coronation Street team, with wherewithal for the mortgage and the Jaguar in the garage.

Recursio ad infinitum

You’ve had one of those, when you found yourself locked into one of those endless website loops from the disreputable ends of the net.

It’s a pompous way of saying, “going round in circles, and getting to sod all”. [Though theologians prefer a more astral definition.]

After thirty-five years faithfully serving its local audience, Anglia TV was sold into the various consortia and shifting cartels which now own the shell of Channel 3. The main feature of that was the curious share-dealings of Jeffrey Archer and his “fragrant” wife, who had the insider knowledge.

More happily, Anglia’s archive seems to have ended up, as with that Smethurst film, with the University of East Anglia.

Oh well …

On the way to a bum deal

Doubting Thomas was more perceptive than he knew:

B****r me boy. North Norfolk’s a going to be as posh as Southwold and Aldeburgh with the Londoners coming down for their country weekends. When do the artsy fartsy culture fests start? Poor old Alan Smethurst’ll be spinning in his grave.

No sooner said, than provided.

The Pert Young Piece does an early Saturday gymnasium session, and returns with the Saturday papers. Nice. Out of the Guardian‘s dinky plastic jacket falls that curious Guide — doubtless indispensable for couch potatoes, clubbers and so full of totally-pointless listings. Hence it goes ignored by Malcolm.

On this occasion, by chance it fell open alongside Malcolm’s coffee, at page 37, events (all headings are tastefully lower-case). And this:

Norfolk F00d & Drink Festival

As this annual East Anglian event approaches its end, there’s still plenty of culinary-based fun to be had. Forget talk of nostril-sizzling mustard, the highlights are a lot sweeter with the scone competion at the family-friendly Wroxham Barns and an open day at the Institute of Food Research, where future Ferran Adriàs and René Redzepis can find out how our bodies interact with food. It’s not all serious science though: there’s a disco with music inspired by food proteins (Soya sub-bass anyone?) and a giant inflatable colon to explore.

Malcolm freely admits he has never heard of Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi (though he assumes both of those were in the plural above, and included simply to test keyboard-knowledge of accented characters).

But … pause for wonder … “a giant inflatable colon to explore”?

Norfolk was never quite that perverse. But it would definitely have amused the Singing Postman.

Footnote:

As that Smethurst gem plays, the Lady in Malcolm’s Life opines:

“If that’s the Singing Postman, you seriously need help.”