tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13491793829016219442024-03-13T00:43:09.019+00:00Debatable Land: stories of life in a grey areaAn account of life on the English-Scottish border, in the land between the rivers Tyne and Forth, covering the
historical, the political, the scenic and the merely entertaining, and getting ready to report on the changes to daily life which the campaign for Scottish independence may bring about.Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-90571796314137758152019-06-16T18:20:00.000+01:002019-06-23T18:55:37.015+01:00The Future's Dark, the Future's Orange<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's been a long time since I posted anything on this blog, because I was living away from the region it concerns for a couple of years. I'm now back in Northumberland and, guess what, the political forces threatening to make life on the English-Scottish border difficult have not gone away. In fact they just get more and more complex.<br />
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I'm not living in Berwick any more but I go there regularly to catch up with the amazing community of artists and other creative folk there, which I really miss. This bohemian community is centred on Bridge Street, next to the river. I'd called in to Slightly Foxed bookshop to say hello to owner Simon Heald, and heard him talking to another customer about an Orange march that was apparently assembling in the town centre. I got the impression that the police had been round warning all the shopkeepers on the route.<br />
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How very odd, I thought. Many years ago, before I ever lived in Berwick, I came across a small Orange parade heading across the bridge, and was rather startled. I've never seen anything like that since and had assumed that like many old traditions it had died out. I was intrigued by the thought of seeing another one.<br />
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So I had my lunch in the cafe of the YHA in the Dewars Lane Granary and was just heading back up the lane when loud drumming was heard in the distance. I put on a burst of speed and arrived in Bridge Street just in time to see a rather large number of the biggest and loudest drums I've ever seen in a parade rounding the corner, accompanied by the odd flute and a lot of banners.<br />
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I have certainly never seen anything on this scale in Berwick before and neither has anyone I spoke to about it. None of the participants seemed to be local. I saw two banners from the Scottish Borders, Hawick and Prestonpans,but the bulk of them seemed to be from Yorkshire. I confess that the existence of groups called Sons of William, Crown Defenders, or plain Loyalist Yorkshire, had previously escaped my notice. Later in the day I saw a child wearing a sweatshirt saying Loyalist Yorkshire and found the sight disturbing in a way I can't quite put my finger on.<br />
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Simon in the bookshop, never a man to mince his words, seemed to be the most genuinely angry I've ever seen him about the sight of this lot processing past his shop. He was equally forthright a few years back when the Scottish Defence League, the north-of-the-border version of the notorious English Defence League, staged a march in Berwick. The gist of his views on all of these groups was that the whole bloody lot of them could bugger off. All of the feedback I've heard so far from Berwick locals is along the same lines.<br />
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One of the marchers was actually heard to shout No Surrender. During my period of travelling in 2016 I visited the Siege Museum in Londonderry (definitely not Derry in this context) and finally managed to understand what this slogan is all about. It refers to the city's defence against the army of the Catholic James II / VII in 1689. Even when I was in Northern Ireland I found myself thinking quite often that having your head permanently stuck in 1689 is a bit daft. And as for invoking its memory in 2019 in a town that is nowhere near Ireland, it's just, like .... what ??<br />
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The only explanation I can think of is that the Loyalist movement now sees the threat of Scottish Nationalism as the new front in the struggle to keep the United Kingdom together, and has decided that Berwick-upon-Tweed is the most appropriate place to make their point. The prospect of this march being repeated every year is deeply unappealing. What makes Berwick so special is that it transcends the border. While it is technically, legally, in England it exists culturally and socially in a place that is neither England nor Scotland. The last thing we want is outsiders trying to arouse artificial and non-traditional national loyalties here. Of course, one could say that all those infuriating London journalists who descended on us in 2014 during the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum were doing essentially the same thing.<br />
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I've often said that Berwickers are in denial about just how bad things could potentially get on the border after Brexit and possibly after a second Scottish independence referendum. Brexit has amplified many tensions and conflicts in the UK and unleashed some dark forces. Being a perverse sort of creature, this makes me very glad that I came back to Northumberland. I couldn't care less about encouraging tourism. I'm all about the dystopia.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-28677744025284788622018-07-04T15:20:00.000+01:002019-04-18T11:38:41.967+01:00The 70th Anniversary of the NHS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Hello again, for the first time in a while. I decided to post these pictures on here because they have a local significance. These are the scanned images of some paperwork retrieved from the house of my uncle when I cleared it after his death. The originals are now in the Northumberland County Archives at Woodhorn.<br />
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This one is the notice of the changes to National Health Insurance about to come into effect on 5th July 1948. Note the address of the local office in Clayport Street, Alnwick.<br />
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This is my uncle's membership card of an 'approved society' collecting contributions under the health insurance scheme established just before World War 1, covering employed workers.<br />
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It shows my uncle's address, and so incidentally also illustrates the Blackpool connection in my family history. My grandparents called their Alnwick red-brick semi 'Norbreck' after the place my grandmother grew up, originally a tiny medieval village just to the north of Blackpool but now very much a suburb.<br />
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This is the inside of the membership card, showing the record of contributions. Notice that a separate piece of paper has been stuck in to cover the period up to 4th July 1948. From the day after that nobody had to pay for health insurance any more, it was all free.<br />
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I think these documents are really interesting and important, because they are the kind of thing that rarely survives. (My uncle was a man who never willingly parted with a piece of paper, a characteristic that was mostly exasperating but in this case proved valuable.) They make it clear that the National Health Service was originally designed as a system of <i>insurance</i>, to take over from previous schemes of insurance to cover sickness and unemployment. Over time the link with 'national insurance' payments has been obscured and largely forgotten. I think the time has come to restore a form of contribution directly linked to the health service. Obviously means-tested and collected through taxation, but something that would make an often indifferent and ungrateful population focus more clearly on what they're paying for and how much they're paying and whether it's worth it or not. Like other countries. Like grown-ups.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-69131404650842992362017-06-05T20:47:00.000+01:002017-06-05T20:47:15.722+01:00Carlisle: the other end of the border with some of the same problems<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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No, this is not a photo of Primark, even though I'm wearing one of their tee-shirts as I write, the point of interest in this picture is the two street names. Scotch Street and English Street are two of the busiest streets in Carlisle, the town on the English side of the western end of the English-Scottish border, and thus the opposite number of Berwick-upon-Tweed at the eastern end. These street names make it very clear that for centuries Carlisle was a centre for the administration of border law and a meeting place - often a violent meeting place - for rival families from England and Scotland.<br />
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After a period of travelling during which I spent far too much money I am now attempting to compensate for my extravagance by living as what is euphemistically known as a 'property guardian'. It's incredibly cheap but if you want the best deal you can't afford to be too fussy about where you live. So I'm now over on the west coast and having to travel frequently between my new home and the storage unit in Berwick I am desperately trying to empty out, which involves a lot of passing through Carlisle.<br />
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It is an attractive town with a lot of picturesque old buildings, many built from a lovely red coloured stone. At this time of year it is full of the kind of serious minded retired people whose idea of a fun holiday is a week of hard walking in the hills, possibly with evenings spent enjoying a fine restaurant or a glass of real ale. This border town is larger than Berwick, with a cathedral and some decent shops, something conspicuously lacking in Berwick. It does though have the same uneasy sense of a town dominated by fairly comfortably off retired people, both permanent residents and visitors, with a resentful working age population that is predominantly poor.<br />
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In Berwick, there is a general assumption that only the retired people have any money and so it will not be the working age folk contributing to any charitable event you're trying to get going, and this is only an extreme example of a spreading social trend. Yet politicians still talk as if pensioners were poor. Of course some of them are, but some of them have pensions that are double the average wage in small towns dependent on tourism, and yet they still get free bus travel, television licences and a chunk of their gas bill. Saying so during the current general election campaign has been absolutely taboo. I am not a supporter of the Conservative party but I think that one of the things Theresa May has got right is to attempt to shift the payment arrangements for care in old age away from the assumption that it is fine for ordinary taxpayers to subsidise other people's property inheritance. Needless to say she was forced to retreat on this by the massed ranks of pensioner power.<br />
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Oh dear, I seem to have strayed off the subject of the border, don't I? But wait, there is a link! Because the future of the border depends on the electoral performance of the SNP, and that depends to a large extent on how much the Westminster government pisses off the Scots, and that will all depend on the results on June 8th. It is noticeable that the SNP manifesto pushes the question of independence firmly onto the back burner - because all the polls are still showing a clear majority against it - and admits in a roundabout sort of way that they can't really use their newly acquired power to raise income tax as it might 'lead to a loss of revenue', i.e. a lot of wealthy Scots would move to England. We can probably expect to see even more comfortably off retired folk in the English border towns.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-17194561834703447432017-04-22T18:43:00.002+01:002017-04-23T13:23:37.987+01:00A Wonderful Tribute to Salmon Fishing on the Tweed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Hello again. It's been a while since I wrote on this blog, because I've spent the last eighteen months being nomadic. But my heart will always be in the Borders (as indeed are most of my belongings, in a storage unit). I was back in Berwick last week to catch the closing days of a blockbuster exhibition at the Watchtower gallery, run by my friend Kate Stephenson. This place has been an important part of my life ever since it opened a few years ago, and I try to attend every show there. Some shows are visited only by other people who dutifully go to everything artistic in the area. But the one that's just closed was, according to Kate, packed out every day. Indeed I heard people talking in the street about how good it was before I even got there.<br />
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Because this was a show about the history of net fishing for salmon on the Tweed, a subject very close to the hearts of many people locally. Unlike the fancy angling indulged in by toffs further upriver, net fishing from a small rowing boat is a very ancient, almost primitive, way of catching fish that tends to move people to raptures about the disciples doing just the same thing on the Sea of Galilee. There is something really primal about the elemental struggle of man versus fish, the respect for the fish that comes from knowing their ways intimately, balanced against the need to kill them in order to eat.<br />
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All of the original photos taken by Jim Walker for his books on the industry, <i>By Net and Coble</i> and <i>A Wake for the Salmon</i>, were on display, and I got another chance to talk to the man himself. He takes the view that the net fishers were deliberately put out of business by the upriver angling interests, who charge a great deal of money for the privilege of rod fishing for salmon and don't want the common netters competing for the fish. Certainly, the end of the Berwick Salmon company came in suspicious looking circumstances; it was bought out by an outfit calling itself the Atlantic Salmon Conservation Trust, which then shut the whole thing down, leaving the crews unemployed, without any compensation. If anybody feels libelled, take it up with Jim, not me.<br />
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One story that was completely new to me was that of the man whose obituary is on this poster: Augustyn Karolewski, Polish soldier and Scottish fisherman. After escaping from Nazi occupied Poland as a teenager and fighting with the Polish forces based in the UK, he settled in the Scottish Borders, married a local lass, and spent the rest of his life fishing on the Tweed, enjoying, according to this obituary, the respect and affection of all. This is a lovely and timely reminder of how much we Brits owe to the Poles who did so much to help defeat Nazism, and how badly we betrayed them in 1945. I suspect that after Brexit modern Poles will survive without Britain a lot better than we'll survive without them.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-67241865386756672952016-11-15T18:00:00.001+00:002016-11-15T18:15:58.949+00:00Thoughts on Recent Travels in Scotland<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This is a pretty cute map of Scotland (Alba) with Gaelic place names, produced by some school children in Obar Dheathain, or Aberdeen as it is more commonly known, and on display in the train station there. I recently ventured up to Aberdeen, the furthest north I have ever been. It's at 57 degrees of latitude north and at this time of year, blimey, does it get dark early. It was here that it really hit me for the first time that Scotland is much closer to Scandinavia both geographically and culturally than England is. Of course the Scottish independence lobby are working on cultivating these links for all they're worth. Though First Minister Sturgeon has recently been much mocked for attending a conference of nations bordering the Arctic Circle, which Scotland conspicuously does not. I mean, even in the middle of winter the sun does rise for a few hours in the north of Scotland.<br />
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The main street of Aberdeen is called Union Street and there is also a Union Bridge and a Union Square, the last now taken over by a large and glitzy shopping mall in which to while away some of the hours of darkness. It's clear that Unionism was much in vogue at the time the Granite City was built. So it is appropriate that it was here I first encountered the campaigning end of the anti-independence lobby.<br />
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There was Scotland in Union, neutral between political parties but 'positive about Scotland in the UK', and opposite them in the central square, the Conservative party, explicitly demanding 'no second referendum' on independence and filled with spluttering dislike of and anger towards 'that Sturgeon woman'. The non-aligned faction seemed unhappy about the Conservatives getting in their space, probably conscious that association with that party has done enormous damage to the Unionist cause.<br />
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One of their leaflets is shown here. The view that the SNP government is concentrating too much on demanding ever more independent powers rather than on making good use of the ones they've already got seems to be widespread, and so does the feeling that the indyref was a horribly divisive experience that few people are anxious to repeat. We in England have had a taste of that with the Brexit referendum, which also divided families and friends. Now imagine having had to go through both those bitterly divisive campaigns in less than two years. And now imagine that your government wants to do the whole thing again a.s.a.p.<br />
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The timetable is reportedly now looking very tight indeed for the Scottish government to be able to transition seamlessly from EU membership as part of the UK to EU membership as an independent nation. Now that the UK PM Theresa May has announced she will trigger Article 50 early in 2017, Scotland would need to hold a new referendum on independence that returned a Yes majority not much later than that. Otherwise it will have to leave the EU along with the rest of the UK and then start all over again after independence at some unspecified time in the future.<br />
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The problem for Nicola Sturgeon is that the opinion polls are still showing a clear majority against independence. Though, with opinion polls now thoroughly discredited after their lamentable failure to predict the result of either the Brexit referendum or the US presidential election, that may not be something to rely on too much.<br />
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I travelled from Aberdeen to Glasgow by coach, braving a driver who threw my luggage around and didn't seem to like my English accent much. Glasgow is an extraordinary city - once the Second City of the Empire, as they are fond of reminding you despite the Empire being politically unfashionable nowadays - and the fact that its inhabitants voted majority Yes in the indyref seems to me to have been the result of their tremendous self-confidence and justified pride in themselves, rather than any anti-English feelings. At least nobody here seems to be as upset by an English accent as the Aberdonian bus driver. I remarked to the young receptionist in the hotel that I thought Glasgow was a great city, and he replied, 'Yes, it's the best city,' in a tone of great finality.<br />
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This statue outside Glasgow Concert Hall depicts Donald Dewar, 'Scotland's First Ever First Minister', as the inscription says. He represented the Labour party, and had been active in Labour politics UK wide before the new Scottish Parliament was created and he got the gig of being its First Minister. His death after only eighteen months in office is widely regarded as a tragedy both personally and for Scottish politics. It seems to have been almost forgotten in some quarters that the Scots did not rush out and vote by a landslide for a nationalist government as soon as they had the devolved opportunity, they elected a coalition of Labour and Liberal Democrats. That seems rather quaint now, so comprehensively have both parties screwed up in the sixteen years since Mr Dewar's death.<br />
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A footnote to justify including an old photo of Glasgow Central Mosque that I like. Some of the polling in the run-up to the indyref found that Scots of immigrant heritage had higher rates of support for independence than the population as a whole. Commentators speculated that this might be due to their fears about the rise of the populist right and anti-immigrant feeling in England. Interestingly, Police Scotland have reported that in Scotland they did not observe the large increase in assaults on people of Central and Eastern European origin that was recorded in England immediately after the EU referendum. Either Scots are just more tolerant, or the populist sentiments that are being channelled by the far right in England are flowing into the independence movement in Scotland and being expressed through a non-ethnic form of nationalism. The whole situation is extremely complicated, and now that we have a President Trump to contend with as well, God only knows what may happen.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-36634953013976099422016-10-19T20:39:00.000+01:002016-10-19T23:08:05.256+01:00Another Walled City<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span id="goog_608568826"></span><span id="goog_608568827"></span>To anyone who knows Berwick upon Tweed this will look very like the walls for which Berwick is famous, but these fortifications are not on the border between England and Scotland but in a city that's now close to the border between UK-administered Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Everything about the place is so controversial that even choosing what to call it has political overtones. Its original name was Derry, in 1613 it became Londonderry, it is now referred to officially as Derry Hyphen Londonderry, and it's currently the fashion to call it LegenDerry, which I like.<br />
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The walls of Derry are similar to those of Berwick but more complete and with more imposing gateways through them. They are of course a big draw for visitors - so much so that an English accent surprises the locals less than it does in Belfast - and you are expected to stroll around the complete circuit and admire both the views and the structure of the walls themselves. I've done my best, but I can't see this defensive structure as anything other than oppressive.<br />
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This photo is taken through one of the crenellations in the wall, looking down on the Bogside area. The tourist info panel says that the nearby Royal Bastion was built to give a clear field of fire over the Bogside, back when it was the field of approach of an enemy army rather than a housing estate, but if I were living there now I would always have the feeling that the forces of the state could start firing down on me at any time.<br />
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Within the walls of Derry there are some of the most beautiful Georgian streets I've ever seen, and that's presumably where the rich merchants originally lived. Just outside the walls is where the poor people lived, and seemingly still do. I have never seen any other city where the historical distribution of power and wealth is expressed spatially in such a stark way. I don't find it conducive to a carefree holiday stroll.<br />
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This is one of the entrances / exits to the wall. It doesn't have actual gates any more, but during the Northern Ireland Troubles the British army blocked off some of these arches and set up checkpoints there. I've seen a photo, and I really think that it would cure anybody of finding walled cities romantic or picturesque. I don't suppose being shut in /out was any more enjoyable in the 17th century than it was in the 20th.<br />
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I've trudged round four different museums that between them cover every shade of political and religious opinion on the history of Derry-Londonderry, making conversation with the staff of all of them in the most neutral tone I can muster. The only thing everybody agrees on is that they're all really worried about what will happen when the UK leaves the EU. There is much head-shaking and "we'll just have to wait and see."<br />
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One of my visits was to the temporary home of the Museum of Free Derry, an archive of the civil rights movement in the impoverished nationalist Bogside and the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 when 13 local people were shot dead by British troops. Its permanent home is in the process of construction, and you can see in this photo that the European Regional Development fund is contributing some of the funds. Don't get the idea that the EU is doing this because it's pro nationalist and anti British, though. I also visited the Siege Heroes Museum, a loyalist operation attached to the Apprentice Boys Hall that celebrates the heroic defence of the city by its starving Protestant inhabitants against the troops of the Catholic King James II in 1689. The Siege of Derry looms very large indeed in the tradition and imagination of the unionist community. The young man on the desk told me that its smart new building was also funded by the European Union. "We took the money and now we've run," he said ruefully.<br />
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On the same day I arrived in Derry-Londonderry, Radio 4 broadcast a programme from it, exploring the fears of a new 'hard' border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after Brexit. Though, as one contributor said, it shouldn't be called Brexit because it's not just Britain leaving, it's the whole of the UK, including Northern Ireland. (Uxit?) There was a suggestion among some contributors that the events following the referendum on EU membership has exposed as a fiction the claim that the UK is a free association of equal partners and shown England imposing its will on the other nations of the UK. (Though to be fair, I think Wales voted majority Leave as well.) That's exactly how Scotland feels, and that's why Berwickers are worried as well.<br />
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I wanted to find a cheerful aspect of Derry to end this post on, and the best I could come up with was this golden teapot. It hangs outside a shop in the Strand Road, it's covered in real gold leaf and it's bigger than the golden kettle in Boston! A nice cup of tea, that really does unite us all.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-53472958604537675632016-10-02T19:09:00.000+01:002016-10-03T19:48:14.141+01:00You May Experience Connection Problems<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Hello again! I drew my blog to a conclusion, as I thought, back in June, when I moved away from Berwick, but I now feel compelled to write again. In an attempt to get a different perspective on the future of the English-Scottish border, I've travelled to Ireland. The extreme cheapness of the flight to Dublin from Newcastle or Edinburgh with Ryanair makes it easy to justify doing this on a sudden impulse.<br />
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One of the nice things about being in the Republic of Ireland is escaping from the endless wallowing in the First World War that's going on in Britain, but then the ROI keeps banging on about the centenary of the Easter Rising instead. This is a photo of the General Post Office in the main street of Dublin, now called O'Connell Street, that was the headquarters of the Rising of 1916. Note the flag of the European Union flying alongside the Irish tricolor. The amazing metallic spire, soaring to a giddy height that won't fit in my photo, replaced a statue of Nelson that was blown up by nationalists in the 1960s. I'm sure the spire was an improvement. If anybody would like to demolish some more statues of Victorian worthies back in Britain, they can feel free as far as I'm concerned.<br />
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I paid my 10 euros and went round the museum inside the GPO. The main attraction is a noisy film of comedy Englishmen of the 'I say old chap' variety having rings run round them by Irish rebels, but there are also some very good videos of interviews with serious Irish historians, from which I learned a lot. It is clear that the British reaction to the Rising was hopelessly bungled and only succeeded in uniting a nation that was previously divided over the aims and tactics of nationalism. I could see similarities with what is going on in Scotland at the present time. To settle for devolution or to hold out for full independence? Can such a small nation survive on its own? Is independence more important than prosperity? Surely the country's prosperity will actually be greater when Britain is no longer siphoning off the proceeds of its key industries?<br />
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The big difference between now and 1916 is of course the existence of the European Union. I snapped the photo on the right in the supermarket over the road from my hotel in North Dublin. It's a large section, because there are a lot of Eastern European immigrants in the Republic of Ireland. (Okay, I know Poles hate being called Eastern Europeans, they insist Poland is in Central Europe, but evidently the Supervalu chain hasn't had that memo.) Most of the crew on my Ryanair flight were Polish. From being always known as a country of emigration, Eire is now also a country of immigration.<br />
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I then got the train up to Belfast, and the bus back from Belfast to Dublin. I grew up in the 1970s when television news showed soldiers patrolling border checkpoints between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It is now a completely open border. Nothing happens when you cross it. Absolutely nothing. Cruising down the motorway on the express bus, the only way you can tell you're back in the Republic is that the direction signs start to be in Gaelic as well as English. There isn't even a flag or a 'welcome' sign like you get between England and Scotland. On the train, the only reference in the entire journey to the fact that you are technically travelling between two different states is that the log-in screen for the free wifi says 'you may experience connection problems between Dundalk and Portadown'. And sure enough you do, because the broadband codes are being switched to make sure BBC iPlayer knows when you're in the UK and can watch on-demand telly and when you're outside the UK and can't. My phone showed Roaming in the Republic but switched back to being in the UK north of the border, and the same in reverse on the way south. In Belfast, all calls were included in my monthly bundle, in Dublin, not. I found this weirdly fascinating. In 2016 we don't need anything as crude as soldiers stomping about the border, we can monitor your every move digitally.<br />
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This is a sculpture in Thanksgiving Square on the waterfront in Belfast. According to the distinctly waffly description board, it is inspired by a variety of female figures in Celtic mythology and expresses themes of peace, reconciliation, hope and aspiration, while the fact she is standing on a globe refers to our modern global village. If you say so. The last time I was in Belfast was in 2002 and since then the city has been completely transformed. It now has a very attractive and lively city centre, full of exuberant young people, and with the highest density of coffee shops I've ever seen, possibly indeed in Europe. Being there moved me very much. A small voice at the back of my mind said that perhaps in twenty years time Aleppo could look like this.<br />
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But today Theresa May, Prime Minister of the UK, announced that she will formally trigger the process of leaving the European Union in six months time. When I heard this I wanted to cry. All this openness and ease of travel, this creeping de facto re-unification under the auspices of the EU, could be destroyed by Brexit. In a few years time there may once again be armed checkpoints all across the Island of Ireland. And across the Island of Britain, if Scotland proves as loyal to the EU as Eire. Every time I go back to Berwick, a town that would be blighted more than any other by a 'hard' border with Scotland, I have to make conversation with Conservative supporting, Leave voting, locals who are thrilled at the result of our EU referendum. I just want to say to them, <i>Are you out of your bloody mind?</i><br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-26290237545947775652016-06-19T22:26:00.000+01:002016-06-20T10:03:27.209+01:00And It's Goodbye From Me - Tweed to Tyne<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This post will be my last on this blog for some time, possibly for good. It depends on whether there are any more dramatic developments affecting the border between England and Scotland. My original thinking regarding the referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union, now almost upon us, was that a vote to Leave would trigger a fresh outburst of campaigning for Scottish independence that I ought to write about, but that a vote to Remain would mean I could gracefully sign off from reporting on the Borders as the status quo would be assured. I now think that whatever happens in the referendum we are in for a turbulent time politically, so I may as well sign off before the fateful date of 23rd June.<br />
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Because the thing is, I'm not actually living in Berwick any more. I sold my flat there and went to the Antipodes for three months, as previously described on this blog, and I am now living mostly in Newcastle-upon-Tyne while I contemplate the possibility of returning to the Antipodes for a while. I found I couldn't bear to move out of the region described in the heading of this blog, the land between the rivers Forth and Tyne, but I am now living at the far end of it, on the bank of the Tyne. This photo shows two of the bridges across the Tyne, the railway and the swing bridges.<br />
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I chose this view because archaeologists have now discovered that the original Roman bridge across the Tyne, the <i>Pons Aelius</i> or Hadrian's Bridge, was on the same site as the modern swing bridge. Presumably because convenient crossing points don't change that much. So this post continues the theme of my last about the Roman sites at Wallsend and South Shields. The photo here on the right shows the entrance to the harbour at South Shields. On the left side of the picture is the town / village / suburb of Tynemouth. This is where the river we love so much flows out to sea.<br />
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I was fascinated to learn that matching altars to the Roman gods Oceanus and Neptune have been found near the swing bridge, and that Alexander the Great is known to have sacrificed to the same gods when he reached the mouth of the river Indus. Presumably the Romans were conscious that the mouth of a river was the point where they left the land and entered the realm of the sea gods, and so it would be prudent to ask for their protection.<br />
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This is the Shields ferry. It chugs between the two banks of the Tyne several times an hour, a journey of only five minutes or so but one rich in cultural associations within the region. This vessel is called <i>Spirit of the Tyne</i>, which is apt. There is a sculpture outside the Newcastle Civic Centre that is supposed to represent some sort of presiding deity of the Tyne. I hope that the spirit of the river was able to share in the sacrifices to Oceanus and Neptune.<br />
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I read somewhere that it may not be mere coincidence that so many rivers on the eastern side of Britain have names beginning with the letter T. The Tyne, the Tees, the Tweed, the Till, the Teviot ... they divide up the region and mark out areas of allegiance and affection. The suggestion from linguists is that these names may all derive from some ur-name beginning with a T that just meant a river, and that would mean there is unity in their diversity. I like that.<br />
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Recently I have become deeply gloomy about the political and social strains tearing at the fabric of life in the UK. Nobody could deny that this country faces some really serious problems and challenges. I think that's why I've come to find it so soothing to look at the rivers Tyne and Tweed and imagine the thousands of years that their waters have been flowing to the sea. We fight each other, but the land and the waters outlast us all.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-91722871721646345712016-05-01T20:52:00.000+01:002016-05-02T12:28:09.126+01:00'Where Rome's great frontier begins'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This is the reconstruction of the West Gate of <a href="https://arbeiaromanfort.org.uk/" target="_blank">Arbeia</a>, the Roman fort on the south bank of the river Tyne, in present day South Shields. It is not part of Hadrian's Wall, which apparently confuses a lot of visitors who can't conceive of any Roman ruins not attached to the Wall, it guards the other side of the estuary of the Tyne, preventing Northern British enemies from sneaking down the coast and attacking from the south. The counterpart on the northern bank is <a href="https://segedunumromanfort.org.uk/" target="_blank">Segedunum</a>, in modern day Wallsend (duh!) and I talk about that below.<br />
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At a later date Arbeia became a supply base for the garrisons all the way along Hadrian's Wall. Excavations have shown that it had far more granaries than was normal for a fort and also dug up an unusually large number of the metal tags bearing the Emperor's head used to seal supplies. So it seems that food was shipped from Continental Europe into the estuary, offloaded here, then transported to the line of forts stretching to the Solway Firth on the west coast.<br />
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In fact it was a jolly important place, and the commanding officer accordingly enjoyed the ostentatiously large house you can see reconstructed in this photo on the right. One of the staff told me that even after the Romans had been there for 200 years and must have understood that the climate of North East England is not well suited to al fresco living, they still insisted on employing the standard house plan involving having to cross a roofless courtyard to get from one room to another. Adapting to local conditions would have meant an intolerable loss of status. Compare the British in India.<br />
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Because of these reconstructions, built on top of the foundations of the originals, Arbeia is more fun than the usual archaeological site where you just stare at a few old stones. It also has a small but wonderful museum of things found on site, some unique in Britain and all of amazing quality.<br />
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The fort is thought to have been originally called something else and to have been later nicknamed Arbeia, meaning 'place of the Arabs', after the employment of specialist boatmen from the river Tigris, in modern Iraq, to sail and fight on the Tyne. I can't tell you how much I love this image. Although of course this happened before the emergence of Islam, and those Arabs were probably Christians, I still see some sort of appropriateness in the modern presence of a mosque just down the road from the site. On this ancient imperial border, we see that the Romans were multi-cultural <i>avant la lettre.</i><br />
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This picture on the left shows the archaelogical site of Segedunum, or Wallsend, on the northern bank of the Tyne estuary, with the building that is now used as the museum but was formerly the canteen of Swan Hunter shipyard, hence its resemblance to the prow of a ship.<br />
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This site presents a moving exploration of how successive layers of history were lived out and left their traces on the same site. Both Segedunum and Arbeia used to be covered with 19th century terraced housing that had to be demolished to expose the Roman sites, and some of Segedunum lay under the Swan Hunter yard. The piece of Wall that ran down the slope from the fort to the river was first exposed when the shipyard was being extended to make it large enough to build the <i>Mauretania</i> in the early 20th century. And a coal mine can still be seen adjacent to the surviving stretch of Wall on the other side of the fort. A considered decision was made to preserve some visible evidence of this mine and grant it the same respect and validity as the Roman remains.<br />
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I took some photos from the observation platform in the former shipyard workers' canteen, showing the striking landscape of river, abandoned shipyard, excavated ancient fort. This is the one with the least reflection of me and my camera - sorry it's still not great, but you get the idea. You can see a reconstruction of a bathhouse in the far corner of the site, sadly now closed to visitors because it's no longer structurally safe. They're still trying to work out how the Romans prevented a steamy bathhouse from rotting in the damp British climate.<br />
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A modern monument has been erected on the site bearing all the names of those Roman army personnel known from surviving records to have actually physically built the Wall, with space left to add any more discovered. When I first visited the site, Swan Hunter was still operational, and this juxtaposition of modern and ancient construction workers was very powerful. Now, the shipyard is as derelict as the fort. It has passed into history in its turn.<br />
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And what of the layer of history below the Roman one? The museum explains that the people who lived in North East England before the Roman colonisers arrived were called the Brigantes. Below the foundations of the fort archaeologists have found ploughed furrows that were never planted with anything. The invaders kicked the farmers off the land between ploughing and sowing. The Brigantian farms near the Wall were abandoned soon after, either because the Romans forcibly removed the local population for security reasons, or simply because their social and economic systems were so badly disrupted by having a giant wall built through the middle of their community that their lives became impossible and they moved of their own accord. This all sounds horribly familiar from more recent times. Brigantian farmers, Roman builders, Geordie shipwrights - all just local people trying to make a living on the banks of the great river.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-57756273207933327452016-04-18T19:24:00.001+01:002016-04-18T19:29:34.642+01:00Oh God, Not Another Referendum.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I'm now back from my three month adventure touring New Zealand and Australia. I've lost my acclimatisation to the bitter Borders wind, and I've spent the last week going round huddled in my thick winter coat telling everyone I can't believe it's still this cold, much to their bemusement since everybody who's spent the whole winter here thinks it's quite pleasant and spring-like, actually.<br />
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As if the weather wasn't enough to get used to again, the state of British politics is enough to make me want to jump straight back on a plane. The first I heard about the EU referendum was when I was lying on my bed in a hostel in the resort of Franz Josef Glacier, in the Southern Alps of the South Island of New Zealand, listening to the BBC news online. Ringing across cyberspace came the voice of David Cameron telling me that this was the most important political decision I would have to make in my lifetime. It quite spoiled the holiday mood, I can tell you.<br />
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My first thought was that I really resent having to go through this referendum business all over again after being put through the wringer less than two years ago over the Scottish independence vote. This has continued to be my dominant feeling about the whole thing, and now that I'm back in the Borders I can confirm that it seems to be most people's overriding reaction here. There is a kind of weariness about the way people discuss the EU vote. Or, in fact, don't discuss it, because it is clear that most people are avoiding stating their views openly in social situations for fear of falling out with their friends and acquaintances, in exactly the same way as they did with the question of Scottish independence. One of my Berwick friends told me, 'we just don't talk about it to anyone, especially in Scotland, we're afraid there may be murder done'. What makes it trickier is that, unlike the Indyref, it's impossible to predict what any one person's opinion will be on EU membership. It cuts right across all other political alignments.<br />
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There is no doubt that the prospect of a Leave result in the EU referendum triggering a second Indyref in Scotland has reactivated all the fears and uncertainties over the future status of the border between England and Scotland. Property prices in Berwick are still falling, with masses of lovely houses up for grabs and not shifting. Nobody except me seems willing to come right out and say so, but I am sure that the property market in this area is being depressed long term by an unwillingness to live on a border that could yet become the frontier of the EU. I'm glad I sold my flat when I did.<br />
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Being in New Zealand at the time of the announcement of the Euroref, if I'm allowed to call it that on the analogy of the Indyref, has given me a rather different perspective on it to the way I saw it before. The Kiwis see the EU as 'a hostile trading bloc' and resent being relegated from a favoured 'daughter' of Britain to just another non-EU country, stuck in the longer queue for passport checking at Heathrow and told that their butter has no privileged access to European markets any more. And they really, really resent the way EU farmers are showered with subsidies and handouts while Kiwi farmers just have to stand on their own two feet in the market. Actually I think I agree with them about that. Today the National Farmers' Union came out in favour of remaining within the EU. Gosh, there's a surprise.<br />
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I look forward to seeing how Anne-Marie Trevelyan, our new Conservative MP, balances the demands of subsidy-seeking farmers and immigrant-loathing housing applicants in her constituency over the next few months. I reckon that even if it achieves nothing else, the Euroref could well destroy the Conservative party. And that result would be worth any amount of biting our lips and changing TV channels between now and June 23rd.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-59750926907032030652016-03-26T07:30:00.001+00:002016-03-30T12:40:17.592+01:00So Where Exactly Does the United Kingdom End?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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As I come to the end of my period of travelling around Australia and New Zealand, I am thinking more than ever about the future of 'the United Kingdom'. One of the things I'm looking forward to about returning to 'the UK' is that the people who live there hardly ever call it 'the UK'. We think we live in Britain, but when I offer this in response to the person on the ticket desk of some museum who is dutifully collecting visitors' origins for their stats, they often look a bit confused. Then they look down their list of options and say, 'So that'll be the United Kingdom then'. If I get the opportunity, I explain that in the wake of the Scottish indyref the term United Kingdom has become associated with an explicitly Unionist political agenda and 'Britain' is more neutral. Nobody much in Australasia seems to understand this, and really, why should they.<br />
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I do think though that the management of Best Western Australia could be expected to have a firmer grasp of political geography than that demonstrated by their online hotel booking form. It gave me the options of saying I was from: a) United Kingdom - Great Britain, b) United Kingdom - Scotland, or c) United Kingdom - Wales. Being from England is not possible except by identifying England with Great Britain, a bad habit the English already have that ought not to be encouraged, and being from Northern Ireland is not an option at all, an egregious howler since the correct differentiation between Britain and the UK is that the latter includes Northern Ireland and the former does not. But hey, Best Western is run by Americans, what can you expect.<br />
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My stay in New Zealand (or Aotearoa as its inhabitants increasingly like to call it) coincided with its referendum on changing the flag. The photo above shows the present flag flying beside the war memorial at Bluff, the southernmost point of the New Zealand mainland. It was a pet project of the current prime minister, John Key, to change the flag to one that does not include the flag of the United Kingdom and thus could be seen as representing the modern independent nation rather than the former colony. The previously chosen alternative is shown below - it keeps the stars of the Southern Cross but replaces the UK flag with the Silver Fern long associated with NZ. The result of the referendum has just come in and the Kiwis have rejected the proposed alternative and opted to keep the old flag. Not by as large a margin as predicted though, the result was 57: 43, and as I understand it a lot of No voters were motivated more by dislike of Mr Key and all his pet projects than by devotion to the traditional flag.<br />
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I am not, of course, entitled to have an opinion on what flag Kiwis ought to adopt, that's entirely a matter for them. I am though entitled to have an opinion on the attitudes to 'the mother country' that were displayed during the referendum debate, and I found a lot of them exasperating. I was told by one tour guide that it was appropriate to keep the UK flag because 'we are still part of the Commonwealth'. Very few countries of the Commonwealth have chosen to reference the UK in their post-independence flags, and anyway, the sad truth is that hardly anybody in Britain outside Buckingham Palace gives a damn about the Commonwealth. There seems to be a widespread view overseas that the Union Jack has something to do with the Queen. It doesn't.<br />
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I even read one letter in a newspaper that said NZ was still part of the United Kingdom, and considered writing to the paper to point out that it very definitely is not, but wasn't quite sure if the letter was intended satirically. Even if that particular writer was being sarcastic, there is certainly a degree of attachment to the UK in New Zealand that is not reciprocated and seems embarrassingly inappropriate to a British visitor. All the more so because the proportion of New Zealanders who have Scottish ancestry is very great and you would think that some anti-Union sentiments would have travelled out there with them.<br />
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I started off by telling people that if Scotland becomes independent, which everyone I know believes is inevitable eventually, and the United Kingdom breaks up, NZ is going to look a bit daft using the flag of a country that doesn't exist any more. Then I realised that the NZ flag has taken on a range of associations that are no longer anything to do with the UK. The most emotive argument used by the No to the New Flag lobby was that thousands of New Zealanders had fought and died under the present one. The photo above of it flying beside the war memorial on a weather-beaten coast seems to me to capture a lot of the emotions evoked by this argument. It was tempting to say, So doesn't that just prove that Kiwis ought not to have got involved in British wars? But I could see that would have been insulting to those who feel deeply about this. The Returned Services' Association in Aotearoa New Zealand will keep flying a flag that includes the one created to celebrate the Union of England and Scotland, regardless of what happens in Holyrood. Such are the vagaries of colonial history.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-76629385749335731632016-02-28T07:34:00.000+00:002016-03-02T06:02:32.760+00:00The Scotland of the South<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Hello again from the southern hemisphere. I am still working my way around New Zealand by bus, and have now made it right down to the bottom end, to the province of Otago. This is the statue of Rabbie Burns in the centre of the city of Dunedin. When I first saw it I was impressed by this evidence of the residents' devotion to literature, or perhaps to the egalitarian ideals of the poet. I then discovered that the city was founded by a Rev. Thomas Burns who was a nephew of Rabbie, and deduced that erecting a great big statue of his famous uncle was a way of perpetuating the family name somewhat more subtle than putting up a great big statue of the founder himself.<br />
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Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh - it is still used in modern Gaelic - and the settlement in Otago was a conscious attempt to re-create Edinburgh in a new land. The main street of Dunedin is called Princes Street. Other streets in the central city are called George, Stuart, Moray, Hanover and St. Andrew. There are suburbs called Mornington and Corstorphine. Luckily the discovery of gold in Otago later generated the wealth to enable the New Edinburgh to be built in a fitting style.<br />
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The city's coat of arms shows a Maori and a Scottish Highlander standing side by side. In fact, apparently, Lowlanders were actively preferred for migration to the early settlement, as they were felt to be more sober and Protestant, and the names of the small towns in Central Otago sound like a lullaby of home to a visitor from the Scottish Borders: Roxburgh, Teviot, Ettrick, Kelso. There is even a Berwick just outside Dunedin.<br />
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It seems that when raising sheep in the rolling hills of Otago became a big thing, Highlanders were then thought the best people to do it, hence the man with the kilt and the crook. Though, to be honest, most of the Scottish diaspora seems to have adopted tartan-ism as the most obvious signifier of the old country, without bothering to distinguish Highland and Lowland traditions. The motto means 'by following in the steps of our forefathers'. My O' level Latin can't really see that in it but I will have to take the word of <a href="https://www.dunedin.govt.nz/your-council/dunedin-history/dcc-history/coat-of-arms" target="_blank">Dunedin city council</a>.<br />
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I am writing this in the city of Invercargill, on the very tip of the South Island, with only a few small islands between it and Antarctica. The weather here would make any migrant from the Debatable Land feel right at home. I've had to finally pack away the hot weather clothes and buy an anorak.<br />
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The town was named after the William Cargill commemorated on this plaque, the joint founder of Otago. Note the motifs on the corners of the plaque. The image of the thistle entwined with the fern has long been the symbol of the Scots in New Zealand, as in <a href="http://www.rampantscotland.com/poetry/blpoems_fern.htm" target="_blank">this 19th c. poem</a>, while the juxtaposition of the fern and the Southern Cross constellation anticipates the design of the proposed new NZ flag.<br />
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The glorious thing about Invercargill is that all of the streets in the city centre are named after Scottish rivers. The main shopping area is on Dee, Tay and Esk streets. Keep going and you come to Spey, Clyde, Don, Forth, Ness. Most poignantly to a Borderer, there are streets named Jed, Gala, Eye, Yarrow, and yes, Tweed. They've even allowed the Tyne to sneak in. The southern gales blow me through a permanent memory of home, a lyrical grid plan of settlers' nostalgia. I can't decide if I feel homesick or I feel at home. Probably the early settlers experienced the same ambivalence.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-8149405778314634992016-01-25T23:51:00.001+00:002016-01-26T03:30:36.173+00:00Warkworth's Namesake in New Zealand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In my last post some weeks ago, when I explained that I was about to depart for Australasia, I promised that I would post about anything I came across there that seemed relevant to the remit of the Debatable Land blog, and this seems to fit the bill.<br />
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Warkworth is a village in North Northumberland, about twenty minutes' drive from Alnwick, where I grew up. Yesterday I visited the town of Warkworth in New Zealand, which was named after the Northumbrian one. The tourist blurb describes it as a 'captivating historic village', and while in truth it is increasingly becoming a commuter suburb of Auckland, from where it is less than an hour's drive north, its setting on the bank of the Mahurangi river is not dissimilar to Northumbrian Warkworth's lovely location on the bank of the river Coquet.<br />
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Warkworth in Northumberland has a sign at the entrance to the village announcing that it is twinned with Warkworth in New Zealand, so I was happy to see that the latter returns the favour. Although at present the sign is somewhat obscured by the flowers of the southern hemisphere summer, you can see that Warkworth NZ has sibling and friendship arrangements with a number of other places too.<br />
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According to the <a href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/keyword/warkworth" target="_blank">New Zealand History website</a>, Warkworth NZ was founded by John Anderson Brown, who bought the land in 1843 and named the town after his birthplace in Northumberland.<br />
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He went on to name one of the original streets after Alnwick, and of course I just had to go and check that out. After labouring some distance uphill in heat of around 30 oC, I was rather disappointed to find that Alnwick Street is, at least to the British eye, a not particularly historic looking stretch of unremarkable houses.<br />
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Lilburn Street, also seen here, is named after another village in Northumberland. The Lilburns were a prominent family among the Border Reivers, but that probably wasn't the association intended for the street.<br />
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Less commendably in my eyes, Mr Brown named several streets of his new settlement after families of Northumbrian nobility - Percy, Neville and Bertram. It was some consolation to see that the main feature of Percy Street is now a large branch of the appropriately named New World supermarket chain. I found it pleasing to see the family name of the Duke of Northumberland attached to this most egalitarian and mundane feature of modern life, rather than to the elegant 19th c. town houses that still constitute Percy Street and Percy Terrace in Alnwick.<br />
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In fact, there is a fascinating ambiguity in the use of Old World names in the settler societies of the New World that is difficult to appreciate without making the journey between them. Was the founder intending to honour the nobility of the country he had left by naming streets after them, or to subtly bring them down to earth by attaching their names to a rough pioneer settlement? There is also the consideration that the Percy and Neville families were bitter rivals and might have taken a poor view of seeing their names attached to parallel streets, to stand side by side on a map for ever more.<br />
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In a new country old names take on new significances and associations that are just as valid as the original ones. The people who go about their daily lives in the shops and cafes of Neville Street don't care tuppence about what the Nevilles of Northumberland were getting up to at the time of the Norman Conquest, and nor should they.<br />
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The original Warkworth is dominated by the ruin of a medieval castle, apparently such a textbook example of a motte and bailey castle construction that school parties regularly go to study it. Warkworth NZ seeks to draw the visitor's attention to its historic cement works. There is a nice parallel there of an Old World building designed to maintain the power of the nobility and a New World facility for producing the material for sheltering ordinary people.<br />
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Let's not get too idealistic though - the most prominent and historic looking buildings in the centre of Warkworth NZ nowadays are this Masonic Hall and the Bank of New Zealand, which is a pretty clear indication of the early residents' priorities.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-40062569404627064572015-12-05T16:32:00.000+00:002015-12-05T16:43:57.671+00:00Debatable Land Heads for the Antipodes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This is the monument to Captain James Cook at Whitby. He stands on the headland of this chilly, windswept piece of the North Yorkshire coast, gazing out to sea. Whitby is outside the usual geographical range of this blog but it just about qualifies as north-east England. At any rate, Arriva buses do a North East Explorer day ticket whose validity stretches to the far side of Whitby, which is good enough for me.<br />
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More importantly, this monument to 'a great Yorkshire seaman' symbolises my imminent departure for Australia and New Zealand. I've been there before, in fact I had visited Auckland before I visited Whitby, which was perhaps a little unusual of me, but made my emotional reaction to the port from which Cook sailed on the voyages of discovery that led to the founding of the modern nations of Australia and New Zealand much stronger than it would have been if I'd remembered it from my childhood. I've just visited the town again and the plaques on this monument made me cry all over again. I know that it is now considered insensitive to talk about 'discovering' a land mass that was already occupied by other groups of people, but I don't believe that invalidates the spirit of adventure and enquiry that prompted the voyages.<br />
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I have also just visited the birthplace of James Cook, for what I'm ashamed to say was the first time ever. It has now been incorporated into a lovely public park in Middlesborough, a city historically part of Yorkshire but now the centre of the modern urban county of Cleveland. Sadly the cottage where the great man was born was knocked down about fifty years later, though luckily he was sufficiently famous by then for the site to be marked. There's now a rather elegant stone urn on the spot, and round the base has been carved Cook's famous remark about wanting to go, 'not just farther than any man has been before, but as far as it is possible for a man to go'.<br />
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This line - at least in a revised gender-neutral version - has been my inspiration and motto ever since I first heard it. It has become confused in my mind with the classic opening of <i>Star Trek</i> about exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new civilisations, but I think that's fine because I'm sure the example of the great sea voyages has influenced the writers of fictional space voyages. One of my friends in NZ told me that Cook literally did go as far as it was possible to go, because he took his ship up to the edge of the ice of Antarctica. But of course the sentiment can also be taken metaphorically. It is absolutely right that it should be carved on the site of the humble cottage where he was born, in what is now an ordinary public park in an unglamorous town. It reminds us that genius can emerge from any background, a fact from which the contemporary British education system seems to be in determined retreat.<br />
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I was able to book my own voyage to Australia and then on to New Zealand with just a few distinctly non-epic mouse clicks. I leave on New Years Eve and arrive on New Years Day - appropriate or what? So this blog will be in a state of semi suspension for a few months. But if I come across anything relevant to the English-Scottish Borders while I'm out there - which is more likely than you might think - I'll post about it. And if there are any seismic political developments at Holyrood or Westminster that will affect the Borders - also not that unlikely - I will be on the case. In the meantime, wish me <i>haere ra</i> (Maori for bon voyage).</div>
Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-24675353610725887822015-10-31T18:59:00.000+00:002015-11-01T11:13:24.125+00:00A Symbol of the End of Empire Moored at the End of the Debatable Land<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Having finally succeeded in divesting myself of my decaying flat in Berwick, I am a newly footloose traveller. Halloween finds me in the Premier Inn on Leith Waterfront, with the reception staff barely visible behind swathes of fake cobwebs. Leith Waterfront is one of those rebranding exercises whereby docks and industries are replaced with soulless blocks of over-priced apartments and a shopping mall. The harbour that my hotel room overlooks is actually that of Newhaven, originally a fishing village just outside Edinburgh.<br />
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The last few days have been what the Scots call 'dreich' and all this photo has to recommend it is that it captures the grey, damp, chilly atmosphere of the east coast in late autumn. The distinctive shape of the Forth Bridge in the background marks the northern limit of the area covered by this blog. Beyond the Firth of Forth, there is no more historically disputed territory, there is only unequivocal Scotland. The Romans surveyed the tribes beyond the Forth and decided they weren't worth the effort of conquering. The Kingdom of Northumbria once stretched as far as the Forth, but its kings never tried to push it any further. I look at the Forth Bridge and it seems to be saying to me: don't come any further, Englishwoman.<br />
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Today I decided on impulse to go round the Royal Yacht Britannia, now permanently moored in Leith dock. It was decommissioned in 1997 in a controversial money-saving exercise and after touring the ports of the UK for a while (I remember it coming to Newcastle) it was sold to a maritime conservation charity and settled down as a stationary visitor attraction.<br />
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The blurb in the exhibition says that Leith beat off the competition from other ports just because it demonstrated the best plans for preserving the ship and making it accessible to the public. At the time though there was some feeling that giving Britannia to a Scottish port was a calculated act of political prudence, at a time when Scots were showing worrying signs of losing enthusiasm for the United Kingdom. It might have been even more canny to send it back to Clydeside where it was built, since Glasgow has proved the least keen on the continuance of the UK of any region of Scotland.<br />
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Today there seemed to be plenty of Scots just as keen on looking round Britannia as visitors from overseas, or from England. Things to do with the royal family are never top of my must-see list, but this was one of the best organised visitor attractions I've been to. See, it even has its own free wifi, presumably for all those people who feel the need to tweet their whereabouts continually to the world.<br />
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Everyone of my generation remembers those photos of newly-weds Charles and Diana waving to their adoring public from the ship's bridge. Today I got to see that very bridge, specially designed for royals to show themselves to the public, complete with teak windbreak to reduce instances of royal ladies' skirts blowing up. We all gazed intently at the bed in the honeymoon room, the only double bed on board, specially installed for Charles and Diana, and tried not to look too prurient even as we all reflected that a cramped cabin with a crew of 150 sailors watching your every move can't have been the best start to married life. The almost unbelievably basic sleeping quarters of the ordinary sailors were part of the tour, a sobering contrast to the luxurious royal rooms. As the sailors lay hunched up in their tiny bunks they must have speculated on what was going on in that double bed two decks above them. They simply must have done.<br />
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I found the experience of touring HMY Britannia more moving than I expected. I remember the scenes when Hong Kong was returned to China and its last British governor sailed away in Britannia in the pouring rain, in what seemed at the time to be the final instance of the flag coming down on a former imperial possession. In its after-life in Leith, Britannia could yet be a immobile witness of the Union Jack descending the flagpole for the last time in Scottish waters.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-19343760327904857862015-10-24T19:21:00.000+01:002015-10-29T16:22:56.676+00:00The Most Scenic Rubbish Dump in the Country<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Everyone who visits Berwick is impressed by its beautiful coastal location, but it may not always occur to those who only associate the seaside with holidays that when you live on the coast the sea view is always there, as a background to the most mundane activities. This is Berwick's rubbish tip. Sorry, 'household waste recovery centre', with an emphasis on the recovery part. I am happy to report that our recycling rates have recently shown marked improvement.<br />
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As you cudgel your brains to work out which skip your items should be tossed into, you can relax for a moment by enjoying the beautiful blue sea in the background. The view is particularly fine from the top of the ramp that leads up to the Rigid Plastics skip. Immediately behind Rigid Plastics is the area devoted to old mattresses, but if you lift your eyes just a little higher, the North Sea stretches out in all its glory.<br />
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It would be nice to think that the view helps to remind struggling recyclers of why it's worth making the effort to stop all that plastic getting into the sea, killing marine wildlife and then ending up back in our own food chain. Carrier bags are a particular menace to any kind of animal or bird that eats fish, because they have evolved to identify a white thing floating in the water as a fish and swallow it forthwith. They then either choke or starve to death as the plastic blocks their digestive tract.<br />
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On 5th October new legislation came into force in England obliging shops to stop giving out free carrier bags and start charging 5p for them. Similar rules have been in force in Scotland for quite some time now and Scots shopping in Berwick have been acting rather superior as the English folk next to them in the queue look confused about it all. It is really remarkable though how quickly we have all got used to it. The number of plastic bags used has dropped like a stone since the legislation came into force. You wouldn't think that 5p would make that much difference, but as someone said to me, they all add up. Personally I think that the real difference it has made is that it is now socially acceptable to put my shopping in my backpack, whereas before it was regarded as a bit weird and hippy-ish.<br />
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A fantastic feature of Berwick for anybody moving house is that the rubbish tip, the new self storage facility and the Salvation Army's shop selling second-hand furniture and household goods are all located within a few minutes walk of each other on the development on the outskirts of the town formerly known as North Road Industrial Estate and now as Ramparts Business Park. The former name was less confusing, as the real ramparts are about two miles away. The Scottish border is a matter of a few hundred yards up the main road from the entrance to the estate, so ours is not only the most scenic but the most northerly rubbish tip in England.<br />
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I have whiled away the months that the English system of property sale takes to grind its weary way to completion (in Berwick you are always aware that it's all different, though not necessarily better, selling a property in Scotland) by disposing of as many of my surplus possessions as possible, and that means I have been spending a lot of time up here. Tip? Donate to Sally Army? Or store it? The fact that the storage unit is immediately past the entrance at the top of a hill and the tip is at the far end of the estate at the bottom of the hill tends to incline me to just chuck it all into storage. I have a feeling that in a year or so's time when I've realised I don't need any of it I may end up just transferring the whole lot down the hill and into those recycling skips.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-7182569781147971802015-09-28T13:47:00.001+01:002015-09-29T11:04:26.882+01:00Berwick Film Festival 2015<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I think that the Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival ought to be re-named the Festival of Film in Caves. Not since the prehistoric painters of Lascaux have so many artistic productions been found in subterranean environments.<br />
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The video installation shown on the left was actually one of the less impressive offerings this year, but Coxons Tower is such a fantastic venue that it makes anything look good. It is the inside of a lookout tower on the defensive walls of Berwick and has striking stone vaulting.<br />
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You can see in this picture that the organisers have had the wonderful idea of installing a couple of real cinema seats in the Tower for viewers of the video. There is something really memorable about sitting in a red plush seat inside a centuries old fortification watching an ultra modern video.<br />
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Several of the other venues on the 'trail' of video art installations are ice-houses. Bleak, dank, echoing man-made caves, effectively, temporarily illuminated by film. You slither down, or up, the muddy entrance paths and pick your way across the uneven beaten-earth floor with a feeling of excited anticipation about what you may see inside. Nobody who has experienced this aspect of the Berwick festival ever forgets it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpDKBkLy6MvIHp3r38h0cDdVMVNXJRwilfPOlPQU0TNc9vMD_GSpu8rW8pAZz9XJn8-I1nZ81J1IthqTN3kw32pMfgBr_JLfxMSacfJ4yYjUYSiLgGxhdcXE4wCAIDy_FUkIbSPzJMlw4/s1600/DSCN0075.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpDKBkLy6MvIHp3r38h0cDdVMVNXJRwilfPOlPQU0TNc9vMD_GSpu8rW8pAZz9XJn8-I1nZ81J1IthqTN3kw32pMfgBr_JLfxMSacfJ4yYjUYSiLgGxhdcXE4wCAIDy_FUkIbSPzJMlw4/s320/DSCN0075.JPG" width="240" /></a>To add to the excitement the festival now has a 'fringe', which has stuck with the subterranean theme by using the empty cellars of a house in the town centre. There seemed to be a smell of stale wine in the air when I visited and this led me to assume that the cellars had previously been used for wine storage, but when I mentioned it one of the young organisers said that it was more likely to be the result of their own activities the night before.<br />
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Most of the art in the 'fringe' house was as good as the official installations, and some of it was better than some of them. Special mention to Carole Lubey's powerful piece, shown left, of an older woman dancing nude, and Brooke Stephens' beautifully observed film of the patterns made by water spreading on a wall and mist rising Gothic-ally from a cemetery.<br />
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To grab the attention of passers-by the location of the fringe house was marked by this piano. I'm told that somebody was playing it some of the time, though I didn't catch that myself. Rather brilliantly, a Northumberland County Council parking permit had been propped on the lid of the keyboard, so that the piano could stand in the car park all day with perfect legality.<br />
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I'm afraid that this year's Festival finished on Sunday 27th September so it's too late to see any of these exhibits now. But do come next year, you will not regret it. </div>
Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-11121324526819490182015-09-15T13:32:00.000+01:002015-09-16T20:12:55.625+01:00The Ruins of Temperance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This is my first posting of photos taken with my new camera. The woman in the shop assured me that it had huge quantities of megapixels and would produce photos of a quality that would make me gasp in astonishment compared with those feeble efforts taken by my old camera. So far, I'm not convinced. But to be fair, it hasn't been trialled in a clear atmosphere yet, because the weather over the last few days has not been dry - unlike the subjects of this post (ha!).<br />
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This is the only surviving wall of the Good Templar Hall in Berwick. The name meant nothing to me at all, I had to google it. Turns out the Good Templars were / are an international organisation promoting the cause of temperance, that is abstention from alcohol. They have their <a href="http://www.iogt.us/" target="_blank">own website</a> if you would like to know more. Only American links come up, the UK branch of their operation seems to have quietly faded away. (If you know differently, please do leave a comment.)<br />
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I learned more about this building from a booklet with the splendid title <i>Berwick's Battle Against Drink</i> by Wendy Bell Scott. I originally bought my copy a couple of years ago from a newsagent while killing time in the main street of Spittal waiting for the Christmas reindeer to appear. My first thought was that, unlike Flodden (q.v.) it is a battle most Berwickers seem to be trying to lose. The book is also <a href="http://www.bluebuttonpublications.co.uk/shop/4585105432/berwick's-battle-against-drink-1830-1900-by-wendy-bell-scott/8305986" target="_blank">available online</a> from a local publishing outfit called Blue Button. Wendy's research started life as part of her studies at the Open University, and I was delighted to see one of my own former O.U. advisers, John Wolffe, featuring prominently in the bibliography. Pious Victorian reformers are one of his things.<br />
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The subject of excessive consumption of booze is still very much a live issue, and Berwick as usual has particular problems because of its position on the border. I'm told that in the past, before I lived here, there was an influx of Scots on Sundays because in those days Scotland took a stricter approach to pubs opening on the Lord's Day than England did. This cross-border situation is likely to be recreated, because the Scottish government is keener than the Westminster one to introduce compulsory minimum pricing for alcoholic drinks, in an effort to reduce consumption. In a <a href="http://debatable-land.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/booze-cruise-berwick.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> I described the likely effect on the parts of England just over the border of suddenly making booze more expensive in Scotland. Thankfully, implementation of the legislation to that effect passed by Holyrood in 2012 is being held up by legal challenges from the alcohol industry. I say thankfully - at a personal level I have always been sympathetic to temperance ideals, but the prospect of my street filling up with Scots who don't share them is not an enticing one.<br />
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God knows our resident English drunks are already a big enough nuisance. The original plans for the restoration of the riverside park included provision for some brave soul to abseil down the steep bank beside the river to collect up and remove all the cans and bottles chucked down there over the years. By now the lower levels must require techniques more closely related to archaeology than to simple litter-picking. Sadly it was reported that the assessment of the bank found it too unstable for abseiling to be safe. And in any case the drinkers can throw the things down faster than the council can pick them up. So beer cans and wine bottles continue to roll out of the undergrowth at your feet and witness to the cause for which the Good Templar Hall was erected.<br />
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P.S. I shouldn't forget to mention that the new leader of the Labour party is reportedly a teetotaller, a welcome survival of the historical association of the temperance movement with socialism, particularly Christian socialism.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-63801548510854614582015-08-27T17:29:00.000+01:002015-08-28T15:03:40.546+01:00Northumbria's Backbone<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Spurred by my imminent house move, I've been once again sorting out the mass of old papers that have descended on me from various deceased members of my family. (It's down to one storage box now - believe me, that's progress.) This booklet was one of the things I came across, and for the first time I've actually read it properly.<br />
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It dates back to the days when a presentation accompanied by projected slides was referred to as a (magic) lantern lecture. On a no doubt freezing February night in 1923 the inhabitants of Chatton gathered in the village hall to hear the minister of the Presbyterian church expound educationally on the Great Whin Sill, an important geological formation that gives the Northumbrian landscape much of its character. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whin_Sill" target="_blank">Wikipedia entry</a> can tell you more.<br />
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I expected this lecture to be a boring technical explanation of the kind that only the desperate tedium of life in a small village in the winter before the advent of television (or even radio) could drive people to turn out for. In fact, it is a romantic, almost mystical, description of the route followed by the stratum of basalt known locally as the Whin Sill, with mentions of all the notable man-made features along the way as well as descriptions of the landscape itself. The Rev. W. Thorp points out that medieval castles, prehistoric fortifications and relatively modern churches are all found on major outcrops of the sill, and muses on how the whin gives us strength and safety. Okay, we can readily agree that builders of all periods would have recognised that a massive chunk of rock was a sensible place to locate your defensive structures, but the minister sounds like some modern believers in earth energies talking about ley lines.<br />
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The really unexpected aspect of this lecture is the writer's conviction that living on basalt has formed the character of the local people. That's why he called the lecture <i>Northumbria's Backbone</i>, meaning that the rock is both geologically and psychologically the backbone of the county. He comments approvingly that Ulster also has large amounts of basalt rock and its people display sturdiness and hardiness similar to that of the Northumbrians. (Remember, he was a Presybterian minister, so his Ulster sympathies would have been distinctly one-sided.) A vaguely plausible mechanism for this - drinking the local water filtered through the rock - is mentioned in passing, but the essential idea is not much better than a piece of sympathetic magic. Hard rocks make hard people.<br />
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This idea is even more batty than the more widespread notion that racial inheritance determines character. One wonders how long the effect was supposed to last after moving away from the nurturing rock. Rev. Thorp says that it surely cannot be accidental that so many famous men and women have been born on whin. On the contrary, Reverend, I think it really can be. And I'm sure that those luckless enough to have been born on the soft chalk rock of the far south of England would take offence at the suggestion that they have therefore not managed to produce any great or famous sons and daughters.<br />
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It must have been a lonely life being the only man with a university education in a Northumbrian village in the early 20th century. One can understand why rural clergy developed consuming interests in some odd subjects. The modern believers in ley lines don't have that excuse. Perhaps such a sympathetic magic approach to life - a mystical identification with landscape - is somehow innate in us. I have more than once heard people who grew up in Northumberland and moved away for a while say that they came back here because they just couldn't bear living in a flat landscape, that they just missed the hills so much.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-4587552351916810562015-08-02T14:00:00.001+01:002015-08-02T14:03:32.917+01:00Berwick Bear Breaks Her Chains<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This terrific image was created by Borders artist Cara Lockhart Smith for the Berwick Trades Union Council to use on its banner. It cleverly references both the chained bear on Berwick's town crest and the famous Marxist advice that the workers of the world have 'nothing to lose but their chains'.<br />
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It is tempting to use this as a starting point for a discussion of the ideological arguments currently convulsing the Labour party, but those national issues are outside the local scope of this blog. I did have a purely local argument with someone over their blind devotion to an idealistic form of Christian socialism which life has cured me of believing in, but I don't want to go into that here either.<br />
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No, this image strikes a chord with me at present because I have finally succeeded in selling my flat. The buyers' faces were lit up with joy at the prospect of owning their very own holiday home on the Berwick quayside. Ah, how well I remember that feeling. Fingers crossed that in their case the feeling lasts at least until after exchange of contracts. The flat was marketed as a 'refurb project' or what my Kiwi friends call 'a fixer-upper', which marks my final admission that domesticity and DIY are perhaps not my strongest skill set and it would be better to let somebody else do it.<br />
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I hope I'm not betraying the whole spirit of this blog if I confess that I am getting a little home-sick for Northumberland. When I moved from Alnwick to Berwick I naively thought that I was staying in Northumberland, but I was very wrong. Berwick has been dragged kicking and screaming into a purely formal membership of that fine county, but it has never stopped resenting it. I told the estate agent that I would only consider buying a new place on the Tweedmouth side of the river, and it says a lot about this area that he did not look in the least surprised.<br />
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He had already told me that the political ferment north of the border has led to some clients deciding to move there because they want to make a definitive commitment to Scotland. I fear that I am starting to feel that I want to make a definitive commitment to Northumberland. Historical Northumberland that is, which includes the great city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Of course, if you want to go all the way back and talk about 'historical Northumberland' in the same way as scholars of the Middle East use the term 'historical Syria', the Kingdom of Northumbria once stretched all the way to Edinburgh. Yes, the present capital of Scotland was once ruled from Bamburgh castle. It was, admittedly, a very long time ago, and no Scot has ever expressed a desire to revert to that particular political regime.<br />
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So there may be a bit of a hiatus in this blog while I sort myself out. But never fear, my loyalty to this region will never fade, and I will continue to write about anything interesting that happens here. In the meantime, please continue to browse my 122 previous posts.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-64807433456139516452015-07-14T15:05:00.001+01:002015-07-14T15:08:22.281+01:00First successful SNP wind-up of Westminster is over hunting, of all things<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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" /><br />
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I confess this is not my own photo, I just copied it from an online library. I could not get a photo of the fox cub referred to in my last post because it was already stressed by the presence of so many humans, let alone by having a flash go off in its face. And I never see a fox in the wild to try to photograph - not in the Borders at least. In London, yes. Last time I was in London I saw a fox running past Victoria coach station and was told that's not unusual. These animals are not stupid, they know that in cities there is more food and less hassle.<br />
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In my last post I spoke too soon about the Conservative government quietly dropping its plans to re-legalise fox hunting. They announced a vote to take place today on liberalising the law to allow larger number of dogs to be used to flush out foxes before they are killed by shooting. At the last minute they cancelled it, apparently out of a fear that they would lose the vote. The Conservatives themselves, in line with tradition, would allow party members a free vote in accordance with their conscience, and enough Conservatives are opposed to hunting to make a majority uncertain when all other parties are also opposed. The Labour party broke with tradition to 'whip' their members to vote against, that is to make it a party disciplinary matter to vote as instructed, or else. The SNP gleefully seized the opportunity to 'remind David Cameron how small his majority is' by instructing all their large new wodge of MPs to vote against as well.<br />
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The irony here is that the law in Scotland is already more liberal than in England and the current plans would simply bring England in line. There was at one time a possibility that fox hunting might be legal on one side of the border and not the other, leading to much disingenuous argument by hunt supporters in the region covered by this blog to the effect that if the fox ran over the border, well, you know, it's not always very clear where the border is out in wild countryside, and you can't expect a pack of hounds to just stop running when they pass it ... So it would be better all round to keep the law of the two countries in line. But some people would rather do that by making Scottish law on the subject less permissive.<br />
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The really delightful aspect of this parliamentary manoeuvring is that the expression 'to whip' MPs derives from fox hunting in the first place. The party officials charged with making MPs do what the party leader wants, sometimes allegedly by means bordering on blackmail, were nicknamed 'whippers in' after the members of a hunt who keep the hounds rounded up and under control. There are other English idioms that come from the same source, such as 'in full cry', an expression sometimes used of 'a pack' of journalists in pursuit of their 'quarry'.<br />
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When fox hunting was first banned in England by the Labour government ten years ago I was quite sad about it, because I had happy memories of being taken along to meets as a child. I never went anywhere near a horse or a hound, we just went along to watch the riders assemble and enjoy the spectacle. Lots of people did that, especially on Boxing Day and New Year's Day, traditionally the two landmark meets of the season, hangovers notwithstanding. But the behaviour of hunt supporters in the decade since then has turned me against them. They have behaved with the most blatant arrogance, preserving the entire apparatus of hunting intact, ready for the confidently expected day when their own political party will legalise it all again, and pretending that it is merely an unfortunate accident when a fox is actually killed by dogs rather than the dogs being called off in time. Regardless of one's views on the ethics of hunting, most of us dislike seeing any group of people behaving as if they are above the law. It is not helping the Conservative party to shed its image as the party of the landed gentry and the large farmer.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-77140804708371583202015-06-20T17:35:00.000+01:002015-07-14T14:36:37.720+01:00Berwick Wildlife Trust Open Day<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Regular readers of my blog may remember that I have always derived much comfort, in the face of the vicious local, national and international politics afflicting Berwick, from the herd of swans who swim serenely to and fro across the border, and that I have always admired the work of the Swan Trust with their motto 'caring for wildlife both sides of the border'. So when I saw that they were having an open day I resolved to go. That was earlier today, and I was not disappointed.<br />
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The Trust was originally formed to protect swans from injury and the effects of pollution, but it has branched out to cover all kinds of wildlife and is officially called the <a href="http://www.swan-trust.org/" target="_blank">Berwick Swan and Wildlife Trust</a>.<br />
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It now has premises out on the industrial estate, named the David Rollo Centre in memory of a local vet who did a great deal of unpaid work for the Trust. Today the centre was housing: three adult swans, two cygnets, a brood of ducklings, two owls, assorted other birds, several hedgehogs, and a fox cub. The man who was answering questions said that they can't cope with otters, badgers, seals or deer. Seals are sent down the coast to Tynemouth or even Norfolk. Otters and anything large are taken in by the SSPCA (like the RSPCA only Scottish rather than Royal) over the border, who have more space and a bigger pond.<br />
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This cute little chap is a herring gull chick. They have lots of those. Apparently at this time of year a lot of chicks injure themselves by thinking they can fly when they can't. How sweet this one looked as he tried to flap his fluffy little wings and squirted out the contents of his tiny bowels! It was enough to make you forget that most Berwickers don't want herring gulls to survive, including me most of the time. Only, with timing so perfect you wouldn't dare make it up, one of the adult brethren of these little balls of fluff flapped his large noisy wings and emptied the contents of his large soggy bowels all over me as I walked through the town centre later this afternoon. That's right, on my <i>head</i>. I had to go straight home and wash my hair. Last year I lost a handbag to a seagull's forcefully ejected waste products. Still, as the man said, 'We are a wildlife trust, we can't discriminate between different kinds of wildlife.' He even claimed that numbers of herring gulls are falling. If they're falling in other parts of the country, that may be because they've all moved to Berwick.<br />
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This cygnet came into the centre because his mother rejected him and tried to drown him. Surely a case for avian social services. One of the adult swans was knocked down by a car on Holy Island causeway after the driver tried to cross before the road was clear of water - yet another example of the damage done by idiots who think they know better than the tide table.<br />
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The fox cub was adorable. There is still a division in rural areas between those who hunt foxes for sport and those who rescue and nurse injured foxes. A small child covered her ears in horror when the Trust worker explained that they feed the cub on day-old chicks, which seems to prove that pro-hunting propagandists are astute to use photos of hens ripped apart by foxes to support their case. Hunting is now technically illegal but hunts are doing everything they possibly can, up to and sometimes beyond the limit of the law, to carry on as before. The Conservative party once promised to re-legalise fox hunting when it was returned to power, but it seems to have quietly let that drop. The hunting-shooting-fishing lobby likes to describe its activities as 'the traditional country way of life'. Actually, the people who give their time and skills free to the Wildlife Trust are just as much true country folk.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-74646134515655819682015-06-04T17:19:00.000+01:002015-06-04T17:22:27.639+01:00Berwick Castle At Peace<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I am conscious that my last few posts have consisted of intemperate ravings about the general election, and feel a need to redress the balance. So here are some pretty pictures of the ruins of Berwick castle on a lovely summer evening (yesterday, in fact).<br />
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Despite its importance as a border fortress, there is not a lot left of Berwick castle, because it was inconveniently occupying the site deemed most suitable for a railway station by the Victorians. I have always admired the confidence in progress that led them to feel no qualms about knocking most of it down. A fine view of the only surviving outer wall can be had from the northbound platform of the station. It continues down the hill to the river, as seen in this picture.<br />
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Some local tourism activists would like to rebuild the castle, or at least erect a gift shop amid the ruins. This seems to me to be: a) barmy b) expensive and c) unlikely to attract visitors who have the option of any number of other castles within half an hour's drive. Castles are pretty much ten a penny in the English Borders. As somebody who grew up in the shadow of one of the most imposing, Alnwick, and regularly played on the beach beneath another, Bamburgh, I have serious castle fatigue. When we went on holiday to Wales during my teens I moaned all the time about being made to tour another load of castles - built of course for the same reason, to maintain English control over another nation of the British Isles. But lots of people from more peaceful parts of England love the things.<br />
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That bird obligingly alighted on those stones at just the right time. When a composition like this comes together in a fine evening light, I remember why I came to live in Berwick in the first place. On a wet Wednesday in January, the ruins just look, well, ruined. There are a couple of benches strategically placed for admiring the views that also provide a home for the local drunks, hence the fine scattering of broken glass all over this ancient monument. In the right mood I appreciate this for the same reason I appreciate the Victorians knocking the rest of the thing down. Life goes on. Some of the activities of medieval people that we research today would have been disapproved of and censored in their own time.<br />
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If you want to know about the history of the castle, read Jim Herbert's blog, Berwick Timelines (linked to in my sidebar). It's more his sort of thing than mine. He has all the dates and facts about the history of Berwick at his fingertips.<br />
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These rooms on the lowest level of the castle, used by the soldiers on duty to keep warm as best they could while keeping an eye out for the enemy, are the only rooms to have survived. I always find it a little creepy when walking past them to the river bank, as shown here. The atmosphere in the tunnel is dark and dank even in the summer. The local drunks treat the cells as convenient waste disposal chutes for their cans and bottles, and the metal grilles installed by the conservation bods make it impossible to reach and remove them. Yes indeed, life goes on.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-44751942149349523382015-05-08T12:22:00.004+01:002015-05-08T13:01:14.940+01:00Never Tickle A Sleeping Lion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Has David Cameron ever read any Harry Potter books? Surely his children must have told him about them at least. So he should know that the motto of Hogwarts school is 'never tickle a sleeping dragon', and yet he has learned nothing from it. A few hours ago Alex Salmond announced that 'the Scottish lion has roared this morning across the country'. This is not surprising to those of us who follow these things closely, because any lion would roar if it had been, not just tickled, but poked and prodded mercilessly for weeks, as the Scots have been by Mr Cameron.<br />
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The Conservative party decided that their best electoral hope was to terrify the English with dire predictions that a Labour government could only stay in power with the support of the Scottish National Party, and that it would thus be forced to allow its leader Nicola Sturgeon, whom it depicted as a combination of Valkyrie and Wonderwoman, possessed of political super-powers, to sweep down across the border and lay waste to England. This kind of rhetoric became more and more absurd as the campaign wore on, and by the final week before polling had crossed the line into being offensive. The final straw for me was when Boris Johnson, wannabe prime minister, said that a Labour-SNP alliance would be 'a jock-alypse'. Even allowing for the fact that Boris is known for his eccentric humour, this is not okay. He would not think it acceptable to coin a facetious term featuring any other ethnic nickname or stereotype, but somehow insulting the Scots is fine. The fact he did not realise that this expression was offensive illustrates the problem.<br />
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The Conservatives have now got what they wanted. The English have rejected the scary Labour party with its nasty foreign allies and returned a Conservative government with an overall majority, in defiance of all opinion polls. The Scots have rejected everybody except the SNP. The most memorable aspect of the night for me was hearing James Naughtie on Radio 4 sounding genuinely shaken by the Scottish results he was reading out. It takes a lot to shake a hardened news and politics presenter like James Naughtie. At one point he used the word 'revolutionary' about what was happening in Scotland, and he was right. This is not a vote for a political party, this is a wholesale rejection of the Westminster government and the present constitution of the United Kingdom.<br />
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The Conservatives are committed to holding a referendum on membership of the European Union in a couple of years time. There is a real possibility that it will return a majority for Yes to leaving in England but for No in Scotland, and Nicola Sturgeon has astutely reserved the right to demand a second referendum on independence if England tries to force Scotland to leave the E.U. against its will. I think she would be right to do so. But the consequences of that are frightening, at least from my viewpoint right on the border. We will once again have to face the bullet we thought we had dodged last September, that Berwick could become the frontier of the E.U.<br />
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I believe there is now almost no question that a second independence referendum would return a Yes majority. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum last September, I pointed out on this blog that the headline figure of 55% favouring staying in the UK should not blind us to the fact that the percentage of No voters had fallen steadily over the course of the campaign. Guess what, it has kept on falling for the last seven months and here we are with the result today.<br />
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There are only so many ways of saying 'David Cameron is an idiot' and I have used most of them on this blog over the past two years. To my great regret he is now an idiot who seems likely to keep being prime minister for another five years. His utterly inept handling of the Better Together campaign and his cynical use of the SNP as a bogeyman to frighten his core support in the south of England has brought us to this point. The only ray of hope I can see right now is that Boris Johnson, who is far more intelligent than Cameron, was on breakfast radio today already talking about the necessity to move towards outright federalism as the only way of countering the demand for full Scottish independence. I completely agree with him, and I hope he does penance for his ill-advised joke by forcing his party to get on with it and by ousting Cameron as PM if he refuses. The United Kingdom will not survive another five years of the Honourable Witterer for Witney.<br />
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Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1349179382901621944.post-45193143659648641082015-05-07T17:08:00.000+01:002015-05-13T13:07:01.598+01:00Tories receive 'every mark of disapprobation' - in 1859<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I am writing this during voting hours for the general election, so I can't tell you who won yet. I've just returned from attempting to mark my cross with a choice of using either a pencil tied on the right-hand side (I'm left-handed, and we're about the only minority group you're still allowed to discriminate against) or a free-range pencil with a broken point. My polling station is the one shown here, which the rest of the time is St Cuthbert's church hall. The clerk told me he was already so tired that he was struggling to read the numbers on my card, because turn-out has been brisk. There is always a rather moving contrast between the extremely low-tech nature of actually voting and the vigour of British democracy. As far as I can see the only technical innovation in the last fifty years has been the provision of a gadget that allows blind people to mark their paper unaided.<br />
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So I thought this would be a good time to write about an election held in Berwick back in 1859, before the introduction of the secret ballot, long before women's suffrage, and after only the most limited reform of the franchise. Michael Cullen, a local historian, has painstakingly researched this subject and written up his findings in this short booklet. I am entirely indebted to him for this information.<br />
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It seems that Berwick was notorious for corrupt practices in elections even by the lax standards of the 1850s, and the goings-on at the 1859 election were even more deplorable than usual. It was regarded as a 'cheap' seat because it only had 1,300 enfranchised residents, and buying that many votes was considered do-able by most candidates, who seem to have treated the matter as a straightforward cost-benefit analysis.<br />
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In those days the voters had to announce their choice of candidate within earshot of anybody who cared to hang around the polling station. This resulted not only in intimidation but in a running total of votes being kept throughout the day, so that the candidate who was behind knew he was behind and would probably go out and drum up some more support by whatever murky means seemed necessary. Although only a small percentage of the adult males of the town had a vote, most of the population had an opinion and did not hesitate to make it known. One local paper reported that ' votes given for the Liberals were received with the most enthusiastic cheering, while those electors who gave their support to the Tories were received with hisses, groans, and every mark of disapprobation'. The other local paper described the anti-Tory protests as 'groans, yells, hisses and cats' noises'. When it was announced that the Tories had won, the crowd broke down a barricade set up to keep them back, over-turned the table being used by the clerks for refreshments, and 'shied' the resulting pieces of broken glass and crockery around the hall. Then they rampaged around the town breaking windows in the houses of known Tory supporters.<br />
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The Liberals decided to challenge the results of the election on the grounds that their opponents had engaged in extensive bribery. This had only been technically illegal since the passing of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1854 and cultural change was lagging behind. Such a formal legal challenge was a recognised custom at the time, and although the fee was very expensive it could be worth it if the outcome of the election was reversed. The procedure was that a Royal Commission was set up to enquire into the matter and numerous witnesses were required to travel to London to give evidence. They were paid a per diem rate for their expenses there, and since it was more than many of the voters earned back home, the result was that some witnesses were dismissed by the judge as being too drunk to say anything useful or even coherent, and at least one was arrested for contempt of court. The judge was also exasperated by the mysterious loss of memory afflicting many of the witnesses regarding the question of payment for their vote, most amusingly in the case of a man who said that he had seen a hand place a coin under his glass in the pub but had never caught so much as a glimpse of the body to which the hand was attached. The final report complained that some of the witnesses had 'prevaricated and perjured themselves with the most hardened effrontery'.<br />
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The picture which emerges from the proceedings is that it was usual practice for the candidates to withdraw several hundred pounds in coins from their banks and present it to their election agents to distribute as they thought best, with many nods and winks. The going rate per vote seems to have been about £2. One voter was brought by train from Beadnell and claimed that the money was for his train fare, but was at a loss to explain why it had been necessary to pay £2 for a ticket that normally cost 2 shillings. Some men accepted cash from one side and then voted for the other. Some happily accepted cash from both sides. Some immediately spent a chunk of the money on getting so drunk that they had to be held up in the polling booth. A policeman stationed on the town walls had reportedly encouraged the crowd to go down and get their share of the goodies, as 'there was plenty going', though he later denied saying any such thing. Some of the ladies of the voters' families had been offered silk gowns. And beyond straight-out cash payments there was widespread 'treating', the lavish purchasing of food and drink for voters.<br />
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The Commission finally found a long-ish list of people guilty of giving or taking bribes. The Tory agent fled the country to avoid arrest. It was generally conceded locally that the Commission ought to have looked more closely at what was going on over on the Liberal side as well, since they were well known to be up to all the same tricks. Michael Cullen wonders if hostility to the Tories locally was driving support for the case. From their behaviour on polling day, it certainly seems that anger was widespread among those who had no vote towards those who did have one and sold it to a hated party.<br />
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More disturbing than actual bribery is the evidence that loss of employment was a real possibility for a man who voted in a way disagreeable to his boss or a potential future boss. One voter said he had only voted for the Tory candidate because he expected him to offer his son a job. The introduction of compulsory secret ballot in 1872 removed this fear, and it also removed much of the incentive to bribe, since a candidate had no way of knowing whether he had got his money's worth. In the long run, though, it was only the extension of the franchise that ended routine bribery, as the number of voters became un-affordably large.<br />
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I have some concerns that the rise in postal voting at the present time may be re-introducing some of the 'corrupt practices' of the 1850s. Over the last fifteen years or so there have been numerous reports of people selling their postal votes on Ebay, handing them over to strangers in the pub in exchange for a drink, or allowing helpful candidates to fill the forms in for them. But I can't believe that this is typical of the 21st century voter. Even in 1859 there were reportedly some Berwick voters who refused bribes and told the agents they were not to be bought. Looking at the number of people waiting to use the broken pencil in the church hall today, I believe that their spirit lives on. </div>
Elaine Housbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09140752781171688757noreply@blogger.com0