Booze Cruise Berwick

This is the 18th century guardhouse in Berwick known as the Main Guard. Originally it was located in the town centre and was, well, the main guard point. After the end of the Napoleonic wars the authorities stopped worrying about anyone invading and scaled down the garrison in Berwick. The locals complained a lot that having a guardhouse in the middle of the high street was obstructing the traffic. The authorities were looking around for job creation schemes for unemployed former soldiers, and shifting the guardhouse seemed to fit the bill. So it was dismantled and rebuilt just off the Walls, out of everybody's way. They made a good job of it and you would never think to look at it that it had ever been anywhere else. The building was restored and cleaned up a while back and is now rented from English Heritage, who own it, by Berwick Civic Society, who put on an exhibition about local history in there every summer.

What visitors really like however is not the interesting historical information or the attractive exterior architecture, but a small, dank, windowless room inside the building known as the Black Hole. It has a flagged floor uneven enough to require a warning notice, bare whitewashed walls and the original heavy wooden door. It is usually full of the Civic Society's junk and looks like a particularly off-putting version of everybody's cupboard under the stairs. What was it for? visitors invariably ask. Well, it was the 18th century version of a drunk tank. People who were picked up for being drunk and disorderly were locked up in the Black Hole overnight with no fire, light, bedding or, one fears, sanitation, before being hauled before the magistrates in the morning. Every time I've told this 'horrible history' to a visitor they have promptly replied 'they could do with using it again these days!'.

The police in Berwick are still shovelling drunks off the streets and into cells every Friday and Saturday night and often other nights as well. The problem here seems at the moment to be no worse and no better than anywhere else. (I've always thought there are more unpleasant drunks in Alnwick, but that's a controversial view.) The situation could though be about to get completely out of hand. The Scottish government is introducing a legal minimum price for a unit of alcohol which would have the effect of raising prices on many of the most popular drinks, particularly those sold very cheaply by supermarkets. I'm all in favour of this. The problem is that it's not a UK wide policy yet. Holyrood is going ahead with the scheme while Westminster dithers. The result will be that alcoholic drinks in Scotland will suddenly become more expensive than in England. And what do you think that's going to mean for Berwick? Yes - car loads of Scots driving to our local supermarkets to stock up. If they take it home before they drink it that might not be so bad, but my guess is that we'll also see a lot of inebriated Scots staggering along the river paths to join the inebriated English who are already a permanent fixture there.

This issue turned into a party political row when the Labour group on Northumberland County Council called on the council to seize the opportunity to promote the north of the county as a 'booze cruise' destination for Scots. I grieve to see members of the Labour party lose touch so completely with their temperance roots. They were promptly condemned by the Liberal Democrats on the council and by our local MP Alan Beith, who is a LibDem and an active Methodist. I don't think they meant us to take the term 'cruise' literally, they were just using the analogy of those day trips across the Channel to stock up at the Calais hypermarket. My local newsagent though seemed to have taken it that way when we discussed the matter as he sold me my copy of the 'Tiser last week. The only place cruises would be able to sail from would be Leith, he said, and would it be worth the fare? Don't laugh- it all depends how many cans you buy after you dock.

Lifeboat Fete Season

This is the Berwick lifeboat Joy and Charles Beeby being launched last Sunday. Not for an emergency thankfully, purely for exhibition purposes at the annual fundraising fete held on Carr Rock, Spittal, where the lifeboat station is situated. I love lifeboat fetes. All of the RNLI stations down my stretch of the coast, and presumably everywhere else as well, hold one over the summer. The dates are co-operatively chosen so that no two fetes within travelling distance of each other are held on the same day. Should you so desire you can support the lifeboat fetes at (from north to south) St Abbs, Eyemouth, Berwick, Seahouses, Amble and Cullercoats in any one summer. The most fun bit is watching the crews demonstrate their rescue techniques. One of them will cheerfully jump into the water, light a coloured flare and wait for the boat to zoom flashily around the harbour before homing in on him and hauling him aboard. A couple of years ago in Amble the display was based on a vessel bearing the somewhat non-p.c. name of Chav Boat whose occupants were enthusiastically demonstrating the dire consequences of heavy drinking and rowdiness on the water. So long as it's not needed anywhere for real the RAF search and rescue helicopter will also take part, winching a man up from one boat and depositing him gently on another one in a way that is really quite impressive.

The modern Facebook-friendly mascot of the RNLI is Stormy Stan, seen here obligingly posing for me. He works along the same lines as Santa Claus, embracing small children while their parents take a picture and then with a bit of luck put a donation in the bucket. The crew member behind him is wearing the indoor uniform of the service. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a remarkable phenomenon - a vital emergency service operated entirely by volunteers. You wouldn't set it up that way if you were starting from scratch, but it's developed gradually over nearly 200 years into a service that works perfectly, and if it ain't broke don't fix it. The RNLI attracts enormous public affection and loyalty and never has any difficulty in raising enough money for its running costs. Having grown up on the coast I had always assumed that people inland did not know or care about it, so I was taken aback the first time I saw someone rattling a tin for the lifeboats in the centre of Birmingham, which is as far from the sea as you can get in the British Isles. I spoke to the tin-rattler and learned that she was a native Brummie who barely knew the coast, yet shared the general admiration for 'the charity which saves lives at sea'.

Remember the Tweedmouth Salmon Queen? This is her again. One of the more challenging duties of the role is the requirement to arrive at Carr Rock on a lifeboat and pick her way gingerly up the launching ramp, wearing a lifejacket over her gauzy gown. Her young attendants have to do likewise. The mayor is standing at the top of the ramp to welcome them. Eagle-eyed viewers may notice that this is a different lifeboat, called Barclaycard Crusader. It's based at Eyemouth, the next station up the coast, and accordingly was displaying a Bonnie Scotland banner. The name always makes me giggle,but I suppose that sponsoring lifeboats is one way for Barclaycard to fullfil the Corporate Social Responsibility Mission Statement which it no doubt has filed away somewhere. This ceremonial landing is solemnly announced over the loudspeaker as 'the arrival of the civic party', and the really clever part is that the tide has to be at just the right height to facilitate it. The organisers have to pore over tide tables before they fix the date as well as liaising with half a dozen other fete committees. So make it worthwhile for them by buying an RNLI torch or teatowel, and please, I beg you, don't be one of the idiots who force the volunteers to risk their own lives in a rescue attempt that would never have been necessary if the rescue-ees had shown some basic maritime common sense. There are too many of them nowadays.

Alnwick Music Festival

This week I bring you some pictures from a little further south than usual but still well within the territory historically disputed between England and Scotland, the town of Alnwick. This town is best known for its large and showy castle and the recent development of part of the castle grounds into a horticultural theme park known as the Alnwick Garden, but since that's had quite enough publicity already I don't propose to add to it here. Alnwick International Music Festival has been, as some of its banners proclaim, 'welcoming the world to Northumberland since 1976', without any help from the Castle, solely through the hard work and dedication of a small band of volunteers. A stage is set up in the marketplace and visiting groups perform traditional dances and songs from many countries all day, every day for a week, weather permitting. When weather does not permit, which is often, the whole operation moves into the hall seen here behind the stage.

This is the Lithuanian group Zemaitukas. The Baltic states are now frequent visitors to the festival, possessing as they do the organisers' preferred combination of an unrestricted right of entry to the UK plus an attractive national costume and lively traditional music. Here they perform on a sort of horizontal harp, the name of which I'm afraid I didn't catch. I was interested to learn that they come from the town of Klaipeda, because that name often features in the reports of activity in Tweed Dock as the next destination of ships calling in there.

A friend of mine regularly volunteers as a 'group host', which means caring for the every need of a particular visiting group throughout the festival. Some of them are more trouble than others. This year she has had to make three trips to hospital with her accident prone charges. A few years back she had to smooth over a nasty spat arising from an unfortunate confusion of the Slovenian and Slovakian flags. (Since the organisers of the London Olympics managed to mix up the flags of North and South Korea, I think that the Alnwick volunteers can be forgiven for that.)

This is a Russian family group who perform under the name of The Family Tradition Ensemble. They have attended the festival several times; the daughter first trod the boards in Alnwick when only just able to toddle on stage. I nicknamed her the Infant Phenomenon, after one of the members of a family group in a Dickens novel.  As you can see she is an infant no longer, but still a phenomenal performer for her age. This is a good opportunity for me to send greetings to all my Russian readers, of whom Blogger Stats tells me I have a surprising number. I hope you like Family Tradition's crowd-pleasing version of the Russian bear.

Apart from the obvious problem of trying to raise enough funds to feed and shelter a hundred or so international performers for a week every year, the main headache for the organisers is visa problems. Every year at least one of the groups listed in the programme is not actually in evidence, after failing to secure the necessary immigration documents. This year the no-show is from India. Perhaps surprisingly, a group of Mexicans have made it past the UK Borders Agency without incident. As restrictions on immigration to this country grow ever tighter, it is sadly becoming difficult to welcome the music and dance of some regions of the world to Northumberland.

'Isles of Wonder'

At precisely 8.12 am on Friday 27th July the bells in the tower of Berwick town hall, also known as the Guildhall, started ringing. We are used to hearing the ringers practice every Thursday evening but the sound of a joyful peal at such an ungodly hour awoke confused folk memories of V.E. Day in me as I stumbled between bedroom and bathroom. It was, of course, the national celebration of the start of the Olympic Games dreamed up by the artist Martin Creed. He also suggested that individuals should ring their door bells or make a noise on pots and pans, but thankfully nobody round my way took him up on this. Considered as a piece of art, this struck me as requiring not much more thought on his part than his famous lump of blu-tack stuck on a wall, but as an expression of national relief that after seven years of preparation the Olympics were now, for better or worse, amongst us, it was a pretty good idea.

Regular readers of my blog may recall that the parish church of Berwick has no bell tower because it was built under the puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell, and so bells were installed in the Guildhall when it was built in the next century. (For more on the church see the post of  10.5.12.) They may also recall that the seagulls in Berwick are a dratted nuisance, and so will not be surprised to see a gull flying towards the camera at the bottom of the picture. I do have seagull-free photos of the Guildhall, but I quite like this one.

The nearest the Olympics have come to us is Newcastle, which is hosting some of the football matches. The train station and city centre are covered in signposts to the St James Park ground printed in a bright bubblegum pink which comes as a shock in a city where football fans bleed black-and-white. LOCOG have apparently decided that even if nothing else is memorable about these Games the colour scheme will be, so pinks and purples are everywhere. From the train I thought I saw the Olympic rings hanging on the Tyne Bridge, but when I went down to the quayside to get a photo I couldn't see them anywhere. I suspect I was standing too close to the base of the bridge, but in any case, given the ferocious brand protection exercised by the IOC they'd probably get this blog shut down if I posted a photo of their symbol.

This window display was snapped in a sports shop in Marygate, the main shopping street of Berwick. It is not entirely clear why any visitors to this country would want to buy their souvenirs of London 2012 in Berwick rather than in, say, London, which may be why all Olympic souvenirs now have 20% off. Except the replica torches, which have enjoyed an inexplicable popularity.

I used to be a hard-core Olympic refusenik but I was completely won over by the fantastic opening ceremony. The next day I held my head a little higher as a proud citizen of what Danny Boyle called the Isles of Wonder. Only a few killjoy Tories have dissented from the rapturous reception given to the ceremony. They thought it was 'leftie' - which was exactly why some of us liked it! Considered within the particular remit of this blog, there seemed to be nothing to upset any of the 'nations and regions' of the UK. Danny Boyle scrupulously segued from Jerusalem's celebration of England's green and pleasant land to traditional songs from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (alphabetical order, in other words). The uniforms of Team GB look a lot more blue than red, so that should gladden the hearts of Scots. And one of the young athletes who lit the cauldron comes from Westruther in Berwickshire, very much part of the Debatable Land. Take a bow, Callum Airlie.

The Commonwealth Games of 2014 are being held in Glasgow, which Scottish nationalists calculate will generate a surge of national pride that will translate into votes for independence in the referendum to be held in the same year. There is nothing at all 'debatable' about Glasgow, indeed a city with a stronger identity or more clearly defined sense of its place in the world would be hard to find. But it is within day-tripping distance of Berwick, and after enjoying the Olympics so much more than I expected I am seriously thinking of attending some events at the Commonwealths. I'll be the one not waving a saltire. 

'A Wake for the Salmon'

Following on from last week's Salmon Queen festival, the boats appeared this week on Gardo Stell, next to the Old Bridge on the Tweedmouth side of the river. This is now the only salmon fishing stell in regular annual use. The camouflage effect of the boats' blue paint is not ideal for a photographer. I assumed this traditional colour was designed to hide them from the fish, but I'm told it is chosen as the colour most visible at night. One boat remains on the sandbank where they are based, not visible in this picture but exposed at low tide, while the other end of the net is attached to the second boat and a man rows round in a circle to spread it out. After waiting a while for the fish to swim into it the net is winched back in. Part of the process can be seen in the photo on the right, taken last year in admittedly failing light.

I was once walking across the bridge on my way back from the supermarket when I saw the men despatching a net full of fish on the sandbank by clubbing them. The contrast between my bag full of packaged, processed food and the emotionless killing of the salmon gave me a jolt. It had a primal quality which reminded me of Hemingway's novella, The Old Man and the Sea. It is easy to romanticise fishing, and I was probably guilty of this when I first came to Berwick, but it is a hard, tough trade which has to battle constantly against the vagaries of both nature and the commercial market. The Tweed is one of the great salmon rivers of the world, and the fish from here reportedly sell for astonishing prices in restaurants abroad, but not much of the profit reaches the men who catch them. Nor do the fishermen share my own love of the seals, since they are competitors for their livelihood.

Local photographer Jim Walker made a prolonged study of the salmon fishing industry. For this post I have borrowed the title of his best known book, A Wake for the Salmon. This is now out of print and the main collection of his work available is By Net and Coble. If you have any interest in the subject I advise you to look at this book. Jim's work has an elegiac quality because he was documenting an industry in steep decline, in the years immediately preceding the closure of the Berwick Salmon Fishing Company.

I'll end with an image from the float parade which concluded Tweedmouth Feast. Young Rebekah was chosen to wear the Salmon Queen's crown, according to the committee, because of her obvious pride in coming from Tweedmouth. So the place is far from finished yet.

P.S. The Berwick Advertiser had the cheek to get the chair of the Feast committee to ask us in her opening speech to send it any good photos we took of the event. It seems that nobody did, because the photos in today's edition are rubbish. Dream on 'Tiser, I'm keeping my photos for my own publication.

The Tweedmouth Salmon Queen

The main event to report this week is the crowning of the Tweedmouth Salmon Queen this evening. In the foreground of the picture is the boat in which the Queen and her attendants arrived, a type of boat traditionally used for salmon fishing known as a coble. For this event the boat is mounted on wheels and pulled by a van. On the stage set up in the public gardens on the river bank the new Queen waits to be crowned and her predecessor waits to give her farewell address, watched by sister royalties the Eyemouth Herring Queen and the Spittal Gala Queen, while the chair of the organising committee welcomes a formidably long list of local dignitaries. The local scout troop forms a guard of honour with flags.  A genuinely enthusiastic local crowd claps every speech and jockeys for prime photo-taking position. 

A group of bagpipers precedes the coble playing A Scottish Soldier, a song associated with the local regiment, the King's Own Scottish Borderers, who used to be based in the Barracks in Berwick. Yes, I know that Berwick is not in Scotland anymore and that Tweedmouth has never been in Scotland, but that's just the way things are round here. In fact a procession of swirling kilts and skirling pipes never really goes amiss anywhere. They performed again at the end of the official proceedings, with much pleasure to all.


The crowning of the Salmon Queen is the central event of the Tweedmouth Feast, a festival marking the feast day of St Boisil to whom the parish church is dedicated. The custom of having a festival on the feast day of the patron saint of the local church is widespread and ancient. St Boisil, also spelled Boswell, was a monk at Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders and has the distinction of having predicted a great future for the young Cuthbert, the most famous Northumbrian saint. Because salmon fishing was the main source of livelihood in Tweedmouth in times gone by the Feast developed as a celebration of the peak salmon run. The weather vane of the parish church is in the shape of  a salmon. 

The custom of choosing a local girl as the Salmon Queen though dates back only to the 1950s. An exhibition on the history of the event held recently in the Guildhall made this clear. Although originally they seem to have been slightly older, the Salmon, Herring and Gala Queens are now always girls of 16 or so and a large part of the curious charm of these events comes from watching mature people with prominent positions in local society ceding precedence to a teenage girl. The great excitement this year is that the organising committee of Tweedmouth Feast has revived the practice of holding a parade of floats as part of the festivities. We look forward to seeing that on Sunday afternoon. For those readers not familiar with the concept of a float in this sense, it means a group of people in costume standing on the flat bed of a decorated lorry representing some organisation or theme, usually in a humorous fashion. They are called 'floats' because the concept dates back to the parades of decorated river barges of earlier centuries. So it would be even better if the Tweedmouth Feast could one day follow the example of our national Queen and put on a river pageant instead.

These are the two young attendants of the Queen in the back of the official coble. The excitement and sense of occasion on their faces is delightful. I really like the Salmon Queen event because it is a perfect combination of ancient custom, fairly recent custom and whatever people enjoy doing right now, without having had any false historical consistency imposed on it by the heritage industry. While waiting for the arrival of the 'principals' the crowd buys ice creams and burgers and listens to pop music over the p.a. system. After the crowning the vicar leads us in a prayer to 'God the creator of the salmon, the creator of the Tweed', and we all make a half-hearted attempt to take our hands out of our pockets and listen respectfully. Then the new Salmon Queen lays a wreath on the adjacent war memorial and a lone piper plays a lament, so the mood turns sombre for a while. But after that the 'principals' sweep away again in the coble and everyone who hasn't already been to the burger van makes a dash to the local chippie, your correspondent included. Great stuff. 

The Cross Border Twins

The story of the Anglo-Scottish twins has received extensive media coverage this week, and I've decided to join in. To read the full story, look at www.berwick-advertiser.co.uk. I can't show you any directly relevant photos without breaching copyright, so here are a couple of pretty pictures of bridges instead. One of them shows 'twin'  swans, geddit? Oh well, please yourselves.

The parents of these twins live in Wooler, a small town about fifteen miles south-west of Berwick. Their mother went into labour early on 1st July and gave birth to the first twin at home. An ambulance then took her to the nearest hospital, the Borders General, just outside the Scottish town of Melrose, where the other twin was born. Result: an English son and a Scottish daughter. Their father has joked about buying them English and Scottish football shirts respectively.

The only unusual thing about this story is that the unexpectedness of their arrival caused one of the babies to be born at home. Residents of the far north of England routinely receive treatment at Borders General hospital as well as Wansbeck hospital in mid-Northumberland. If you suffer a medical emergency and need to be rushed to hospital, the one you end up in will depend not only on the nature of your problem but on where exactly you live, where the ambulance has come from and which place you can be got to quickest in the prevailing road and weather conditions. During the heavy snow a couple of years ago one unfortunate woman in labour had to be air-lifted out of gridlocked traffic. And of course when a resident or visitor on Holy Island has a heart attack during the highest six hours of the tide, which seems to be a not infrequent occurrence, they can only be reached by air or boat. The air ambulance normally flies to a Newcastle hospital where there are helicopter landing facilities. On the other hand, if you collapse in Cornhill then a quick cross-border dash by road to Melrose will probably be the best option.

The future of health services in the event of Scottish independence becoming a reality is the greatest concern that residents of the English Borders have about the SNP referendum proposals. I hope that whatever happens we will never see a situation where any hospital would refuse to admit a woman in premature labour, no matter what her nationality might be. But it may very well be the case that an independent Scotland would not be prepared to pay for residents of England to receive routine health care in its hospitals. If that were so then people in Berwick, Wooler and the surrounding villages will face longer travelling times to hospital, a longer wait for emergency ambulances which are coming from further away and possibly even having to change their GP, because several GP practices have cross-border catchment areas. So far the SNP have said nothing beyond vague reassurances on this subject, and nobody believes that Alex Salmond has ever thought it through.

I once had a frustrating experience trying to get an SPCA inspector to come and rescue an injured bird in Berwick. The English branch based in Newcastle said that Berwick was too far to travel and the Scottish organisation said that they do not work over the border at all. Will we ever see the day when a phone call seeking help for an injured human produces the same response?