The Calm Before the Storm

This is Bank Holiday Weekend in England, that is, Monday is a public holiday. In Scotland they will be at their desks as usual on Monday, having had their summer public holiday on 4^th August.  The Scots are more sensible than the English in this matter, because late August is in fact pretty much autumn and the sight of cagoule clad families trudging glumly along a rain-swept beach trying hard to pretend that they are enjoying a wonderful summer seaside break becomes a little saddening after a few decades.

This picture of the bridges of Berwick upon Tweed is the same one I used in my very first post on this blog, over two years ago now. At that time the referendum on independence for Scotland seemed far in the future and not many people outside Scotland were taking much interest in the subject. It is now less than a month until the ‘indyref’ and nerves are wound increasingly taut. In Scotland lifelong friendships have been strained by differing voting intentions for the indyref and even here in Berwick where we don’t have a vote, we approach the subject very cautiously when talking to our Scottish friends. As September 18^th hurtles towards us, thoughts of what the future might hold for us here on the border loom ever larger. So while we still can and it is still officially summer, please let us all just chillax for a bit.

The Tweed has been described as a great Scottish river that enters the sea in England.  It is comforting to watch every day the ceaseless flow of its waters and know that they answer to no politician and care not whether they are classified as being in England or in Scotland or as forming the border between the two. Every day the tides rise and fall exactly at the times printed in the handy booklet supplied by the local angling shop, according to the dictates of the moon and not of any human agency. Today, for example, high water was at 14.39 and low water will be at 20.38 and no latter-day King Knut can change that. 

 The herons stalk stoically up and down the mudbanks of the estuary at low tide, gazing fixedly into the water for a passing fish. The impudently mobile fish themselves create many bureaucratic headaches for the officers of the fisheries protection patrols who, even without full Scottish independence, have to follow rules about how far into the neighbouring authority’s waters they are allowed to pursue fishing malefactors. (They have the right of ‘hot pursuit’ but not to just hang around on the off-chance of spotting known villains with their illegal crab-pots down.) 

The swans swim serenely to and fro across the border and the good people at the Berwick Swan and Wildlife Trust care for them when they are injured on either side of it, as their motto says.

As we worry over the prospect of border controls becoming necessary in the future, and fret about the possibility of needing a different currency to go shopping in the next town up the road,  it makes me envy their freedom. In the words of the song, “birds fly over the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?” 

Memories of World War One

Monday is the centenary of the start of the Great War for Civilisation, as it was known at the time. I have very mixed feelings about the unstoppable tide of reminiscences of war that is engulfing us this year, but it does give me a reason to show you a photo I’ve been wanting to share for a while now. 

This is a picture of my grandfather, Jack Rowsell, and two of his mates at a Northumberland Fusiliers training facility (possibly Fenham barracks in Newcastle), dated 1910. It is difficult to be certain which one is him under those hats, but my best guess is the one in the  middle. He sent it to the young lady who would later become my grandmother and wrote on the back, ‘Please don’t laugh too much or woe betide you when I come on furlough’. You can see what he was worried about. That rig-out does indeed seem more likely to make his girlfriend giggle than swoon with admiration of his manly physique.  

Jack and Amy married in 1914, probably at least partly because of a desire to secure the entitlements of a soldier’s wife as Europe moved towards war. They and their three daughters then spent the next thirty years living the life of an army family in various colonies and troublespots before retiring back home in Alnwick.

Both of my grandfathers were fortunate enough to survive the Great War and to be laid to rest in Alnwick cemetery only after achieving their three-score-years-and-ten. This is a photo of the cemetery. It has a rather fine avenue of trees down the centre, though that has never made me feel any better about having to attend an interment there.

On my last visit there I noticed the gravestone of a man with the given name of Verdun. Sure enough, he was born in 1916 soon after the Battle of Verdun. It seems that his parents got carried away on a surge of patriotism and sympathy for France. Their unfortunate son then had to live out the rest of the twentieth century burdened with that moniker. I strongly suspect that he was always known as Dun.

It reminded me that Amy, my grandmother, had a close friend who was always known as Effie but who had actually been christened Euphrates. I have seen the name on her gravestone and so know that this is not just a family legend. The inscription gives her middle initial as T, which irresistibly suggests that her second name might have been Tigris, though I don’t recall anyone ever saying it was. The story went that the vicar who conducted her christening was so outraged that he initially refused to baptise her unless the parents came up with a more suitable name, but he was for some reason eventually won over. In relation to the theme of war, this is a rather melancholy reminder that there was once a time when the region now called Iraq meant nothing to people in Northumberland except that its rivers had rather pretty names.

The Clay Pipe Makers of Tweedmouth

When I was living in Alnwick I had a phase of poking about the area in between the wall of Hulne Park and the modern housing estate of Barresdale which a century or more ago used to be the town rubbish tip. It was not necessary to take a spade to find something interesting, all kinds of intriguing oddments were lying about on the surface or only partly covered.

Among other things I found loads of old clay pipes. Hardly any complete ones, because - duh!  - nobody would throw away an unbroken one, would they, but lots of bowls and stems. Here is a selection. Note that the one back right says Tweedside Cutty and the stem of the more-or-less complete one is stamped Berwick. I did not think anything much of this at the time as I also found examples stamped Newcastle. But since I have been living in Berwick I have thought that I should really find out more about the Tweedside stamp. Enquiries in the local vintage shops met with blank looks.

So last week I went to consult the Berwick archivist, the fantastically knowledgeable and always helpful Linda Bankier. She immediately produced two articles about the firm of Tennants (sometimes spelt Tennents), who ran a clay pipe making factory in Tweedmouth from at least 1844, when their purchase of the business is recorded, to 1915, when it burned down. The factory evidently already existed on the site at an earlier date under different ownership. The site in question is the one at the end of this alleyway next to what is now our local convenience store. It is not possible to access it any more as it is now the back yards of several private houses. According to the article in the archives loads of pipes have been dug up in the neighbourhood - mostly faulty batches, which it seems they disposed of by just burying them in the yard.

The factory was literally just over the road from Tweed Dock, and the blocks of clay would arrive by ship and then be trundled down the alley. The street at right angles to the shop frontage shown here is called Kiln Hill, but until I talked to Linda I never knew that this is a reference to the kilns in which the clay pipes were baked. And one house on Kiln Hill now calls itself Pipe House, in homage.

The archives record that Tennants pipes were sold and used over a wide area on both sides of the border, so it is not surprising that I dug some up on the Alnwick tip. But it is surprising that I then ended up walking past the site of the factory where they were made nearly every day, without realising it.

The Berwick Curfew Run

When Berwick was a town under strict military control, a curfew bell rang at 8 pm, for about quarter of an hour. Or to be precise, apparently, for 13 minutes. A fun annual event for local sporty types is to try to run around the town walls before the bell stops ringing. The guide to walking the walls says that it takes an hour at a leisurely pace, so running all the way round in a quarter of that time is a challenge. On a sunny summer evening the walls are a blissful place to be. For this year’s race the glorious weather we have been having recently decided to leave us. But the view is still beautiful. 

The runners assemble outside the front gate of the Barracks, seen here, and then move up onto the grassy ramparts adjacent to it for the start. (You can read my post about the Barracks here.)

The curfew bell could not actually be heard from where I was standing, which was disappointing, since I can hear bells from my home further round the walls. Next year I think I'll just watch from  my front steps.

Club shirts were seen being worn by the Tweed Striders, the Chirnside Chasers and the Runduns, who I’m guessing come from Duns. The last two are towns on the Scottish side of the border, so this event is yet another example of the cross-border community life we value so much and hope to be able to preserve.

On top of the steady drizzle there was a stiff breeze blowing (there usually is here) and I am sad to report that my hat blew off and landed just over the lip of the embankment in this photo, perched on the very edge of the sheer wall below, in a spot completely inaccessible from either the top or the bottom except at imminent risk of breaking my neck. 

As I gazed at it longingly, a boy of about eight came alongside me and said, ‘that’s a steep drop’. Well done that child for paying attention during the health and safety briefing. There are notices at intervals around the walls warning of the Dangers of Steep Drops, for the benefit of walkers who are either completely lacking in common sense or under the influence of an unwise combination of alcohol and bravado. Last year a woman was pulled over the edge by her dog, but reading the notices probably wouldn’t have helped in that case.

I decided that on the whole it was better to have no hat than to have no functioning head to put it on, and went home without it, wet. In any case, I originally acquired it free as a perk of my stewarding duties when a visitor to the Civic Society exhibition left it behind. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

P.S. I have just been to watch the 2015 curfew run, and got the chance to ask one of the organisers whether the bell actually rings. The answer, sadly, is No, because the curfew bell is now so fragile that it would probably not withstand fifteen minutes of vigorous ringing. They promised me that this year the ordinary bells of the Town Hall would be rung for the run instead, but they never were.

The World Cup: 'Anyone But England'

The football World Cup is once more upon us, and my local pub, the Barrels, known for real ale and live music, has replaced the live music with televised football for the duration. Here on the border, supporting England is a delicate business. There are certainly some England flags to be seen flying proudly on houses and cars round here, but not nearly as many as I used to see when I was working down south. Shops in Berwick are wary of putting large red-and-white ‘come on England’ type displays in their windows. According to the figures produced by the local regeneration activists, 65% of shoppers in Berwick are resident north of the border, and no trader wants to alienate 65% of their customers. Some of the Barrels’ regular clientele will only have gone along last night to cheer if England lost, and the English team obligingly gave them an enjoyable evening.

Several World Cups ago, back in 2002, I attended a conference in Belfast while it was on. As I drank my coffee in the local McDonalds, a radio commentary on an England match was playing in the background for the benefit of the customers. So far, so typical of anywhere back home. Then an outburst of cheering by the young staff behind the counter indicated that a goal had been scored, and it took me a few moments to realise that it was England’s opponents who had got the ball in the net. Having grown up close to Scots who behave the same way, I took this in my stride. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the Scots will confine themselves to gloating over the football and not follow the Irish example into any more direct physical manifestations of their dislike of the English.

Of course this sort of antagonism between near neighbours is not confined to the UK. When I was travelling in New Zealand I saw a tee-shirt that said ‘I support two teams – New Zealand and whoever is playing Australia’. I can confirm from personal observation that when Australia is playing England in a cricket test match the Kiwis will cheer for England. The attitude of Kiwis to Australia is not dissimilar to that of the Scots to England. They know it’s bigger and richer and a lot of them are obliged to go and work there and it doesn’t really feel like a foreign country, but OMG they want the world to know that their loyalty will always be with the smaller place they call home.

The real problems come when the England and Scotland football teams play each other. People in Berwick stay indoors and close the shutters then.  Joke!  I think.

At Last, a Serious Political Debate in Berwick

I live very close to Berwick youth hostel and go to its excellent cafe quite a lot. The manager, Sion Gates, is an able and energetic young man and has now pulled off something of a coup by organising the only public debate on the implications of the Scottish independence referendum for Berwick, in the said cafe. Many thanks and congratulations to him for swimming against the tide of political apathy engulfing Berwickers, many of whom seem like they won’t notice there’s anything out of the ordinary going on until the day they find their shopping trip interrupted by a police checkpoint.

I took this photo last summer in the hostel’s courtyard. At the time I just thought it was cute but now it kind of looks like a metaphor for different political institutions growing out of different ideological old shoes .... or something

At 6.40 last night I crossed the courtyard, showed my numbered ticket (no. 5 out of 110, I am very proud to report) and was in plenty of time to get a seat near the front.  My dominant impression of the evening is of the sheer pleasure of being in a room full of people who were all serious about and engaged with current events. The tone of the debate was heated but good-humoured.

The speakers were, on the No side, our Conservative candidate for the next Westminster election and a LibDem former MSP for the area just north of the border, and on the Yes side, an SNP minister in the Scottish government and some bloke from the Radical Independence Campaign. For full details see this photo of the poster. 

I have to say that I was not impressed by the RIC guy, who delivered the same sort of Left-Green speeches he has probably given a hundred times before with no real concession to the fact he was now on the other side of the border. The SNP minister, though, impressed me – he was personable and well briefed and managed to sound like he really cared about the English borderlands. The two No speakers both came across as very committed to the entirety of the Borders and they emphasised the sheer uncertainty of most of the variables involved and the impossibility of knowing exactly how Berwick would be affected by independence.

Unfortunately for Mrs Trevelyan, however, her position was undermined by her own party leader just last week, when David Cameron promised to give the Scots powers to set their own taxes even if they vote No. Since he worked hard to keep this option off the ballot paper, conceding it now makes it look as if he has been out-manoeuvred by the nationalists, and the SNP speaker last night correctly pointed out that it is simply ‘dishonest’ for any unionist to claim that the status quo is an option any more. I think myself that if Scotland raises income tax we would see a welcome flight of working people into Berwick, but most questioners last night were more concerned about the negative implications of Scotland reducing corporation tax to attract more investment.

The debate was chaired by Jim Herbert, a local historian whose blog Berwick Time Lines is linked to in my side-bar. It took me a while to recognise him because it was the first time I’ve seen him wearing a suit. (Sorry Jim.) He gave an introductory sketch of the historical background to Berwick’s unique situation, which included the suggestion that we may now be seeing a return to the position between 1603 and 1707, when the monarchies of England and Scotland were united but their parliaments and legal systems were not. I have never heard it put like this before and there is something reassuring about having Scottish independence presented as a return to a past situation rather than something radically new.

Except of course that in 1603 there was no European Union .... The Yes campaign believes that the idea that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to join the EU in its own right is mere posturing and bluff, and that the EU is desperate to keep countries in it at all cost and won’t let them leave if they try. I agree with this myself. However, I felt that the Yes speakers ducked the question of what will happen if a re-admitted Scotland is forced to join the Schengen common travel area while RUK stays out. That’s when the police checkpoints would pop up just north of Berwick’s largest supermarket.

The  most reassuring thing I gained from the debate was the panel-wide assurance that Berwickers will still be able to use Scottish health facilities. Since our nearest general hospital is north of the border, this has been a big worry locally. The SNP  minister stated unequivocally that the plans for an independent Scotland include a commitment to the maintenance of cross border health services, free at point of use, just like now.  So, as one questioner forcefully explained, we now only need to persuade the two national ambulance services to transport patients across the border, which they usually refuse to do even at present.

At the end Jim asked for a show of hands for and against independence for Scotland. The vote was pretty much evenly split, but since I know for a fact that there were some committed Yes supporters from north of the border in the audience, it was not an entirely fair vote. He also asked whether anyone would support independence for Berwick and a number of hands went up, including mine. I do seriously believe that the best option for Berwick would be to become a tax haven in the manner of the Cayman Islands  Pity we don’t have their climate

Jokers and Thieves

This fine piece of calligraphy was created by local artist Arthur Wood for the Watchtower art gallery here in Berwick. The picture loosely evokes the building housing the gallery (originally a church) and the text is of course the lyrics of the classic song All Along the Watchtower. As I gazed at it during my most recent visit to the gallery, it occurred to me that the lyrics describe the current political situation in Berwick with an almost uncanny accuracy.

There must be some way out of here

Said the joker to the thief

There’s just too much confusion

I can’t get no relief.

There is an awful lot of politics going on here just now, and all of it is confusing. The impending referendum on independence for our friends on the other side of the Scottish border would be quite enough on its own.  Indeed, it was reported this week that cinemas in Scotland have decided to stop accepting advertisements by either side in the independence debate, because movie-goers at the end of their tether have complained that they go to the cinema to get away from the saturation coverage of the wretched referendum.

Then, on 22^nd May we had elections for the European parliament. As usual only about a third of the electorate turned out to vote in these, but the ones who did seem to have been motivated by an extreme level of fed-up-ness with the present government and all its local associates.  The UK Independence Party (whose only real policy is leaving the European Union) gained the most votes of any party nationally and came second after Labour in this area.  Under the peculiar voting system used for the European elections whereby MEPs are parcelled out in job-lots of three per large region, North East England now has two Labour and one UKIP members of the European parliament. Both Conservative and Liberal Democrats, who historically have behaved as if North Northumberland were a football to be passed between the two of them and all other parties were playing in some lower league, sank to ignominious third and fourth places.

The way that the debate over EU membership relates to the debate over the future of the UK is brain-torturingly hard to follow, especially for Scots. Basically: if you are a Scot who wants to stay in the UK but leave the EU, you vote UKIP; if you want to leave the UK but stay in the EU, you vote SNP; if you want to stay in both the UK and the EU you can vote for any of the three older parties; and if you want to leave both the UK and the EU, you currently have no major party to vote for. Meanwhile, those of us just over the English side of the border put our heads in our hands and just hope that none of the possible permutations of outcomes involve building a big wall across the motorway.

With all this going on you might think that members of Berwick Town Council would be gravely concentrating on the bigger picture and putting aside individual differences in a manner befitting the local government of a community on the front line of the most important political questions of our time. Instead, they have just plunged themselves into an extraordinary piece of in-fighting that to an outsider displays a combination of viciousness and pettiness that only very small towns can manage. I don’t wish to get into the details and personalities, merely to reflect that the town council appears to do almost nothing of any importance but to take itself with a seriousness inversely related to its usefulness. Some of its members are now calling loudly for the council to be dissolved pending new elections. This would seem to be a rather risky strategy - they might find that nobody missed it.

And just to round it all off, someone has written to the local paper suggesting tongue-in-cheek that, given recent unfortunate events in that country, the question of whether Berwick is still at war with Russia ought to be clarified as a matter of urgency. This hoary old story dates to when Berwick was a separate legal entity; the declaration of the Crimean War  listed 'England, Scotland and Berwick upon Tweed' as belligerents but the peace treaty concluding the war allegedly mentioned only England and Scotland.

I wouldn’t want to suggest (honest, m’lud, I wouldn’t) that any politicians - locally, regionally, nationally or internationally - are ‘thieves’, but a right pack of jokers they most certainly are.