Northumbria's Backbone

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.

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 Wikipedia entry can tell you more.

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.

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 Northumbria's Backbone, 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.

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.

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.

Berwick Bear Breaks Her Chains

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

First successful SNP wind-up of Westminster is over hunting, of all things

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Berwick Wildlife Trust Open Day

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.

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 Berwick Swan and Wildlife Trust.

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.

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 head. 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.

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.

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.

Berwick Castle At Peace

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never Tickle A Sleeping Lion

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tories receive 'every mark of disapprobation' - in 1859

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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.