The Desolate North East

Greetings to all my readers from the desolate, remote and uninhabited North East of England. The description of the area as uninhabited came as a particular shock to those of us who live here. Yes, our home region was described thus last week by Lord Howell, who is none other than the father-in-law of our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. The noble lord felt that it would be terrible to ruin the beautiful rural environments of Southern England by extracting shale gas there ('fracking'), but that there were areas of the country where nobody would be disturbed by this, notably the North-East. The headline in the Newcastle Journal next day was simply: "What on earth is he talking about?"

The photo above is a memento of a period in the 1970s when the powers that be in the South got the same idea about there being nobody much in Northumberland to be bothered by having unpleasant industrial processes dumped on them. At that time it was the waste products of nuclear power stations. They wanted to bury radioactive waste in the Cheviot hills. Needless to say this went down like a lead-lined balloon with the locals and there was a very active campaign of opposition, which incidentally provided my earliest exposure to the experience of political protest. Of course if we had accepted the expansion of the nuclear power station programme in the 1970s we might not have needed the large scale development of wind turbines which are getting local folk so worked up now - but then they're not proposing to put nearly as many of them in the Home Counties either.

The interesting thing about the form of words used by Lord Howell is their clear implication that sparsely populated areas of the South are rural, beautiful and unspoilt, while sparsely populated areas of the North are remote, desolate and uninhabited. Apparently his imagination will not stretch far enough to embrace the concept that the remote landscapes of Northumberland might be worth preserving in their unspoilt beauty as well. This has, sadly,confirmed all our stereotypes about the narrow life experience of those running the country. It has probably also made a good few people living here at the far end of North East England wish that the border could be moved just a few miles south and free us from being ruled by the likes of the Howells and the Osbornes once and for all.

Tweedmouth Feast 2013

I'm very late posting about this year's Salmon Queen crowning (due to the internet problems mentioned in my previous post) but better late than never. It took place on Thursday 18th July during the period of glorious weather we've been enjoying this summer.

Here is the moment when Queen Annie was formally invested with the crown and robes. She made a charming acceptance speech to the effect that she has lived in Tweedmouth all her life and it is an honour and a privilege to be chosen as Salmon Queen.

My fellow blogger Jim Herbert was chairing the Tweedmouth Feast committee this year. Here he is welcoming us to the festivities. Jim's blog, Timelines, is linked to in my sidebar. He knows an awful lot about historic buildings.

After the crowning the new queen and her attendants always lay a wreath at the war memorial adjacent to the riverside park where the festivities are held. It is in some respects an incongruous ritual but one very expressive of genuine folk culture (as opposed to the kind dreamed up by quangos and tourism boards).

As I watched the teenage party process away from the memorial in the dazzling evening sun, I reflected that their generation is growing up to think it normal to be at war.

Summer on the Historic Bank of the Tweed

This is a fun picture, isn't it?  These upcycled old shoes are in the courtyard of the youth hostel near my home. The young staff there are very hard working and full of enthusiasm. I am sitting in their cafe as I write this, using their broadband network. My home one was recently disconnected (don't ask), which is why you haven't heard much from me for a few weeks. Now I feel so much at home in here that I'm wondering if it's worth getting reconnected in my real home.  Check this hostel out, come and stay here on the quayside in beautiful Berwick!

This lovely planter full of lavender is a rare example of something really beautiful being provided by the council. It's in the Tweedmouth street known as Parliament Close, a quiet and pleasant group of houses that look nothing like the location of a major historical event. A small plaque on a wall records that this land on the flat south bank of the river Tweed was the location for what we would now call a summit meeting between England and Scotland, to hammer out the position of the disputed border once and for all. They settled for making the river the border. It's moved slightly north since then.

A Tweedmouth Gravestone Links British Past and American Present

Summer is here at last and the roses climbing the wall of Tweedmouth parish church are in full bloom. There is something about the combination of living plants and ancient graves that gives old churchyards their charm.

There are many interesting headstones in Tweedmouth churchyard, enough to supply material for several blog posts. This time I would like to say something about the small stone shown below. It was pointed out to me by my friend Priscilla, who is very knowledgeable about the history of North Northumberland and tells me something interesting every time I see her.

The writing on this stone is only just legible and the date of death has sadly now sunk below the level of the soil, but it is certainly one of the oldest stones in the churchyard and probably no later than the early 18th century.

If you can get your zoom cursor onto it you should be able to confirm that it says 'here lies the boody' of the deceased, with a double O, rather than 'body' in the modern spelling. My friend thinks this just indicates that the stonemason was poorly educated. I prefer to believe that it represents the actual pronunciation of the word locally at that time.

I had to study Shakespeare's play Henry IV (part 1) for my English O' level, and I remember the notes to the book explaining that the reason so many of Shakespeare's jokes are just not funny any more is that the shift in pronunciation of some words means that his puns don't always work to a modern ear.  In Act I Scene 2 Falstaff refers to himself and his dodgy mates as 'squires of the night's body'. The notes explained that this is a pun on 'knight's body', a squire of the body being a recognised role in a knight's household, and 'night's booty', Falstaff and his cronies being practised highway robbers. This pun was not, according to these notes, as strained as it seems now to us, because to the contemporary audience the words 'body' and 'booty' sounded almost identical.

I then forgot all about this for twenty years or so, until I saw the film Boyz in the Hood, which at the time was innovative in its depiction of young African-Americans in Los Angeles. The way they used the word 'booty' reminded me of Falstaff. Since that film came out the term has spread into general slang on both sides of the Atlantic - as in the famous Beyonce 'booty shake'. In this usage the word 'booty' means, of course, 'body' in a specifically sexual sense.

I want to assure my American readers that, while you may be more familiar with the regrettably snobbish attitude adopted by many Brits to 'Americanisms' in speech, there are also plenty of Brits who are fascinated by the way that modern American English has preserved features of older British English which have now been lost in the country of their origin. I would love to think that there is a direct line from the 'boody' lying in an 18th century grave on the English-Scottish border to the flamingly alive 'booty' of Beyonce and her compatriots.

P.S.  A few months after I wrote this post, the graveyard was given a clean and tidy-up and as a result the lower part of this stone is now visible. The date of death appears to be 1714.

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An Earlier Percy Wedding

My previous post may have led some readers to believe that there has been enmity between the Housbys and the Percys for generations. Not so!  My grandparents were present in Westminster Abbey for an equally spectacular Percy wedding back in 1939. My grandfather was chairman of the local council at the time and in this capacity got to go to many interesting events.  Lady Diana Percy was married to Viscount Brackley in grand style only a few months before the outbreak of World War II.

The yellow card below is the golden ticket that actually got you into the Abbey, the larger white document is the formal invitation. On the inside are directions to Syon House, where the reception was held. This is the Northumberlands' official London residence, though it's actually in Brentford. Well, that's what this 1939 invitation says, anyway, though in modern times the rather downmarket associations of Brentford have led the custodians of the house to prefer to describe it as 'in West London' or 'just across the Thames from Kew Gardens'.

The lower picture in this newspaper cutting shows an elderly woman wearing the traditional costume of Cullercoats, an old fishing village that is now a suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne. My grandmother has written on one of the cuttings that they saw Mrs Donkin seated in the Abbey in her fishwife's outfit. One wonders what the high society guests made of her. She must have been one of the last women to wear this costume 'for best'.

The imminence of war lends poignancy to these mementoes of a happy occasion. My grandmother has also written on the cutting that the wedding reception at Syon House was the last time they saw the young Duke of Northumberland, brother of the bride. "He was killed at Dunkirk."

Ça Ira

I can't believe I don't have any photos of St Michael's Church, Alnwick, but I don't. Apparently it was such a taken-for-granted part of my life for so long that I never bothered to photograph it. So instead I have scanned the cover of an old guidebook to show you what it looks like. This serves the additional purpose of proving that my family has been involved with St Michael's for a long time. Observe the pre-decimal price.

I was christened in St Michael's church and the funeral services of both my parents and of many other people I was close to were held there. So as far as I'm concerned, this is my family church. The Duke of Northumberland, his heirs, successors and hangers-on, are at liberty to regard it as their family church as well, even though their attendance is generally limited to turning up on Christmas Day and sitting in a row in the special ducal seats down the side of the chancel, at a right-angle to the rest of the congregation and featuring comfortable cushions and fancy wood carving that the rest of us have to do without. And since they are formally resident in the parish they are entitled to hold their weddings there, even if they do spend a lot of time out of the parish, at their London residence or at their private home in the Scottish Borders, purchased reportedly as a bolt-hole to escape the visitors to Alnwick Castle whom they expect the rest of the town's inhabitants to welcome with open arms.

Do not, however, expect me to be unequivocally thrilled when one of the Percy daughters gets married in St Michael's church wearing a dress that I'm guessing probably cost as much as some families in the parish earn in a year and invites half the royal family to be her guests. All I know so far about yesterday's 'society wedding' in Alnwick is taken from grudging peeks at the website of the Northumberland (for which read Alnwick) Gazette, which in relation to the Percy family habitually displays a degree of fawning adulation for an unelected local leader seldom seen in a newspaper outside North Korea. If you want to see the pictures, go ahead, click on this link, because you won't see any of them on this blog. During the preparation (for which read massive hype and tourist promotion) for the wedding the paper was reporting that the family hoped the whole town would see it as 'their' wedding. Given the level of security necessitated by the number of royals present, I can't see that this can mean much except that they were all encouraged to stand for hours in indifferent weather waiting to cheer as the procession of their betters walked past. But to be fair, there was a firework display at night to reward them. The ducal family are well known locally for their fondness for very large, very loud and very late firework displays.

A few years back the oldest Percy son modelled for a statue of Harry Hotspur, the scion of the family immortalised by Shakespeare. I made a point of being out of town for the unveiling ceremony. In fact I went to Paris for a few days, where I stood in the Place de la Bastille and sang a few snatches of  La Marseillaise and Ça Ira, two songs of the French Revolution. (Don't worry, the Parisian traffic was far too noisy for anyone to be able to hear me.)  Since then I have taken the more constructive step of  leaving Alnwick permanently. At the time Lady Melissa was walking down the aisle I was sitting in a park in Berwick enjoying performances by a string of great local bands, congratulating myself on my good sense in moving out of the feudal zone.

When my mother died some close friends of our family planted a tree in her memory in the churchyard of St Michael's. I like to think that some of the HRH-es may have thrown it a passing glance. I'm sure it will grow better after the light of the royal countenances has shone upon it.

P.S.  Some time after writing this post I visited my friend Margaret in Alnwick. She is a church warden at St Michael's and in this capacity she could have been present at the wedding service if she had so wished. Instead, she announced that she was sure her fellow wardens could manage without her and took herself off to visit her family on the other side of the country for the weekend of the celebrations. Respect!

Beautiful Spittal

This week I've decided to big up Spittal, a village semi-detached from Berwick that never seems to get as much recognition as it deserves. It has one of the best beaches on the Northumbrian coast and yet hardly anyone is cashing in on this. The sum total of the facilities available in Spittal, other than pubs, is one cafe, a shop which is closed on Sundays, and one grossly inadequate set of public toilets. Meanwhile Berwick itself is awash with coffee outlets, probably  more than it can sustain. If I had a wodge of capital to invest in a business, I would be setting up a rival cafe in Spittal.

Spittal Gala is taking place this weekend and the publicity for it in the local paper made me think. The paper commented that this annual festival is usually assumed to have its origins in the fishing industry, as with the Tweedmouth salmon festival, but that in fact 'galas' are always associated with mining. And Spittal was indeed a mining town in the past. A 'directory' of Northumberland published in 1855 says that the inhabitants of Spittal are 'mostly fishermen and pitmen'.  This is a valuable reminder that mining was not confined to stereotypical 'it's grim up north' style towns. In some parts of Northumberland the coal seams extend under the sea and so some pit villages are on the coast. Spittal used to have extensive factory operations as well, but the big chimney seen in the photo is now the only survivor of those. It is a much loved landmark, the sign of being back home when seen from the window of the train. Certain interest groups would like to knock it down and cover the whole of the Point with houses. N-O-O-O!  Another suggestion is to cover the chimney in some sort of shiny cladding so it looks like a space rocket. I quite like that idea.

 The heritage industry (which, as regular readers will have gathered, I dislike) seems to have trouble processing such conflicting images. A place can be branded as a picturesque fishing village or a family-fun seaside resort or a former mining community or a former industrial site, but not all of them. Spittal is a wonderful miniature example of how real communities just do anything they need to do to get by and have fun whenever they can as well.  Shine on, you crazy chimney.