The Scotland of the South

Hello again from the southern hemisphere. I am still working my way around New Zealand by bus, and have now made it right down to the bottom end, to the province of Otago. This is the statue of Rabbie Burns in the centre of the city of Dunedin. When I first saw it I was impressed by this evidence of the residents' devotion to literature, or perhaps to the egalitarian ideals of the poet. I then discovered that the city was founded by a Rev. Thomas Burns who was a nephew of Rabbie, and deduced that erecting a great big statue of his famous uncle was a way of perpetuating the family name somewhat more subtle than putting up a great big statue of the founder himself.

Dunedin is the old Gaelic name for Edinburgh - it is still used in modern Gaelic - and the settlement in Otago was a conscious attempt to re-create Edinburgh in a new land. The main street of Dunedin is called Princes Street. Other streets in the central city are called George, Stuart, Moray, Hanover and St. Andrew. There are suburbs called Mornington and Corstorphine. Luckily the discovery of gold in Otago later generated the wealth to enable the New Edinburgh to be built in a fitting style.

The city's coat of arms shows a Maori and a Scottish Highlander standing side by side. In fact, apparently, Lowlanders were actively preferred for migration to the early settlement, as they were felt to be more sober and Protestant, and the names of the small towns in Central Otago sound like a lullaby of home to a visitor from the Scottish Borders: Roxburgh, Teviot, Ettrick, Kelso. There is even a Berwick just outside Dunedin.

It seems that when raising sheep in the rolling hills of Otago became a big thing, Highlanders were then thought the best people to do it, hence the man with the kilt and the crook. Though, to be honest, most of the Scottish diaspora seems to have adopted tartan-ism as the most obvious signifier of the old country, without bothering to distinguish Highland and Lowland traditions. The motto means 'by following in the steps of our forefathers'. My O' level Latin can't really see that in it but I will have to take the word of Dunedin city council.

I am writing this in the city of Invercargill, on the very tip of the South Island, with only a few small islands between it and Antarctica. The weather here would make any migrant from the Debatable Land feel right at home. I've had to finally pack away the hot weather clothes and buy an anorak.

 The town was named after the William Cargill commemorated on this plaque, the joint founder of Otago. Note the motifs on the corners of the plaque. The image of the thistle entwined with the fern has long been the symbol of the Scots in New Zealand, as in this 19th c. poem, while the juxtaposition of the fern and the Southern Cross constellation anticipates the design of the proposed new NZ flag.

The glorious thing about Invercargill is that all of the streets in the city centre are named after Scottish rivers. The main shopping area is on Dee, Tay and Esk streets. Keep going and  you come to Spey, Clyde, Don, Forth, Ness. Most poignantly to a Borderer, there are streets named Jed, Gala, Eye, Yarrow, and yes, Tweed. They've even allowed the Tyne to sneak in. The southern gales blow me through a permanent memory of home, a lyrical grid plan of settlers' nostalgia. I can't decide if I feel homesick or I feel at home. Probably the early settlers experienced the same ambivalence.

Warkworth's Namesake in New Zealand

In my last post some weeks ago, when I explained that I was about to depart for Australasia, I promised that I would post about anything I came across there that seemed relevant to the remit of the Debatable Land blog, and this seems to fit the bill.

Warkworth is a village in North Northumberland, about twenty minutes' drive from Alnwick, where I grew up. Yesterday I visited the town of Warkworth in New Zealand, which was named after the Northumbrian one. The tourist blurb describes it as a 'captivating historic village', and while in truth it is increasingly becoming a commuter suburb of Auckland, from where it is less than an hour's drive north, its setting on the bank of the Mahurangi river is not dissimilar to Northumbrian Warkworth's lovely location on the bank of the river Coquet.

Warkworth in Northumberland has a sign at the entrance to the village announcing that it is twinned with Warkworth in New Zealand, so I was happy to see that the latter returns the favour. Although at present the sign is somewhat obscured by the flowers of the southern hemisphere summer, you can see that Warkworth NZ  has sibling and friendship arrangements with a number of other places too.

According to the New Zealand History website, Warkworth NZ was founded by John Anderson Brown, who bought the land in 1843 and named the town after his birthplace in Northumberland.

 He went on to name one of the original streets after Alnwick, and of course I just had to go and check that out. After labouring some distance uphill in heat of around 30 oC, I was rather disappointed to find that Alnwick Street is, at least to the British eye, a not particularly historic looking stretch of unremarkable houses.

Before doing this I called in to the visitor information centre - in New Zealand these are given the rather brilliant name of the i-site - and found the staff less excited about the arrival of a visitor from Northumberland than I hoped they might be. They did though let me have an original copy of the leaflet with the map in, rather than the photocopy they were giving everyone else due to leaflet stocks having reached a critical level. I asked them how they pronounce Alnwick - in the original town the l and w are elided to end up with Anick, but the street named after it is just pronounced the way it looks. This got me wondering whether John Anderson Brown pronounced it that way himself or whether the Northumbrian pronounciation was gradually lost over time. Alas, we may now never know.

Lilburn Street, also seen here, is named after another village in Northumberland. The Lilburns were a prominent family among the Border Reivers, but that probably wasn't the association intended for the street.

Less commendably in my eyes, Mr Brown named several streets of his new settlement after families of Northumbrian nobility - Percy, Neville and Bertram. It was some consolation to see that the main feature of Percy Street is now a large branch of the appropriately named New World supermarket chain. I found it pleasing to see the family name of the Duke of Northumberland attached to this most egalitarian and mundane feature of modern life, rather than to the elegant 19th c. town houses that still constitute Percy Street and Percy Terrace in Alnwick.

In fact, there is a fascinating ambiguity in the use of Old World names in the settler societies of the New World that is difficult to appreciate without making the journey between them. Was the founder intending to honour the nobility of the country he had left by naming streets after them, or to subtly bring them down to earth by attaching their names to a rough pioneer settlement? There is also the consideration that the Percy and Neville families were bitter rivals and might have taken a poor view of seeing their names attached to parallel streets, to stand side by side on a map for ever more.

In a new country old names take on new significances and associations that are just as valid as the original ones. The people who go about their daily lives in the shops and cafes of Neville Street don't care tuppence about what the Nevilles of Northumberland were getting up to at the time of the Norman Conquest, and nor should they.

The original Warkworth is dominated by the ruin of a medieval castle, apparently such a textbook example of a motte and bailey castle construction that school parties regularly go to study it. Warkworth NZ seeks to draw the visitor's attention to its historic cement works. There is a nice parallel there of an Old World building designed to maintain the power of the nobility and a New World facility for producing the material for sheltering ordinary people.

Let's not get too idealistic though - the most prominent and historic looking buildings in the centre of Warkworth NZ nowadays are this Masonic Hall and the Bank of New Zealand, which is a pretty clear indication of the early residents' priorities.

Debatable Land Heads for the Antipodes

This is the monument to Captain James Cook at Whitby. He stands on the headland of this chilly, windswept piece of the North Yorkshire coast, gazing out to sea. Whitby is outside the usual geographical range of this blog but it just about qualifies as north-east England. At any rate, Arriva buses do a North East Explorer day ticket whose validity stretches to the far side of Whitby, which is good enough for me.

More importantly, this monument to 'a great Yorkshire seaman' symbolises my imminent departure for Australia and New Zealand. I've been there before, in fact I had visited Auckland before I visited Whitby, which was perhaps a little unusual of me, but made my emotional reaction to the port from which Cook sailed on the voyages of discovery that led to the founding of the modern nations of Australia and New Zealand much stronger than it would have been if I'd remembered it from my childhood. I've just visited the town again and the plaques on this monument made me cry all over again. I know that it is now considered insensitive to talk about 'discovering' a land mass that was already occupied by other groups of people, but I don't believe that invalidates the spirit of adventure and enquiry that prompted the voyages.

I have also just visited the birthplace of James Cook, for what I'm ashamed to say was the first time ever.  It has now been incorporated into a lovely public park in Middlesborough, a city historically part of Yorkshire but now the centre of the modern urban county of Cleveland. Sadly the cottage where the great man was born was knocked down about fifty years later, though luckily he was sufficiently famous by then for the site to be marked. There's now a rather elegant stone urn on the spot, and round the base has been carved Cook's famous remark about wanting to go, 'not just farther than any man has been before, but as far as it is possible for a man to go'.

This line - at least in a revised gender-neutral version - has been my inspiration and motto ever since I first heard it. It has become confused in my mind with the classic opening of Star Trek about exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new civilisations, but I think that's fine because I'm sure the example of the great sea voyages has influenced the writers of fictional space voyages. One of my friends in NZ told me that Cook literally did go as far as it was possible to go, because he took his ship up to the edge of the ice of Antarctica. But of course the sentiment can also be taken metaphorically. It is absolutely right that it should be carved on the site of the humble cottage where he was born, in what is now an ordinary public park in an unglamorous town. It reminds us that genius can emerge from any background, a fact from which the contemporary British education system seems to be in determined retreat.

I was able to book my own voyage to Australia and then on to New Zealand with just a few distinctly non-epic mouse clicks. I leave on New Years Eve and arrive on New Years Day - appropriate or what? So this blog will be in a state of semi suspension for a few months. But if I come across anything relevant to the English-Scottish Borders while I'm out there - which is more likely than you might think - I'll post about it. And if there are any seismic political developments at Holyrood or Westminster that will affect the Borders - also not that unlikely - I will be on the case. In the meantime, wish me haere ra (Maori for bon voyage).

A Symbol of the End of Empire Moored at the End of the Debatable Land

Having finally succeeded in divesting myself of my decaying flat in Berwick, I am a newly footloose traveller. Halloween finds me in the Premier Inn on Leith Waterfront, with the reception staff barely visible behind swathes of fake cobwebs. Leith Waterfront is one of those rebranding exercises whereby docks and industries are replaced with soulless blocks of over-priced apartments and a shopping mall. The harbour that my hotel room overlooks is actually that of Newhaven, originally a fishing village just outside Edinburgh.

The last few days have been what the Scots call 'dreich' and all this photo has to recommend it is that it captures the grey, damp, chilly atmosphere of the east coast in late autumn. The distinctive shape of the Forth Bridge in the background marks the northern limit of the area covered by this blog. Beyond the Firth of Forth, there is no more historically disputed territory, there is only unequivocal Scotland. The Romans surveyed the tribes beyond the Forth and decided they weren't worth the effort of conquering. The Kingdom of Northumbria once stretched as far as the Forth, but its kings never tried to push it any further. I look at the Forth Bridge and it seems to be saying to me: don't come any further, Englishwoman.

Today I decided on impulse to go round the Royal Yacht Britannia,  now permanently moored in Leith dock. It was decommissioned in 1997 in a controversial money-saving exercise and after touring the ports of the UK for a while (I remember it coming to Newcastle) it was sold to a maritime conservation charity and settled down as a stationary visitor attraction.

The blurb in the exhibition says that Leith beat off the competition from other ports just because it demonstrated the best plans for preserving the ship and making it accessible to the public. At the time though there was some feeling that giving Britannia to a Scottish port was a calculated act of political prudence, at a time when Scots were showing worrying signs of losing enthusiasm for the United Kingdom. It might have been even more canny to send it back to Clydeside where it was built, since Glasgow has proved the least keen on the continuance of the UK of any region of Scotland.

Today there seemed to be plenty of Scots just as keen on looking round Britannia as visitors from overseas, or from England. Things to do with the royal family are never top of my must-see list, but this was one of the best organised visitor attractions I've been to. See, it even has its own free wifi, presumably for all those people who feel the need to tweet their whereabouts continually to the world.

Everyone of my generation remembers those photos of newly-weds Charles and Diana waving to their adoring public from the ship's bridge. Today I got to see that very bridge, specially designed for royals to show themselves to the public, complete with teak windbreak to reduce instances of royal ladies' skirts blowing up. We all gazed intently at the bed in the honeymoon room, the only double bed on board, specially installed for Charles and Diana, and tried not to look too prurient even as we all reflected that a cramped cabin with a crew of 150 sailors watching your every move can't have been the best start to married life. The almost unbelievably basic sleeping quarters of the ordinary sailors were part of the tour, a sobering contrast to the luxurious royal rooms. As the sailors lay hunched up in their tiny bunks they must have speculated on what was going on in that double bed two decks above them. They simply must have done.

I found the experience of touring HMY Britannia more moving than I expected. I remember the scenes when Hong Kong was returned to China and its last British governor sailed away in Britannia in the pouring rain, in what seemed at the time to be the final instance of the flag coming down on a former imperial possession. In its after-life in Leith, Britannia could yet be a immobile witness of the Union Jack descending the flagpole for the last time in Scottish waters.

The Most Scenic Rubbish Dump in the Country

Everyone who visits Berwick is impressed by its beautiful coastal location, but it may not always occur to those who only associate the seaside with holidays that when you live on the coast the sea view is always there, as a background to the most mundane activities. This is Berwick's rubbish tip. Sorry, 'household waste recovery centre', with an emphasis on the recovery part. I am happy to report that our recycling rates have recently shown marked improvement.

As you cudgel your brains to work out which skip your items should be tossed into, you can relax for a moment by enjoying the beautiful blue sea in the background. The view is particularly fine from the top of the ramp that leads up to the Rigid Plastics skip. Immediately behind Rigid Plastics is the area devoted to old mattresses, but if you lift your eyes just a little higher, the North Sea stretches out in all its glory.

It would be nice to think that the view helps to remind struggling recyclers of why it's worth making the effort to stop all that plastic getting into the sea, killing marine wildlife and then ending up back in our own food chain. Carrier bags are a particular menace to any kind of animal or bird that eats fish, because they have evolved to identify a white thing floating in the water as a fish and swallow it forthwith. They then either choke or starve to death as the plastic blocks their digestive tract.

On 5th October new legislation came into force in England obliging shops to stop giving out free carrier bags and start charging 5p for them. Similar rules have been in force in Scotland for quite some time now and Scots shopping in Berwick have been acting rather superior as the English folk next to them in the queue look confused about it all.  It is really remarkable though how quickly we have all got used to it. The number of plastic bags used has dropped like a stone since the legislation came into force. You wouldn't think that 5p would make that much difference, but as someone said to me, they all add up. Personally I think that the real difference it has made is that it is now socially acceptable to put my shopping in my backpack, whereas before it was regarded as a bit weird and hippy-ish.

A fantastic feature of Berwick for anybody moving house is that the rubbish tip, the new self storage facility and the Salvation Army's shop selling second-hand furniture and household goods are all located within a few minutes walk of each other on the development on the outskirts of the town formerly known as North Road Industrial Estate and now as Ramparts Business Park. The former name was less confusing, as the real ramparts are about two miles away. The Scottish border is a matter of a few hundred yards up the main road from the entrance to the estate, so ours is not only the most scenic but the most northerly rubbish tip in England.

I have whiled away the months that the English system of property sale takes to grind its weary way to completion (in Berwick you are always aware that it's all different, though not necessarily better, selling a property in Scotland) by disposing of as many of my surplus possessions as possible, and that means I have been spending a lot of time up here. Tip? Donate to Sally Army? Or store it?  The fact that the storage unit is immediately past the entrance at the top of a hill and the tip is at the far end of the estate at the bottom of the hill tends to incline me to just chuck it all into storage. I have a feeling that in a year or so's time when I've realised I don't need any of it I may end up just transferring the whole lot down the hill and into those recycling skips.

Berwick Film Festival 2015

I think that the Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival ought to be re-named the Festival of Film in Caves. Not since the prehistoric painters of Lascaux  have so many artistic productions been found in subterranean environments.

The video installation shown on the left was actually one of the less impressive offerings this year, but Coxons Tower is such a fantastic venue that it makes anything look good. It is the inside of a lookout tower on the defensive walls of Berwick and has striking stone vaulting.

You can see in this picture that the organisers have had the wonderful idea of installing a couple of real cinema seats in the Tower for viewers of the video. There is something really memorable about sitting in a red plush seat inside a centuries old fortification watching an ultra modern video.

Several of the other venues on the 'trail' of video art installations are ice-houses. Bleak, dank, echoing man-made caves, effectively, temporarily illuminated by film. You slither down, or up, the muddy entrance paths and pick your way across the uneven beaten-earth floor with a feeling of excited anticipation about what you may see inside. Nobody who has experienced this aspect of the Berwick festival ever forgets it.





To add to the excitement the festival now has a 'fringe', which has stuck with the subterranean theme by using the empty cellars of a house in the town centre. There seemed to be a smell of stale wine in the air when I visited and this led me to assume that the cellars had previously been used for wine storage, but when I mentioned it one of the young organisers said that it was more likely to be the result of their own activities the night before.

Most of the art in the 'fringe' house was as good as the official installations, and some of it was better than some of them. Special mention to Carole Lubey's powerful piece, shown left, of an older woman dancing nude, and Brooke Stephens' beautifully observed film of the patterns made by water spreading on a wall and mist rising Gothic-ally from a cemetery.

To grab the attention of passers-by the location of the fringe house was marked by this piano. I'm told that somebody was playing it some of the time, though I didn't catch that myself. Rather brilliantly, a Northumberland County Council parking permit had been propped on the lid of the keyboard, so that the piano could stand in the car park all day with perfect legality.

I'm afraid that this year's Festival finished on Sunday 27th September so it's too late to see any of these exhibits now. But do come next year, you will not regret it. 

The Ruins of Temperance

This is my first posting of photos taken with my new camera. The woman in the shop assured me that it had huge quantities of megapixels and would produce photos of a quality that would make me gasp in astonishment compared with those feeble efforts taken by my old camera. So far, I'm not convinced. But to be fair, it hasn't been trialled in a clear atmosphere yet, because the weather over the last few days has not been dry - unlike the subjects of this post (ha!).

This is the only surviving wall of the Good Templar Hall in Berwick. The name meant nothing to me at all, I had to google it. Turns out the Good Templars were / are an international organisation promoting the cause of temperance, that is abstention from alcohol. They have their own website if you would like to know more. Only American links come up, the UK branch of their operation seems to have quietly faded away. (If you know differently, please do leave a comment.)

I learned more about this building from a booklet with the splendid title Berwick's Battle Against Drink by Wendy Bell Scott. I originally bought my copy a couple of years ago from a newsagent while killing time in the main street of Spittal waiting for the Christmas reindeer to appear. My first thought was that, unlike Flodden (q.v.) it is a battle most Berwickers seem to be trying to lose. The book is also available online from a local publishing outfit called Blue Button. Wendy's research started life as part of her studies at the Open University, and I was delighted to see one of my own former O.U. advisers, John Wolffe, featuring prominently in the bibliography. Pious Victorian reformers are one of his things.

The subject of excessive consumption of booze is still very much a live issue, and Berwick as usual has particular problems because of its position on the border. I'm told that in the past, before I lived here, there was an influx of Scots on Sundays because in those days Scotland took a stricter approach to pubs opening on the Lord's Day than England did. This cross-border situation is likely to be recreated, because the Scottish government is keener than the Westminster one to introduce compulsory minimum pricing for alcoholic drinks, in an effort to reduce consumption. In a previous post I described the likely effect on the parts of England just over the border of suddenly making booze more expensive in Scotland. Thankfully, implementation of the legislation to that effect passed by Holyrood in 2012 is being held up by legal challenges from the alcohol industry. I say thankfully - at a personal level I have always been sympathetic to temperance ideals, but the prospect of my street filling up with Scots who don't share them is not an enticing one.

God knows our resident English drunks are already a big enough nuisance. The original plans for the restoration of the riverside park included provision for some brave soul to abseil down the steep bank beside the river to collect up and remove all the cans and bottles chucked down there over the years. By now the lower levels must require techniques more closely related to archaeology than to simple litter-picking. Sadly it was reported that the assessment of the bank found it too unstable for abseiling to be safe. And in any case the drinkers can throw the things down faster than the council can pick them up. So beer cans and wine bottles continue to roll out of the undergrowth at your feet and witness to the cause for which the Good Templar Hall was erected.

P.S. I shouldn't forget to mention that the new leader of the Labour party is reportedly a teetotaller, a welcome survival of the historical association of the temperance movement with socialism, particularly Christian socialism.