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  ENGEL’S ENGLAND

  MATTHEW ENGEL was born in Northamptonshire (Chapter 38) and lives in Herefordshire (Chapter 40) with his wife, daughter and various animals. He wrote for the Guardian for nearly twenty-five years and is now the least fiscally-aware columnist on the Financial Times. For twelve years, he was the editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. His previous books include Eleven Minutes Late (about the railways) and Extracts from the Red Notebooks.

  ALSO BY MATTHEW ENGEL

  Ashes ’85

  Tickle the Public

  Extracts from the Red Notebooks

  Eleven Minutes Late

  ENGEL’S ENGLAND

  Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man

  MATTHEW ENGEL

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  Exmouth Market

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Matthew Engel, 2014

  Map illustrations by Susannah English

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 84765 928 6

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1.I’ll be with you in plum blossom time

  WORCESTERSHIRE

  2.Do you know how the shower works, Jesus?

  BEDFORDSHIRE

  3.Adventures in the state-your-business belt

  SURREY

  4.Oh, my name it means nothing

  DURHAM

  5.Watch the wall, my darling

  DEVON

  6.Here be bores, and boars

  GLOUCESTERSHIRE

  7.Bye-bye to the bile beans

  YORKSHIRE

  8.Life on the edge

  SUSSEX

  9.Ignorant Hobbledehoyshire (not)

  RUTLAND

  10.Buckethead and Puddingface

  HUNTINGDONSHIRE

  11.Between the old way and the Ooh-arr A

  CORNWALL

  12.Covered in blotches

  WARWICKSHIRE

  13.The sound of the froghorn

  SUFFOLK

  14.Mayday! Mayday!

  OXFORDSHIRE

  15.And no knickers

  CHESHIRE

  16.Location, location

  KENT

  17.Good morning, Your Grace

  DERBYSHIRE

  18.Damsons in distress

  WESTMORLAND

  19.Bowled by a floater

  HAMPSHIRE

  20.Oh, Ena, where art thou?

  LANCASHIRE

  21.The commuter homeward plods his weary way

  BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

  22.Tally-ho, isn’t it?

  LEICESTERSHIRE

  23.Loosen your corset and stay

  HERTFORDSHIRE

  24.The silence of the trams

  NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  25.That nice couple at no. 45

  MIDDLESEX

  26.Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  27.Land of the rising sap

  DORSET

  28.The ascent of Mount Toebang

  CUMBERLAND

  29.A midsummer night’s mare

  WILTSHIRE

  30.Let’s party like it’s AD

  SOMERSET

  31.Very good in Parts

  LINCOLNSHIRE

  32.The horse has bolted

  BERKSHIRE

  33.First we take Hunstanton …

  NORFOLK

  34.Not not proud

  STAFFORDSHIRE

  35.A va-whatle?

  ESSEX

  36.Percy and the parrot

  SHROPSHIRE

  37.Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

  CAMBRIDGESHIRE

  38.And no one to call me m’duck

  NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

  39.The Great Wen-will-it-implode?

  LONDON

  40.From the Black Hill

  HEREFORDSHIRE

  Acknowledgements

  A note on pictures

  Index of Places

  To Laurie and the past; to Vika and the future

  ENGLAND

  The thirty-nine counties and one capital

  INTRODUCTION

  When my son, Laurie, was about eight, I tried to explain to him which country we lived in. Since our home was barely five miles from the Welsh border and we crossed it without thinking all the time, it was not just a theoretical question: when we went into Wales, we entered a different country, but then again we didn’t.

  So I told him as succinctly as I could about England, Scotland, Wales and, heaven help us, the two Irelands; about Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles (a term now increasingly considered politically incorrect, some pedants preferring ‘North-west European Archipelago’ or ‘Islands of the North Atlantic’). He got the hang of the outlines remarkably quickly. But the more I said, the less I understood the subject myself, and the more I realised how bizarre these distinctions were; grasping the three-fold nature of the Christian God was a doddle in comparison.

  I also realised that explaining the subject through sport, our normal topic of conversation, would make matters worse. Each sport organises itself along different national lines. Feeling bolshie, I once pointed out to a British Olympic official that the term ‘Team GB’ was wrong because that excludes Northern Ireland. He replied in a gotcha tone of voice that the alternative, Team UK, would exclude the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. At any given moment, other countries may have more violently expressed divisions, but they generally know who, where and what they are.

  In this century, as nationalism grew in Scotland and, to a lesser extent, Wales, the English began to chafe against their own bonds. One of the great successes of the new Celtic consciousness was the way it finessed any taint of racism: for these purposes, a Scot was someone who lived in Scotland. Attempts to find a matching English nationalism always seemed cranky.

  England and Britain were once considered almost synonymous. If you met a compatriot abroad he was English unless he told you forcefully he wasn’t. Until the late twentieth century ‘United Kingdom’ was reserved for the most formal occasions, like best china; and there were certainly no such people as ‘Brits’. Within the new more inclusive vocabulary the English have found themselves a little lost.

  The Scots could safely rail against English overlordship; the English became stuck in a general alienation that was difficult to express. Their lives were changing, at the mercy of forces beyond their control – a fragile economy, technological change, Brussels, bloody foreigners – and it was hard to know what to do about it. Meanwhile, all the wealth and power that England did possess was pouring inexorably into one corner of the country, the South-East, a process that was bad news even for those who lived there, at least if they were not homeowners. All this in a country whose name cannot be reliably found in drop-down internet menus. Are we U for United Kingdom, B for Britain, G for Great Britain or E for England?

  It was against this background, in the financially difficult spring of 2011, with the country half-heartedly governed by David Cameron’s coalition, that I set off.

  This is a travel book about England, in the spirit and the footsteps of other travellers round thi
s strange land: Defoe, Cobbett, Priestley, if it is not too pretentious to mention them. The difference is that this book is divided into the historic, ancient and traditional counties, the divisions of England that collectively withstood a thousand years of epic history but not the idiocy of the 1970s. It is not a gazetteer, nor a guidebook, nor a compendium of England’s best anything.

  This is emphatically not a book about local government, nor is it a prolonged whinge about the iniquities of the 1972 Local Government Act, though that will crop up as appropriate, to explain why the counties in this book are those of Defoe, Cobbett and Priestley and not those used by modern Whitehall. And a little background is essential in advance.

  For a start, as people kept asking me, why cover just England, and not GB, UK or the whole archipelago? Firstly, there was the euphonious coincidence of my un-English surname, which lent itself to an obvious title. Secondly, the historic counties of Scotland and Wales – now almost all formally abolished – were primarily just administrative units and never had the wider resonance of those in England. This is not true of Ireland, where the frontier between the twenty-six counties now in the Republic and the six still attached to the UK is at the forefront of the island’s tortured history. There is a happier side to that: everyone in Ireland can instantly recognise the perceived characteristics of a Corkman, Kerryman or Dub; and the former Taoiseach Brian Cowen was widely known as BIFFO – ‘Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly’. But all that is another book entirely.

  Thirdly, ars longa, vita brevis. It would have been lovely to spend time exploring the mountains of Sutherland or the 35,000 acres of Clackmannanshire, ‘the Wee County’, which is one-third the size of England’s pygmy, Rutland. But for any author, the prime object of writing a book is to get the damn thing finished and published, and three years’ travel is long enough. Above all, it is unexamined England, so little understood even by its own inhabitants, that fascinates me, and where I felt that exploring the microscopic pieces of the puzzle might produce some insights into the big picture.

  The idea of the county goes so far back in English history that exact dates are impossible. The best I can discover is as follows: Kent was probably recognisable as Cantium when Christ was a lad. Like Essex, it was an independent kingdom in the fifth century AD. The idea of a shire (scir = a division) originated in Wessex not much later. There are references to Hampshire and Devonshire from the eighth century. In the early tenth century, when Wessex conquered Mercia under Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great, the term spread into the Midlands.

  When they arrived, the Normans did not attempt to interfere with these arrangements, but changed the nomenclature: the ealdorman, the Anglo-Saxon officer in charge of a shire, mutated into a comes or count, and thus the shire became known as comitatus, or county. As England was more or less pacified, united and systematised, the concept spread into the Danelaw and the barbarous North (and even more barbarous Wales). Not all shires made it into full-blown counties. In the early days Yorkshire was divided into subordinate shires, including Hallamshire and Richmondshire, whose names persisted though their roles disappeared. The walled town of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire was regarded as Winchcombeshire between about 1007 and 1016, its presumed millennium being marked by a bell-ringing commemoration in 2007. But by the Middle Ages England was a country of counties in a manner that would remain fundamentally unchanged for the best part of a millennium.

  Oh, there were all kinds of anomalies and bits of weirdness which were gradually tidied up. There were counties palatine (Lancashire, Cheshire and Durham) that were directly under the control of a local princeling. There were counties corporate, boroughs that were regarded as self-governing although nearly all still fell under the jurisdiction of the Lord Lieutenant for military purposes; to this day, on feeble evidence, Bristol fancies itself as a separate county. There were enclaves and exclaves. There were ancient liberties like the Soke of Peterborough and the Isle of Ely. Yorkshire was divided into three ridings (a thirding) and Lincolnshire into three parts. Most of the counties were divided into hundreds, areas big enough to offer a hundred men at arms. But some counties had wapentakes instead, while Kent had lathes and Sussex rapes.

  The very distinctions show just how important the county was in the lives of the people. The monarch was in the far distance; authority was channelled through the Lord Lieutenant and the sheriff, though the sheriff’s power later devolved on the justices of the peace. Counties developed their own laws, dialects, customs, farming methods, building styles. They formed the tapestry of the nation. In 1911 P. H. Ditchfield asked in the preface to his book Counties of England: ‘Why should Devonshire farmers shoot their apple-trees on New Year’s Day to make them fruitful, singing curious verses, and those of Surrey or Sussex be ignorant of the custom? Why should a dark man bring luck as a first-foot on the same day in Lancashire, and a fair man in Shropshire?’ The answer is that these were real places that had real differences and inspired real loyalties.

  The Local Government Act of 1888 brought the new-fangled notion of democracy to the hierarchical shires by establishing county councils, while giving the larger municipalities independence within the counties by designating them county boroughs. The biggest change came in London, where the disorganised administration of the capital, outside the City itself, was given some sense by carving chunks from surrounding counties and creating the London County Council. Until this point, the monarch, Parliament and Eros were all living in Middlesex, which was somewhat absurd.

  Elsewhere, the integrity of the counties was respected. There was very minor tinkering with borders and some of the counties were subdivided: the ridings of Yorkshire and parts of Lincolnshire acquired separate councils, but the people remained unarguably Tykes and Yellowbellies. Indeed, county identity was perhaps stronger than ever around the turn of the twentieth century. In peacetime, county cricket was at the heart of the sporting calendar; and, come 1914, the young men marched proudly off to war in their county regiments. This was a mistake, since it meant they died in clusters and, when the bugles sounded from sad shires, they often did so en masse from the same shire, which was bad for morale.

  The map of England was almost entirely left alone until the early 1960s, when the London County Council was expanded to take in the outer ring of suburbs as the new Greater London Council. This fitted with the orthodoxy of the time that large metropolitan areas should be planned holistically; more importantly, it served the ruling Conservatives’ purposes since the old inner-urban LCC was almost always a Labour-led nuisance. The Labour Party huffed and puffed and then, characteristically, allowed the act to come into force as planned after it had returned to power. The main effect was the total abolition of Middlesex, but the outcry was limited: Middlesex had long since become amorphous suburbia and it survived both as a cricket team and (crucially) as a postal address.

  The lack of uproar encouraged the Labour government, under Harold Wilson, to start on the rest of the country. It set up a royal commission under a classic Whitehall committee man, Sir John Maud (later Lord Redcliffe-Maud). His report, issued in 1969, was not to be confused with the MAUD report of 1941 (Military Application of Uranium Detonation), which started the British atom bomb project, and actually led to remarkably little devastation in comparison. The new Maud report proposed dividing England into eight provinces and sixty-one numbered units, nearly all of them ‘unitary’, so that virtually all local government would be in the hands of city-based regions, governing half a million people or more, checked from below only by local parish councils, which, after much thought, were graciously to be allowed to continue. Existing boundaries were considered irrelevant: the map was redrawn from scratch.

  The aim was to ‘revitalise’ local government, then in the hands of 1,210 different authorities. A civil servant who worked on the report told me, with some passion, of the idealism that lay behind it. Though full of staid old farts, the committee had reported in the spirit of the 1960s: bigger trumped smaller;
new trumped old. Down with the slums! Up with the tower blocks! Their report almost totally ignored local loyalties, and so did the initial newspaper commentaries.

  The report was never implemented. The Conservatives regained power under Ted Heath in 1970 and constructed their own version of reform, based on the dear old counties which they usually controlled. The 1970s proved to be a more sentimental, rustically minded decade: hereabouts began the renewed enthusiasm for country cottages, real ale and (too late) steam trains. However, the minister involved was Peter Walker, a dashing, dodgy, self-conscious moderniser, and the counties he proposed were only loosely based on the ancient ones. The Heath government as a whole, whose one great achievement was Britain’s entry into Europe, was deeply in love with biggism.

  This time there would be 380 councils. Since these proposals bore some resemblance to existing reality, people understood more easily what they meant and began to fight for their own history. The proposals were not immutable: the women of Barlborough, Derbyshire, marched on Westminster and averted absorption into Sheffield. But the government soon tired of the arguments: Herefordshire was festooned with posters opposing merger with Worcestershire but got dragged to the altar regardless, kicking and screaming. Most surprising of all was the near-silence of Yorkshire. The bold-as-brass, shout-the-odds, proud Tykes and terriers allowed their county to be sliced, diced and divvied up. No bite, nary even a bark.

  Some protesters were mollified by assurances that the proposals were entirely about local government and would have nothing to do with history, geography or loyalty. Cricket, for instance, simply ignored the 1972 act. But these intentions were thwarted for two main reasons. After the changes took effect in 1974 the Post Office this time insisted that the new county names should be used. And the media, led by the BBC, slavishly followed.

  Local government remained the most consistently worthless of all British institutions. Indeed it got worse. This was largely due to central government’s insistence on untrammelled power: the new metropolitan county councils, including and especially the GLC, terminally irritated Margaret Thatcher and in 1986 were liquidated. Another decade later, with the sole exception of Cumbria, all the other made-up county names – Avon, Cleveland, Hereford and Worcester, Humberside – had also gone.