He was a good borough treasurer by all accounts: stolid, a little frightening, genial enough in his old-fashioned way. But he lived a double life. For thirteen years, he spent every non-working hour composing, setting, drawing and writing by hand the seven-volume study of the Lake District mountains that are his masterpiece and, for me, one of the great works of English literature.
They are truly beautiful things, recognisably and obviously stunning even if you've no interest in the Lake District. Passion, care and attention to detail ring out from every hand-measured indentation to every pencilled hatching on every cliff face. As Hunter Davies once put it, 'Not merely guidebooks, but philosophical strolls, personal outpourings of feelings and observations, written and drawn by a craftsman, conceived and created as a total work of art.' Wainwright himself called them 'love letters' and because of that he refused to take money for them, giving it instead – well over a million – to an animal rescue centre.
As I write these words, I am also preparing to give the annual Wainwright Society lecture at that Rheged centre. I'm honoured to have been asked as Wainwright has perhaps given me more pleasure than any other writer; certainly taken me to more wonderful places and got me out of any number of hair-raising scrapes. Even though the books are now rather out of date – Wainwright steadfastly refused to update the routes though one Chris Testy has now undertaken this – Wainwright is a good man to have in your inside pocket when the fog comes down on Striding Edge and sheer drops are all around.
But Wainwright was a complicated man and my relationship with him is just as complicated. In his early work, Pennine Journey, he is worryingly ambivalent about Hitler and if anything he moved rightward as he aged. By Fellwanderer in the seventies, he was calling for the birching of criminals until 'they scream for mercy' and for the castration of football hooligans. He clearly adored women on some romantic level but his attitude to them was archaic and bigoted even by the standards of the thirties. His first marriage was as arid and loveless as his second was tender and passionate. He could be warm and generous; a pledge in his book on the Pennine Way to pay for a half-pint of beer at the Border Hotel in Kirk Yetholm for any walker who completed the Way cost him an estimated £15,000. But misanthropy was never far away. He hated being recognised on the fells and would turn away and pretend to urinate if anyone approached him. When sales of his books were about to pass the million mark, his publishers persuaded him to agree to have dinner with whoever bought the specially signed millionth copy; he panicked and made a hundred-mile round trip and scoured the relevant bookshops to buy the marked copy himself.
Some of his often silly and sometimes disturbingly illiberal views are lauded as 'old-fashioned common sense' by cultees. But not me. It is Wainwright the lover not Wainwright the political philosopher I warm to. I'd rather remember him as the man who could write 'The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits.' It's writing like this that calls me into cold desolate crags in mid-winter as well as sunlit uplands in spring.
All things being equal - unless I fall under the spell of Surrey – I intend to move completely to the Lake District one day and I'm aware that I'd better save some words for then and add my half-inch of spine and few hundred pages to the groaning shelves. The fells and the lakes and the ridges and forest will still be there. They're not going anywhere.
The Lakes may be as over-exposed as, well, insert name of currently ubiquitous celebrity here if you don't mind doing that bit of work yourself, thanks, but the Cumbrian coast is an enigma. I know it pretty well, thanks to my enthusiasm for the county and its awesome landscapes (using the adjective as Wordsworth might rather than Bill and Ted). But most people, most northerners even, don't know it at all. There are seaside resorts here, or were, at least. Silloth is a compact little Victorian seaside town where Cumbria used to take its holidays up until the coming of the package tour. It has a lot going for it: nice squares, a decent beach, golf courses and an expansive, invigorating curve of seafront where you can get comprehensively battered by the wind off the water. Stunned and sitting on a bench, you feel that you could reach out and touch that big round hill across the Solway Firth even though it's actually in another country – Criffel in Dumfriesshire to be precise. A little north of Silloth lies Skinburness, which is a bleakly attractive bird reserve though it sounds like some terrible affliction of the epidermis.
This West Cumberland coast has suffered as much as anywhere from the vicissitudes of the British economy these last forty years. Seaward of Frizington and Cleator Moor, the whole feel of Cumbria changes, from cottages to boarded-up flats, from Gore-Tex and real ale to Burberry and Smirnoff Ice. Maryport was once a bustling port and can still scrub up well, but I once spent as grim an afternoon as I've ever had here, holed up in a dingy, smoky pub eating greasy chips while sheets of rain came in off a churning grey sea. 'Maryport in Cumbria is crap. It has more chavs per head of the population than anywhere else in Britain.' That's how one local resident put it on an internet forum devoted to Britain's worst towns. Civic pride seems in short supply, though the council have made an effort to attract visitors to the town with a series of 'theme' music festivals such as Punk, Sixties, Sea Shanties and Blues. Wonder what BB King made of it?
The big towns on this stretch of coast are Workington and Whitehaven, both former heavyweights who've taken their share of confidence-sapping punches since their glory days. Confusingly, both towns refer to the natives of the other as 'jam-eaters', an insult that has its murky origins in the mines. Apparently one lot had jam on their sandwiches while the others did not. Whether that makes said jam-eaters snobs or peasants, no one seems really sure. I think probably the former; in these parts, where every nightclub bouncer is pumped up on steroids and manliness is highly prized, to be effete or cosseted is the worst insult of all. After all, as one local put it, Workington is a town where 'if you don't like Oasis you are classed as gay' and where the infamous local busker openly drinks petrol in the town square. With its redeveloped harbour and trendy Zest restaurant, which has played host to Tony and Cherie Blair, Whitehaven may be becoming dangerously cosmopolitan, though. I hope they had jam risotto.
The biggest town on this coast was a real mystery even to me. No one I asked had ever been there, even though at one point it was an industrial powerhouse, a huge naval and shipbuilding centre which attracted workers from all across Britain and the world. Now the world thinks of it as isolated, insular and partly abandoned; a hulking town cut off from the mainstream of life at the end of a peninsula where few ever venture. A place that even the locals refer to, thanks to an old Mike Harding routine, as 'stuck at the end of the A590, the longest cul de sac in Britain'.
Barrow-in-Furness is a bloody long way from anywhere. An hour from the nearest motorway, even further from the nearest city. That's a long way for Britain. As the BBC's Cumbria website puts it: 'To get a real understanding of the plight of the Barrovian, you should consider his geographical location. One of the most significant things about Barrow-in-Furness is that only the most hapless, dazed orienteer could possibly visit by accident – you have to have a purpose to get there.' I had just such a purpose. The purpose was Barrow.
Like Iran, this part of the northern coast was once a theocracy. During the Middle Ages it was ruled by the powerful monks of Furness Abbey, just outside modern Barrow. Back then the little fishing hamlet really was cut off, surrounded on three sides by water or the dangerous sands of the Duddon Estuary, and on the other pinned against the sea by the high fells of the Lake District. These days Barrow has adopted 'Where the mountains meet the sea' as a dreamy marketing slogan, gamely trying to make a virtue of what was once a curse.
Then in 1846, usual story, the Furness Railway was opened, connecting Barrow to the national network at Fleetwood, and the town boomed. Iron and steel brought prosperity and the
population mushroomed. It wasn't a haphazard development. In America, planned communities are commonplace but Barrow is one of the very few in the United Kingdom, built on the grid system with long tree-lined avenues leading away from central squares. The architect of modern Barrow was one James Ramsden of the Furness Railway Company, who seems to have run the town almost as a fiefdom, owning the town hall, the railway, streets' worth of houses and sitting unopposed as mayor for years. You won't be surprised to hear that he had massive mutton-chop whiskers.
Ramsden, doubtless with his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat pockets, oversaw the building of the docks and the founding of Ramsden's Barrow Shipbuilding Company, which became Vickers in 1897. Barrow became Vickers' town, literally; they built an extension called just that on the adjacent Walney Island in the early twentieth century.
Through a turbulent twentieth century, war brought Barrow prosperity while it brought other cities hell. Barrow built the Mikasa, Japanese flagship of the Russo-Japanese War, and the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible and a fleet of other floating widow-makers. Later, Barrow became synonymous with submarines. The Royal Navy's first one, Holland 1, was built here in 1901, and newer ones such as HMS Resolution were developed in the 1960s. The Vanguard class submarines were all built in Barrow. In crowded billets and sweaty hammocks, beneath the inky waters of the world's oceans, Barrow built the sleek and deadly nuclear subs that the cold warriors criss-crossed the globe in.
They were never used in anger, thank God. The thaw at the end of the Cold War might have warmed most of us but it brought a chill to Barrow. There were over 20,000 workers at the shipyard at the start of the 1980s; just 3,000 in 2000. Barrow hasn't had much in the way of good press these last twenty years and, to cap it all, in 2002 it had the grim distinction of suffering the UK's worst outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. Seven people died and another 172 people got sick thanks to a faulty air-conditioning duct at the town's arts centre.
This might have put me in a downcast frame of mind as I made my way along that famous cul de sac, the A590, past Newby Bridge, Broughton and Ulverston, birthplace of Stan Laurel. But I was in a good mood. The sun was shining, the hills were green and sparkling. I had never been to Barrow before and I like adventures, however small. Besides, who can fail to have their spirits lifted by a herd of pink rhinoceroses and elephants pootling about by the side of a major arterial road?
The South Lakes Animal Park was the brainchild of an animal nutritionist called David Gill who runs a similar venture in Australia. You'll see him wandering around the park in a bush hat. From scratch and in an engagingly cranky home-made fashion, he's built what's generally regarded as Britain's best conservation park, a haven for wildlife from around the globe and undoubtedly the only place in the north-west where you're likely to spot a Hamadryas baboon or pygmy hippo or Sumatran tiger or marmoset from the window of your Mondeo as you negotiate a roundabout. Gill is apparently thinking of moving the zoo nearer to the M6 to placate visitors who arrive fractious from the A590 although local rumour has it that Gill just says this periodically to annoy the council. It would be a shame. Barrow folk are proud of the park and its high standing and it would be a shame if it went to some rich metropolitan playground like Witherslack or Ulverston.
Barrovians are proud folk generally, with a fierce sense of community fostered by its geographical isolation. 'It's like an island community, that's the nearest comparison,' says singer and songwriter Chris While, born and raised in Barrow. 'There's water on three sides and hills on the other and there's only one road in or out. So that makes for a fantastic sense of community. People know each other here and share things. In the sixties, some kids would go out to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and come back and teach the others the new dances. It always felt a really safe and supportive place. Our MP was called Albert Booth and he would march with the CND supporters in the town. There was a sense of solidarity.'
Entering Barrow now, once you've got over the shock of the grazing pachyderms by the hard shoulder, you're struck by the contrasts. Wide, handsome streets and a majestic sandstone town hall alternate with the ubiquitous trappings of urban northern blight, the Golden Megatan with its promise of 180-watt sunbeds, the branches of Greggs, of course, and the drab pubs of which Healey's looks like a maximum security prison with its steel shutters and dearth of windows.
That's the sort of grim pleasure encampment you can find in any tough northern working-class town, though. In general, Barrow's pub life is vibrant though probably not for the fainthearted. 'You can go out any night and find that the pubs are always hopping,' says Chris. 'I have a guitarist friend who's lived in LA and toured through Asia and he loves and still lives in Barrow because he knows he can stroll into certain pubs where there'll always be a couple of lads with guitars and a musician's culture.'
The flipside of this, though, is that Barrow has a reputation for looking in on itself. 'It is terribly insular,' admits Chris. 'Kids who leave to get an education often never come back once they've had their horizons expanded. It's like a Stephen King town in that respect. My brother thinks that going to Morecambe is like having a weekend ashore.'
If you visit Barrow's Dock Museum (and I really recommend you do) you'll find this very particular sense of place alluded to in what's surely the most candid display currently visible in a UK museum. You're greeted by a board bearing the legend 'It's Grim Up North' and listing some of the choice opinions expressed by locals and some of the received impressions of the town: 'a dump', 'a town doomed to die', 'the largest village in England'. The museum, though, cleverly points out that one person's insular conservatism is another's steadfast independence. Barrow was also known as the English Chicago during the nineteenth century, when it boomed thanks to shipping and steel, and the town was a babel of accents from every corner of Britain and beyond.
As the name suggests, the museum is built into an old dock. You can climb right down into it, stand dryshod where once you'd have been under thirty feet of icy water, and crane your neck at the high walls above you that are still drying out and streaked with green. There was something of an unscheduled distraction during my visit in that a small boy got stuck in the lift – I heard him tapping and moaning forlornly through the frosted glass – and I had to go and seek help from the museum staff. To complicate matters, the attendant vaguely recognised me from the telly and consequently put the rescue into effect with a distinct lack of urgency since he clearly thought it was all some awful Jeremy Beadle-style prank.
This didn't distract me from the opinion that the Dock Museum is really rather classily done. Beautiful scale models of ocean liners remind you that Barrow didn't just make warships and Trident subs but stylish, state-of-the-art floating hotels for the world's leisured elite. Chris While's dad built the bar on the Oriana, one of the legendary ships that left the Barrow yard. Many Barrovians can remember the dates of every big launch. They were red-letter days in the town and the kids were given the day off school.
Leaving the museum and walking along the waterfront – a rather quaint little mess of boats and netting in the shadow of the enormous BAE submarine 'yard' – you are at once buffeted by Barrow's legendary local winds. At Christmas 1929, a wind of 115 miles shook the town. Barrow's breeziness is enshrined in an old joke. Two men meet on a still, silent day in the middle of the desert. Both have their hands on their hats. One says to the other, 'Ah sees tha's from Barra as well.'
I'm taking the one road to Walney Island, a lateral spit of land accessed by a single bridge which still occasionally has to be raised to let large boats under. The fact the island only has one way in and out is apparently of major concern to the islanders in the event that, quote, 'there was a major incident'. I'm not sure what that incident would be. Maybe the whole island would get food poisoning from some dodgy lobster at the Chinese restaurant on the beach. Or maybe the sheer ugliness of it – it's built in a disused concrete seventies lido – could cause a mass panic attack. Personally if I were a Walney Islander,
I wouldn't care. I'd be more tempted to hoist the bridge up and live here in splendid isolation, between the hills and the wild Irish Sea.
Generations of shipyard workers and their families have lived on Walney Island in Vickerstown, a custom-built estate whose very name reflects Barrow's status as a works town through and through. For many a year, Barrow's day was built around the mournful sound of the Vickers hooter, a muezzin call to work for the town's shipyard thousands. The hooter is long silent now but Barrow still makes ships. Vickers has changed its name more times than Cat Stevens, being at various times Vickers, VSEL, GEC Marine and BAE. But whoever's name is above the door, to the generations of Barrovians who've worked there, and the handful of the new generation who take apprenticeships there, it's 'The Yard', still launching vessels from the Cumbrian coast. Just.
If you ask the people of Barrow, they'll tell you defiantly that the town is on the up. Here on Walney Island, where Barrow meets the sea and where the locals come to enjoy the shingle and grass playground of Biggar Bank, there's talk of a new marina. They're investigating the possibility of an ex-Royal Navy submarine being permanently moored here as a tourist attraction to entice visiting Japanese tourists undersea and away from Beatrix Potter in Windermere. I can't wait. House prices are rising and the tireless local regeneration industry is trying its best to sell Barrow as a destination for luxury cruise ships. It sounds unlikely but you have to admire their conviction as they tell you that, 'Barrow-in-Furness, Britain's newest port of call for cruise liners, is the only deep water port between the Mersey and Clyde and provides instant access to the world famous English Lake District. There are many reasons why Barrow-in-Furness should be your next port of call.' Each year more ships dock at the town. Sneer if you will but it seems to be working.
Pies and Prejudice Page 29