Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  A pub landlord from Stilton commissioned the cheese, hence the name, but my cabbie was right: it’s never been made there. In fact, legally it cannot be made there, because of EU restrictions, and is only produced in eight dairies, one of which is in Melton Mowbray. But since the cheese’s appeal came from its availability at the Bell Inn in Stilton on the main stagecoach route from London to the north, the cheese bears that village’s name. Melton is clearly keen to stake its claim to the whiffy comestible.

  Next to the fun-filled wedges is a display that begins, ‘There are many kinds of saddle …’ which sends me straight to the next one. This, more entertainingly, is a mock-up of old local chemist Attenbury’s, complete with laxative display. I’m intrigued, but at the same time it is hard to ignore the increasingly seductive background chatter of the two guides. ‘It’s my sister’s wedding at the weekend… so that’s a new frock and shoes I can justify … yes, first marriage … I know … Oh, believe me, she’s had plenty of men but she’s never settled down … My sister’s always put adventure before convention … plenty of men, oh yes.’ All this goes on beneath a huge plastic model of the Biggest Pork Pie in the World.

  A great deal of the exhibition circles warily and diplomatically around the topic of hunting. This is hunting country. In fact, Melton is known as the hunting capital of Britain. Given this, the museum is admirably even-handed in its tenor. There’s a tableau devoted to the Hunt Saboteurs Association, for instance. And a panel beneath a large figure of a red-coated huntsman reads, ‘How do you feel when you look at this figure? He’s got too much time and money on his hands? Or he is supporting a centuries-old tradition?’ Sadly there is no box marked, ‘He is a pampered, chinless parasite and whilst I have no strong feelings about foxes I would love to screw up Tarquin here’s social life.’

  Sometimes, though, the mask slips. One display trots out a mildly partisan list of statistics which claims fox-hunting brought in sixty million pounds a year in income to Britain, which has the unmistakeable scent of utter tosh to me. Next to it is a glass case and inside there’s a badger, a rabbit, a fox and a deer. It’s marked ‘Wildlife in Nature’ rather than ‘Things We Like to Kill’.

  Before leaving the museum, I learn that the phrase ‘painting the town red’ meaning ‘to go on the razzle and cause a commotion’ has its origins in one of the best-known events in the history of Melton Mowbray. On the evening of Thursday 6 April 1837, following a day at the local Croxton Park races, the eccentric hunt-loving Marquis of Waterford and his friends were making their refreshed way home at around three in the morning by carriage when they found Thorpe End tollgate closed for repairs. Continuing on foot, they helped themselves to the red paint being used in the refurbishment and proceeded to paint anything in the town that took their fancy: pubs, houses, the carved stone swan on the Swan Inn and, in some versions, the unfortunate toll-keeper himself. No ASBOs for posh folk or indeed anyone back then so instead we commemorate their orgy of drunken vandalism as a bit of a jolly jape. I decide to see for myself how riotous modern-day Melton gets its kicks of a Saturday evening.

  First, I need to eat. For a moment I consider seeing just how bad the worst carbonara in Leicestershire is, but then I weaken and, of course, go for a Thai.

  I say ‘of course’ because you will remember my theory from Chipping Norton about Thai Cuisine and Middle England. To recap; it’s my considered contention that Thai food has become the staple cuisine of Middle England and for a variety of reasons. One, the food is great. Moreover, Thai people are beautiful and polite and wear lovely purple clothes and their establishments have nothing of the late-night lager, vomit and vindaloo session about them. They seem to be a cut above, and thus the Shires have embraced them. I actually came across a couple of Thai Shires on my voyages. Melton’s is called the Thai Sabai, however, and I get the last free table. It’s been open four and a half months, the friendly proprietor tells me, and is groaning with people: nice people, Middle England people, not especially rich but not poor. In a few months, they will find their mortgages rising and their house prices falling and maybe nights at Thai restaurants will become rarer. Just before I leave, a man weaves his way unsteadily by the window and looks in at the diners. He offers his chips to some ladies in the window tables and everyone laughs.

  The Anne of Cleves pub is even fuller. It gets its name from the fact that it was the boozer of choice for local monks for three hundred years before being taken over by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries. He later gave it to Anne of Cleves as part of the divorce settlement. It is, of course, haunted. When the publican, a scouser in a chef ‘s apron, tells me this, I smile and, sensing my scepticism, he pulls from beneath the bar a thick plastic wallet containing the detailed report of the Paranormal Society’s investigation into the pub and an overnight vigil that ended at 5.45 a.m. ‘Norman saw a headless woman,’ he declares. Who am I to doubt him? I ask him what he’s doing so far from home. ‘I’m educating them,’ he deadpans. And an education of sorts I’ve had, knowing a lot more about EU food restrictions and painting the town red and the right colour of cooked pork than I did before I came to Melton Mowbray.

  They told me I’d know I was in Burton-on-Trent by the smell. And they were nearly right. There’s certainly a heady, hoppy tang in the air, as there used to be at Manchester Victoria station thanks to the Boddingtons brewery next door. But all those former recommendations about holding your nose as you pass along the high street are exaggerations now. There’s just a warm flavour of beer and Marmite in the air and, if anything, it’s the huge pipeline running alongside the station platform that gives you the more obvious clue you’re in the capital of British brewing.

  They’ve brewed beer in Burton for a thousand years, ever since the monks at the local abbey of St Modwen first spotted that the subterranean water hereabouts had that indefinable something which made for great bitter. Actually, it’s a quite definable something, namely sulphate in dissolved salts from the gypsum-rich surrounding hills, though of course the monks didn’t know that back then. Chemist C.W. Vincent discovered much later that it was this chemical enrichment that brought out the best in the flavours of the hops. Burton possesses another liquid asset: the Grand Trunk canal, dug between 1766 and 1777 to link the Trent and Mersey rivers and neatly wedging Burton between two watercourses. This ease of access, coupled with the water, meant that Burton became a brewing mecca. Not that they go in much for pints of best bitter in downtown Mecca, but you take my point. The town flourished and brewing became big business, buoyed by demand for Burton’s hoppy pale ales. There were nine breweries here by 1801, which by 1888 had increased to a startling thirty-one. Beer brought all kinds of related innovation and expansion as the breweries supported businesses like coopers and blacksmiths, the ancestors of Burton’s current-day metalworking and manufacturing industries. Burton beers changed Englishmen’s tastes. Previously, our tipple had been mainly stout or porter, heavy dark beers similar to Guinness, but Bass bitter and its famed India Pale Ale, lighter and hoppier, came to predominate.

  I learn a lot of this from tall, willowy, pale blue-eyed Julia in the tourist information centre. Over the last few years, I’ve spent a great deal of time talking to nice ladies like Julia in tourist information centres the length and breadth of the land and it is always a delight. Always eager to explain, always generous and enthusiastic and knowledgeable and often twinkling with a little gentle self-mocking irony. Julia tells me that there are still six breweries in the town and begins to list them. After four or five, her memory fails her and I say airily that it isn’t important.

  ‘Oh no.’ She smiles. ‘It’s a matter of tourist-information honour. I’ve committed myself to six now.’

  You can sympathise with Julia. It’s actually five. Buyouts, mergers and consolidations have meant that Burton is now a town dominated by big beer multinationals rather than feisty independent breweries. The brewers of Burton were once the aristocrats of the town, dominating its civic l
ife. Many of them were ennobled for their patronage of political parties, and became known as the beerage. But even by 1927, the numbers of breweries in the town had shrunk to eight. Now it’s just Coors, Marston, Burton Bridge Brewery (founded in 1982 by Geoff Mumford and Bruce Wilkinson), Tower Brewery, a new microbrewery, and Cottage Brewery, based in the Old Cottage Inn. The Bass Museum of Brewing, which was part of the Coors visitor centre, made its own beer till the centre closed in summer 2008 in no little controversy, not long after my visit.

  With great delicacy back then, Julia tried to explain the political situation vis-a-vis Bass and Coors. Essentially, the US conglomerate Coors now owns the proud British brand Bass. This, everyone accepts, is the way of the world, but what’s irritated some is the closing of the museum and what’s been seen as an attempt to erase every trace of the former brand. Toni Parker from the Museum of London put it thus: ‘As someone who was born in Burton-on-Trent and who is a museum professional I feel quite saddened … On recent trips back to my home town it seems that Coors have tried their best to eradicate all traces of the existence of Bass in the town – the brewing towers have been relabelled with the Coors title and buildings that have long had Bass inscribed on them have seen the inscriptions covered up with Coors signs.’

  I notice this as I stroll past and it does feel at best incongruous and at worst bullying. Because Burton means Bass. And the famous red triangle is genuinely iconic in a way that the Coors logo – it says Coors in nice writing – will never be. Picasso and his fellow Cubist Juan Gris incorporated the Bass red triangle into many of their collages. Great children’s illustrators from Arthur Rackham to Quentin Blake have used Bass bottles to convey beer to their young audience. It seems clumsy at best not to have let the red triangle flutter over Burton. In fact, we could all take it as a national affront. For Burton and Bass was not just our national beer – all those Battle of Britain heroes ‘went for a Burton’ not a Coors – but also one of our characteristic national spreads, loved and loathed in equal measure, queer, quirky and quintessentially English, though with Teutonic intellectual roots.

  When a German scientist called Liebig discovered that brewer’s yeast cells could be concentrated, bottled and eaten he had, to all intents and purposes, invented Marmite. Burton had a lot of yeast and thus the Marmite Food Extract Company was established in Burton in 1902, fed by excess yeast from the Bass Brewery. Though the exact recipe is a trade secret, it is still primarily yeast extract with a little added vegetable extract and spice. When vitamins were discovered just before the First World War, Marmite became what we might call today a ‘superfood’, and sales soared.

  There were no websites back then. But go to Marmite’s website now and you will see how adroitly the current marketing men are managing the brand by actively encouraging people to disagree about it. The site has two wings, one for those who love the stuff and one for those to whom it is a nasty mystery, as it was for Bill Bryson, who in Notes from a Small Island wrote, ‘There are certain things that you have to be British, or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: skiffle music, saltcellars with a single hole, [and]Marmite (an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant).’

  Marmite has always had smart ad campaigns. Those first marketing men called it: ‘The growing up spread you never grow out of.’ During the 1980s, the spread was advertised with the slogan ‘My mate, Marmite’, chanted in television commercials by an army platoon, reflecting the fact that the spread had been a standard-issue vitamin supplement for British-based German POWs during the Second World War. This is almost too perfect to be true, combining two things at the very heart of Middle Englishness: funny little nostalgic foodstuffs and the defeat of the Third Reich.

  A more recent plucky Brit prisoner, Paul Ridout, a backpacker kidnapped by Kashmiri separatists in 1994, asked for some Marmite on toast as soon as he was released. He said, ‘It was pretty good. It’s just one of those things – you get out of the country and it’s all you can think about.’ Marmite’s new campaigns, a kind of anti-advertising where the brand’s demerits are seen to be its strengths, are the bleeding edge of post-modernity. Central to it all is the taste, which is almost impossible to describe. If pushed, I’d say it was like eating Swarfega laced with iron filings and gravy browning. And yet as I sit and type these words, the craving for some of the stuff, smeared into the melting butter on a piece of hot toast, is almost unbearable. At least half of you are feeling the same deep longing too right now. I know. And I know that there will be some in the kitchen cupboard because no one ever runs out of Marmite. A little goes a very long way. Comedian Tim Vine has a good joke about it. ‘I won a competition. The prize was a year’s supply of Marmite. One jar.’

  I remember Vine’s joke as I take an afternoon promenade around Burton. It is not what you would call a pretty town; the huge cylinders and silos of the Coors brewery see to that and Chloe’s restaurant – dwarfed by the huge steel containers – must suffer on Valentine’s day as a result. But it is characterful and has its moments. It is festooned with handsome buildings in a variety of architectural styles, mismatched oddments that speak of a wealthy past. The queer, squat old police station and magistrates’ court both look like wedding cakes. Pausing to admire them, I am almost run down by two adult men cycling down the pavement at breakneck speed. Adults who cycle on the pavement are one evolutionary step up from the carpet slipper in my moral ranking and I would introduce swift pavement-citizens’ justice to eliminate them. In the absence of this, though, I merely curse the pair, one of them with the sallow, prematurely aged look of the career smoker, the other with a baseball cap, always a good indicator of dimness.

  Everywhere there are reminders of Burton’s brewing past. A rather nice ironmonger’s has a plaque that reads, ‘Charles Leeson’s Brewery stood here 1753-1800’. Now it stands next door to Aldi. I have a cup of tea and a piece of toast in Peckish sandwich bar. They don’t do Marmite. In fact, the girl serving there makes a face when I ask for it. You make it here, I tell her. ‘We make ball bearings here and I don’t eat them either.’ She laughs. ‘I can do you cheese on toast,’ she says amiably. That’s nothing like Marmite, I protest. ‘No, you’re right, cheese on toast is nice.’

  I tell her that uncooked spaghetti dipped in Marmite makes an excellent emergency substitute Twiglet. ‘I’ll bear that in mind when I next have a party.’ She chuckles as she clears away the remnants of some old boy’s baked potato.

  Burton’s high street is a mixture of the traditional and the bizarre and thus offers something of a snapshot of Middle England in 2008. There is, of course, a Thai restaurant, which I suspect may now be compulsory by law. There is a shop called Let’s Party Let’s Dance, which seems to sell tinsel, feather boas and other essential hen-night kit. There is a pawnshop next door to a shop offering everything I might need for ‘predatory angling’. A girl of about twenty in a high-visibility tabard is sitting on a transparent plastic box by the pelican crossing. She wears headphones that run to the box, which is, in turn, cabled up to a camera wrapped in a plastic bag on top of the traffic lights. I nearly ask her what all this is about but don’t want to risk a prosaic answer about traffic censuses or some such. I prefer to imagine she is Burton’s Tracey Emin and this is her latest, unfathomable art installation. Looming over all of this is the Riverside Centre, which looks like it may once have been the place in Burton to have your wedding reception, where you would bump and boogie in your implausible flares and sideburns to Barry Blue’s ‘Dancing on a Saturday Night’ or The Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’. Now, burned out and boarded up, it looks like the Kabul branch of KwikFit exhausts.

  And then suddenly I arrive at the Trent, broad and choppy and winding beneath a very fine, low arched stone bridge that has stood here for eight hundred years. It would be a lovely spot to while away an hour with a Daily Mirror and a Thermos, if it were not so bone-shudderingly cold. Two hoodies are making desultory havoc with a lifebelt. Sans Daily Mirr
or or Thermos I still sit and have a sojourn at a picnic table and admire a very prim and pretty blue and white wooden boathouse across the Trent.

  Bench-sitting, idly watching the world go by froma piece of civic furniture, seems to me an intrinsically English pastime. But there is something to envy too. What with 24-hour culture and changing shift patterns and distance working and telecommuting, afternoon bench-sitting is no longer a definite and default indicator of fecklessness, joblessness or aimlessness. Sitting by a duck pond or a bandstand during the four days of the English summer, possibly eating an ice cream, watching people go by, is a charming diversion. It is where you will find us all at some point, the lonely old, the unhappy young, the illicit lovers and the chatty mums. Our cousins on the continent elevate this time-wasting to a philosophical endeavour and call it being a flaneur or a boulevardier. Bench-sitting is just as profound and worthwhile. We just haven’t thought of a poncy word for it yet.

  Almost immediately I am accosted by two policemen on bikes. At least I thought they were policemen, an easy mistake to make given the black padded vests and combat-style trousers. They in fact turn out to be Mormons, evidently from the paramilitary wing of the Church of the Latterday Saints.

  They are pleasant enough in that vaguely sinister, deadened way that the evangelising often have. One hands me a business card that asks, ‘What is the purpose of life? Where do we go after this life? What is the true nature of God? Answers to these and other questions can be found by visiting www.mormon.org.’

  I give a low whistle. That’s pretty impressive, I say.

  ‘Would you like to know about the Church of Jesus Christ?’ asks the younger one with a smile. Not really, I answer truthfully. ‘Do you know anyone who would?’ he persists. Try those, I say, indicating the hoodies by the lifebelt who are now sharing a can of Foster’s.