Huntingdonshire was once famous for something: cabmen. In the days when the Daily Express was the most powerful newspaper in the land and not a relic, the Beachcomber column, written by J. B. Morton, was a daily fixture. For more than half a century, amidst such characters as Mr Justice Cocklecarrot, the M’Babwa of M’Gonkawiwi, Big White Carstairs and Captain Foulenough, there would be references to the ‘List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen’, as for instance in the book review that appeared in the Express of 16 April 1953:
The new edition of the ‘List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen’ (long acknowledged as a standard work on the subject) is a book for the bedside. It can be opened anywhere. One or two mistakes should be corrected in the next edition. Palmer, F. L., is obviously a misprint for Palmer, F. G. On page 284, the name Ropesock is puzzling, and on page 136 there is no indication that Hitchwell, C. T. R., and Hitchwell, B. S., are, in fact, twins. The footnote on page 61 which tells us that Empson, N., is known as ‘Tubby’ is irrelevant and introduces a vulgar note. Still more regrettable is the information that Archer, W. W., is called ‘Puddingface’. But these are minor blemishes, and easily remedied. They have no place in a serious factual work.
Not everyone found Beachcomber funny: it is said Lord Beaverbrook, the Express’s proprietor, was entirely baffled. But the relevant point here is Huntingdonshire. Without it, the joke does not work, or nothing like as well. It needs the four sonorous syllables, shared by only four other counties. But it also needs Huntingdonshire’s essential obscurity and piddlingness. Rutland would never do: too brief a word, too obvious a choice. Do you understand what I’m saying? If not then, as Louis Armstrong supposedly said when asked what jazz is: ‘Lady, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.’
Perhaps the most famous place of all in Huntingdonshire is barely even a place at all. You turn off down one quiet road and on to a lane that leads to a seventeenth-century religious retreat, founded by the MP and divine Nicholas Ferrar; a long-demolished stately home; a farm; a tiny church. It looks out placidly across what passes in Huntingdonshire as a valley. On the wood-panelled walls of the church is a scroll embroidered with a verse so unremittingly grim that one might think it came from the sternest of preachers:
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
No author is given, though a crib sheet is close to hand. A battered and pencil-annotated copy of T. S. Eliot’s poems was open on the nearby pew. In context, it sounds somewhat different.
The place and the poem is ‘Little Gidding’, the last of the Four Quartets, the one that begins:
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
The topographic references in the poem are accurate: Eliot talks of rounding a pigsty, which I was shown reverently, though it is now used as a bike store. Ferrar House is being used as a retreat again and the garden was a hub of early springtime activity. I got talking to one of the volunteer gardeners, a ruminative Ulsterman called Stephen Dalzell.
‘When I work here in winter I can feel what Eliot meant,’ he said. ‘It’s as though heaven and earth are very close together. There’s a phrase that crops up in Celtic legend to describe somewhere like this. It’s called a thin place.
‘Seems very peaceful, doesn’t it?’ he added.
I nodded.
‘Well, you can’t see it now, but on the horizon is RAF Molesworth, which is just about the most secret place in the country. You see the lights at night.’
Funny thing is, as neither Stephen nor I knew at the time, that Eliot almost certainly never came here in winter. His only visit is believed to have been in May 1936. He carried report in the midst of wartime: the poem was published in 1942.
Another funny thing: the whole time I was in Huntingdonshire I never saw a cab, or a cabman.
March 2012
Bill Hensley became mayor of Huntingdon in 2013 and was given a second term the following year. He was still broadcasting, but a little less. The soap opera Huntsford was off the air in early 2014 due to ‘internal politics’.
11. Between the old way and the Ooh-arr A
CORNWALL
Cornish hagiography is a specialist subject. Across the rest of England the names of churches – St John’s, St Mark’s, St Mary’s, St Anne’s, St Peter’s – read like the roll call in a 1950s primary school, where anyone with an unusual name was at risk of getting beaten up in the playground.
Yet Cornwall is a riot of saintly place names, the vast majority Celticly poetic and utterly distinctive, whose very mention conjures up summer afternoons, craggy cliffs, the smell of fish, the cry of seagulls and crowded car parks: St Austell, St Blazey, St Endellion, St Enodoc, St Erth, St Mawes, St Mellion, St Tudy …
And then there are the church names to be relished and discovered only by the most assiduous Pevsnerite: Sts Ciricus and Julitta, St Maunanas, St Meriodocus, St Carantocus, St Crida, St Cruenna … The list is beautiful and almost endless. These are not saints likely to achieve much recognition east of the Tamar, partly because they spent their time converting only the Cornish and also because the stories about them do require a certain suspension of disbelief: St Ia arrived floating on an ivy leaf, St Budoc was born in a floating barrel, and so on. Most of them make it on to the list of saints on the website Catholic Online, but that does list 892 of them beginning with the letter A alone.
All of which is by way of a feeble excuse for not knowing that 5 March, the feast day dedicated to (among others) St Adrian, St Oliva, St John Joseph of the Cross, St Carthach the Elder, St Colman of Armagh, St Theophilus, St Kieran of Saigir and St Gerasimus of the Jordan, is also the feast of St Piran, patron saint of tin miners and of Cornwall itself.
Thus it was that I managed to arrive at St Austell Station at lunchtime on 6 March, the day after St Piran’s Day. Thus it was that I missed what is increasingly described as Cornwall’s national day, missed the carnival parade through Bodmin, missed the tableau on the sand dunes at Perranporth, missed the bloody lot. And I kicked myself and cursed my ignorance from Saltash to Scilly.
All that was left, according to the Western Morning News, was a yeth an werin session that night at the Royal Standard, Gwinear. Not sure what a yeth an werin might be, I drove the hire car twenty-five miles through driving rain, avoiding three separate Road Closed signs. (This phenomenon seems peculiarly prevalent in Cornwall, an indication of either the state of the roads or a clampdown on separatist sentiment by English government forces.) It was a kind of mortification of the flesh.
The street outside the pub was rammed with cars. Inside the noise was deafening and I had to fight my way to the bar.
‘Busy,’ I said to the barman, gratefully accepting my pint. ‘Must be quite an occasion.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he replied. ‘There’s a leaving party, and there’s a pool match against the Engine.’
‘Isn’t there some kind of Cornish event?’
‘Oh,’ he said dismissively. ‘They’re over there, that table in the corner.’
There were eight of them, mostly elderly. Among them was a figure with a long grey-white beard who, though no one was taking any notice, could only have been a former Grand Bard of Gorseth Kernow – the Cornish version of Eisteddfod – unless God himself had nipped into the Royal Standard for a quick one. This was Jori Ansell, Grand Bard of the Gorseth from 1991 to 1994, Bardic name Caradok, known to his friends as George, and, in his role as publications officer of the Cornish Language Board, at least partly responsible for the current project of translating the Bible into Cornish. Not a million miles away from God, then.
Jori proved to be a courtly, well-spoken man who dealt with the arrival of this absurd interloper with infinite politeness. It was hardly the right moment for a chat with the likes of me because (a) the purpose of the yeth an werin is for
like-minded linguists to converse in Cornish and (b), what with the pool match and the party, it was almost impossible to hear anything anyway. But he took time to explain that a few years ago there were only a few such groups in Cornwall but now there was a meeting somewhere almost every night of the week.
This did not seem like an obvious breeding ground for a revolution, especially given the ultra-loyalist name of the pub. But revolutions always emerge from unpromising circumstances: Marx pub-crawling his way up Oxford Street; Lenin meandering round London on the top deck of a bus; the perpetrators of the Easter Rising being regarded as complete eejits until the British did the Irish republican cause a historic good turn by martyring them.
From Huntingdonshire, which did not care about being a county, I had come to a county that increasingly felt the same way for the reverse reason – because it believed itself to be something more. Professor Philip Payton, Cornwall’s leading historian, pointed out to me that the Celtic components of the United Kingdom have rediscovered and revived their own heritage in the reverse order in which they were incorporated into the English state: Ireland, annexed in 1801, fought its way out (bar the six northern counties) little more than a century later; Scotland (1707) has now been flirting with the exit; Wales, formally taken over in Tudor times, was asserting itself more sluggishly. So what about Cornwall, whose degree of separation was always vaguer? Is it incredible that it should go in the same direction? Into the 1960s both the Scottish and Welsh nationalists were considered a laughing stock, and not just by the English. So it might be wise not to be too dismissive of the Cornish.
I said Dwr genes (goodbye) to Jori Ansell: he corrected my pronunciation – hard g, not soft – and I shuffled off. But Cornish consciousness is not necessarily just the preserve of elderly eccentrics being drowned out in a noisy pub. A couple of years earlier, I had visited a class of eleven-year-olds at Hayle Community College and heard them singing:
Yith esa tiek a’n jevo ki
Ha Tangi o y hanow
T-A-N-G-I
T-A-N-G-I
T-A-N-G-I
Ha Tangi o y hanow.
It drove me nuts until I realised it was the song my children knew as
There was a farmer who had a dog
And Bingo was his name-o …
This was part of a taster lesson in Cornish being offered along with German and Mandarin, both of which in theory might be more useful in the twenty-first century. But the kids were loving it. Here was something that was theirs, a secret code unknown to the rest of England. Yet there was also no hint of exclusivity. A girl whose family had just moved from Bolton was joining in every bit as enthusiastically as those who had surnames starting Tre-, Pol- or Pen- with great-grandparents buried in the churchyards at St Elwyn’s and St Winierus.
Dick Cole is an archaeologist by training, but he has celebrated both his thirtieth and fortieth birthdays as leader of Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish Nationalists. He has a natural politician’s easy manner, as yet unspoiled by the compromises and defensiveness of power. In late 2011, after nearly fifteen years of his leadership, his party managed to achieve its fifth seat on Cornwall Council. Loveday Jenkin from Praze-an-Beeble won the Wendron by-election – which, I would modestly claim, are the most euphonious eight words ever written about local government.
It has been a long old haul since the party’s wild-eyed beginnings in 1951. The cause has become modest in its aims, respectable and increasingly mainstream. It is no longer just Mebyon Kernow that wants St Piran’s Day to be made a Cornish bank holiday. It was not Mebyon Kernow’s decision to call the new and Conservative-led unitary county council ‘Cornwall Council’, carefully omitting the contentious word ‘county’.
MK has now marginalised two other separatist organisations: the Stannary Parliament, which claims a line of legitimacy dating back to Edward I but has not actually been elected by anyone in at least 250 years; and the Cornish Republican Army (christened by some clever London tabloid subeditor the Ooh-arr A). A while ago this shadowy and probably barely existent organisation made oblique threats against a couple of celebrity chefs, set fire to a derelict brewery, plastered a wall with graffiti and issued a defiant statement: ‘We are NOT responsible for the damage in Redruth when an ornamental dog had its head removed.’
Cole was clear on the fundamentals: ‘I take the view that Cornwall is the Cornish nation and not an English county. Here we have a distinct culture, a distinct Celtic language. We have a border along the Tamar which has hardly changed since AD 936. If you look at the names of the farms and the fields, they start to become Cornish a very few miles from the border. We have our own traditional music. We have our own sports. We have the DNA of nationhood.’
‘In your wildest fantasies –’ I began.
‘You don’t want to know about my wildest fantasies.’
‘In your wildest political fantasies … do you imagine going to Downing Street on equal terms, as leader of an independent nation, for bilateral negotiations with the prime minister of England?’
‘We are not fantasising. We are not campaigning for outright independence. But long term, things change. The twenty-first century is not about independent countries. There is a whole new interrelationship between nations.’
Cornishness, however, is a particularly slippery concept, because there have never been frontier posts at the Tamar or entry restrictions; and, in the twentieth century, the idea of moving there began to seem attractive.
The problem was exemplified by the late, much-loved and very Cornish Liberal MP for Truro, David Penhaligon, who was asked at a meeting: ‘What are you going to do about all this immigration, then?’
‘Oo you talking about, boy?’ replied Penhaligon. ‘The blacks? Or the English?’
A few English people move to Scotland, Wales or Ireland to work or retire or buy a holiday home, but not that many. And they would always – unless they were exceptionally crass – take the place on its own terms. Moving to Cornwall does not involve the same mental leap. ‘There has to be an accommodation,’ says Cole. ‘But there are a large number of people who expect the Cornish to do all the accommodating.’
Yet Cornwall is indeed accommodating in a way that the other Celtic countries are not. The writer Tim Heald, who lived in Fowey for fifteen years, was once doing a turn at the town’s Daphne du Maurier festival. ‘There was a man in a Viking headdress and a Cornish rugby shirt, the worst sort of local idiot. I said: “I bet you’re from Essex”, and of course he was.’ It all fits with the Bolton lass loving her Cornish lesson. And the Yorkshireman I met with a black and white St Piran’s flag in his lapel. For those who want to embrace it, Cornwall offers a sense of belonging that no other county can. Newcomers to Leeds don’t suddenly proclaim themselves Yorkshiremen.
Cornwall is of course perceived as an exceptionally desirable place: the most beautiful girl in the class, eyed longingly by the boys and jealously by the rivals. Outsiders fall in love instantly with the coastline, the climate, the soft accent, the perception of gentleness.
But there is some perversity involved here. The climatic advantage is strongest in winter: Falmouth is four degrees centigrade warmer – that’s almost a layer of clothing less – than Birmingham then, but one degree cooler in summer. Yet everything is closed in winter and hardly anyone goes there. Instead they pile in for August. And Cornwall’s reputation for beauty is a modern construct, largely built up by the marketing skills of the old Great Western Railway. Bradshaw’s Monthly Descriptive Guide of 1857 called it ‘one of the least inviting of English counties … a dreary waste’. The slow road and rail journeys down the Cornish spine are still very dreary: it was only by building its branch lines to the sea that the Great Western fixed the glories of Cornwall into the English consciousness.
Cornwall we can conjure up instantly; Cornishness, however, is more elusive. Cornish nationalism may be making headway; the language may be reviving two centuries after it died; but Cornish dialect and accent are actually fadi
ng faster than most in the face of the onslaught of immigration. The word ‘emmet’, dialect for ant, has achieved a life of its own as an alternative to ‘grockle’, the lowest form of tourist. Otherwise the sound of Cornwall is blurring into a kind of generalised Mummerset. And in east Cornwall most of the younger locals are actually Devonians, because the maternity hospitals are in Plymouth and Barnstaple.
Sir Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project, finds Cornishness deep in the past, in its lost industrial power. Cornwall was the world’s greatest producer of copper in the early nineteenth century; then copper gave way to tin; and tin gave way to nothing, and so the Cornish miners – known everywhere as ‘Cousin Jacks’ – set out to dig up distant parts of the planet. ‘There are parts of the country where the industrial culture has died which have developed a loser culture,’ says Smit. ‘I don’t find that here. Instead there is a sense of bereavement. And the tombstones are all the preserved mines and the sheds and the beam engines. Popular culture and the best Cornish writing are based on that heritage.’
He also thinks there is an underlying seriousness to Cornwall: ‘The Methodist tradition is still strong. A lot of teetotalism still. There’s an austerity, by desire not lack of wealth. If you want to fit in, you don’t flaunt what you have. Historically, there were stately homes here but, because of the distances and the state of the roads, the upper echelon tended to find company which wasn’t their class and status.
‘So it was a more egalitarian place than most. There was more active headship from the big families and they defined themselves as being Cornish. They didn’t see this as their country estate, they saw it as their home.’ This is echoed by the businessman John Brown, who owns a restaurant in St Mawes: ‘You really do get a better class of landed gentry here. They’re not just rich dickheads. They work.’
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