A few of those smart enough to get out early had already settled in Leicester. So the city council took out adverts in the Ugandan papers warning that the city was full, which the Gujaratis took as an indication of milk and honey. There was a half-hearted attempt at dispersal, but once in, they were free to move, and soon enough the exiles gravitated to Leicester. But why? It wasn’t just the adverts. According to one academic, Professor Gurharpal Singh, many of the East Africans had trading contacts there: some had actually been buying Leicester-produced knitwear and hosiery to sell in Africa. There was also cheap and available housing, partly because the Belgrave area had been blighted by an abortive motorway plan. And there were a fair few jobs.
Though right-wing MPs warned of fearful consequences, they never came. This was mainly because these were the ideal immigrants: they already spoke good English, and they were educated, resourceful, hardworking, instinctively self-reliant and entrepreneurial. These were, en masse, the nice Mr Patels (Patel being a Gujarati name) who were already starting to take over the nation’s newsagents and keeping them open much longer than their predecessors, elderly English couples in cardigans.
Professor Singh also credits the city council, which was hereabouts taken over by funkier and leftier Labour councillors, for embracing the newcomers – many of whom turned into the kind of businessmen Labour lefties hate on principle if they’re white. Leicester became the poster child for modern British race relations. According to the 2011 census, ‘white British’ were down to 45 per cent of the city’s population. The news passed almost unnoticed.
However, there are embers here that no one wishes to poke just in case some resentment might still be smouldering. Asaf Hussain of Leicester University lectures in communal relations and specialises in organising tours – much appreciated by parliamentary candidates among others – of the city’s places of worship: temples, mosques, Sikh gurdwaras, the cathedral and the synagogue. His much-respected wife, Freda, became high sheriff of Leicestershire and deputy Lord Lieutenant. ‘We know everybody,’ Asaf said.
But he isn’t starry-eyed. ‘This is still a multicultural city, not an intercultural city. Children of different races make friends with each other at school but afterwards they tend to drift apart. If the English eat Asian food, it’s not because they have a close relationship with the culture, they just like the food.’
And the same applies in reverse. Successful migrants have begun moving out of the cramped terraces of Belgrave to more expansive suburbs, and a handful to the countryside. This does not imply integration into Leicestershire’s traditional pursuits.
‘Have you ever been invited to go fox-hunting?’ I asked Asaf.
‘Oh yes. I told them I wasn’t interested. I’ve never heard of any Asian going fox-hunting.’
‘The maharajas?’
‘Only to impress the British. For Hindus it would not be very good. There’s an elephant god and a cow god and they would be very angry.’
‘There are supposed to be 300 million Hindu gods, aren’t there? There’s probably a fox-god somewhere.’
‘Maybe. Who knows?’
There are close to a million people living in Leicestershire, a third of them in Leicester itself. The connection between city and county, still overwhelmingly white, was never very strong. And the link has become ever more tenuous, especially since Leicester regained its old independence from the county council (along with Rutland) in 1997.
The cathedral has become somewhat eclipsed by the more vibrant destinations on Asaf’s itinerary, though it has been an important force in Leicester’s strong interfaith relations. Though only an overgrown parish church, bumped up to cathedral status in 1927, it has a certain rustic charm, especially in the autumn when the leaves pile up among the gravestones.
It was also the first cathedral I visited where, far from demanding money at gunpoint, they made it hard to make a donation at all. ‘Ah,’ said Beryl, one of the volunteers. ‘We used to have a glass thing by the door but it got rifled so many times we had to give up.’ They now use a medieval chest that is harder both to find and to open.
This cathedral, rather than offering sanctuary to fugitives, is sited amid Leicester’s most interesting section of higgledy-piggledy lanes and so offers a range of outward escape routes. Sometimes stuff that gets nicked – not the money obviously – makes its way back. Beryl gave me a tour of the returned treasures: ‘That sounding board above the pulpit. That was stolen years ago. It turned up in Derby. And those carvings. They went walkies.’
The cathedral has been hoping for a little publicity boost. In 2012 what was thought to be the body of Richard III was discovered over the road, in what was formerly Greyfriars churchyard, now the council’s staff car park. It was sent away to a secret destination for further forensic analysis, pending possible reburial inside the cathedral. I like to think of old Crookback lying there for five centuries, orchestrating all the thefts like some regal Fagin: ‘I hope you’ve been at work this morning, my dears.’
As things stood, there was a gaping hole in the car park, covered with a marquee as if for a garden party, and, in the cathedral, a tablet behind the altar, recording that he was buried nearby, but neither praising nor monstering him. It has been hard enough to find out where Richard was killed, never mind buried. Some years earlier, Leicestershire County Council invested in a heritage centre on Ambion Hill near Market Bosworth, where – it was thought at the time – the Battle of Bosworth was fought in 1485. Latest research, however, suggests it took place two miles away, on the flatlands near Stoke Golding.
The council responded phlegmatically. It could have been worse. One theory had been that the battle was in another county altogether. Ernie White, the councillor in charge of building the centre, was particularly relieved: ‘My leader said, “If it turns out to be in Warwickshire, Whitey, you’re sacked.”’
Assuming he was in Leicestershire at the time, Richard III gave himself the best possible chance of a deal on his kingdom-for-a-horse special offer.
The roads of most counties are traffic-clogged. The roads of Leicestershire are horse-clogged. On an unpromising November morning, there they all were: on every B road, on every country lane, round the next bend; the ladies (mostly) of the county, riding with the hauteur that can only be achieved by an Englishwoman on horseback.
The county’s emblem is the fox, which is odd because the fox’s sole purpose in Leicestershire has traditionally been to get torn apart. But these days the fox has a city-sized bolthole. Reynard could swagger from Leicester Cathedral towards Humberstone Gate carrying a wadful of money and the snazziest kind of mobile, and no one would threaten him. He would be off limits even to the collection-box thieves. And this is not just because of the pacific Gujaratis.
I heard similar stories even in Melton Mowbray. Melton! Not just un-Gujarati but the fox-hunting capital of the universe, where the territories of the Quorn, the Belvoir and the Cottesmore, three of Leicestershire’s four famous hunts, all converge. In theory, a fox ought to get eaten alive on sight. In practice, the fox has taken command of the suburban gardens, brazenly feasting, for instance, on the blood-fish-and-bone in my sister-in-law’s pots of lamb’s lettuce. And, in summer I dare say, he takes over the loungers on Melton’s sun-kissed terraces, demanding plates of roast chicken, washed down by crisp Sancerre. And if everything is not to his satisfaction, barking at his hostess, ‘Not this one, it’s corked, you vixen.’
Asaf Hussain was not quite correct. I heard of an Asian doctor who was a regular with the county’s fourth hunt, the Fernie. Very nice bloke, I was told. However, he wasn’t from Leicester. He lived in Kettering. Northamptonshire.
Fernie country comprises the southern part of Leicestershire, from the Northamptonshire border and into the area east of the city known, misleadingly, as High Leicestershire. (Charnwood Forest, now largely deforested, is actually higher.) And as I drove through their territory to the little village of Cranoe, the road got ever more crowded.
The senior master of the Fernie, Joe Cowen, paid a special tribute to one of the regular followers, Trevor, who was having ‘a big birthday’. The great thing about Trevor, he said, was ‘he never gets in the way’. This is not necessarily a tribute one would want on a gravestone but it is a muchprized virtue among hunt followers.
There was also one outsider present and, though everyone smiled and nodded at me, they did so a touch warily. Everything the Fernie does now, as one of Cowen’s joint masters announced before the start, takes place under the terms of the Hunting Act 2004. However, in 2011 two Fernie employees were convicted for digging out a fox from its burrow, only the third successful prosecution in the country since the act, after being secretly filmed by the League against Cruel Sports. Strangers with cameras are thus not welcome at the Fernie and even strangers with notebooks ring alarm bells. I absent-mindedly fished mine out of my pocket while talking to a woman about another member of staff, the red-tailed hawk employed to flush out foxes. Her voice suddenly got sharper: ‘Are you from the village?’ I made an excuse and went to grab a piece of fruitcake.
Joe Cowen is a remarkable man. He was a surveyor and a farmer, now sort of retired, but, as he admitted, to him the farming was always an adjunct to the hunting, not the other way round. He had his first outing with the Fernie in 1948, when he was seven, and has been master for forty years, which no one in Leicestershire has matched since the eighteenth century and even puts him ahead of the eponymous Mr Fernie. The joint masters now include his son. Suited and booted on horseback, Cowen senior looked fearsome. In repose in his office, he was affable and amusing, and a gold mine of information.
Leicestershire, he told me, became fox country because it was bullock country. From Victoria’s accession until the Second World War, the bullocks of Britain would be brought down to these rich and springy grasslands to be fattened up for market. In the autumn, they would head indoors, the next step towards their plate-ward destiny, leaving the fields conveniently empty. Perfect.
So Leicestershire became the fox county, not as smart or as snotty as its only rival, Gloucestershire, but inviting enough for metropolitan enthusiasts to take homes for the winter in Melton or Market Harborough. There was, said Cowen, a particular style of Leicestershire hunting: ‘It became known as the quick thing – a twenty-minute burst then stop for a drink. Jump ten fences than have a rest.’
‘A sort of Twenty20 hunting.’
‘Ye-es. Gloucestershire always looked down on this. But the countryside leads to a challenging ride at pace. Old grasses, big thorn hedges. And they do like the galloping and the jumping here.’ In a way, he thought, the hounds in Leicestershire can become secondary to the ride across country.
But it does help to have a fox. And that has become problematic. Under the Hunting Act, the hunt now has to lay a trail somewhat in the manner of drag hunting (which apparently does not involve dressing in women’s clothes) but not quite. So in addition to the huntsman, the whipper-in, the countryman, who looks after the fences, the terrier man, who spies out the land, the stable staff, the hounds and the hawk – all of them full-time with the Fernie – they now have a trail-layer. But his trail might cross the trail of a real fox. And since some of the hounds have not read all thirty-two clauses of the statute to discover what exactly is prohibited and what is exempt, there are, as the master delicately put it, ‘accidents’.
The hunters have coped with embuggerances before now: towns, railways, motorways, fertilisers (‘the hounds get very confused’); the Quorn lost part of its country to East Midlands Airport. They appear to be adapting to this one.
In the absence of busybodies with cameras, the countryside has sly ways of doing what it wants. And hunting does seem to be what rural Leicestershire wants. The farms are too large to appeal to touchy-feely new-agey smallholders; it’s too far from London to attract many commuters; and the scenery is too dull for weekenders. Unless they like hunting, of course. ‘There are about 600 farms in the Fernie country,’ said Cowen, ‘and I can count the number where we’re not welcome on the fingers of two hands. We don’t have much trouble because there’s so much acceptance. And it’s been like that for 200 years or whatever.’
The Hunting Act is palpably absurd. Lacking the political strength to ban fox-hunting completely, its proponents came up with a hodgepodge riddled with complexities and loopholes: it is not a crime to hunt a fox; it is not a crime to kill a fox; but it is illegal to hunt a fox with a dog unless covered by an exemption. The result has achieved none of the antis’ objectives, except the not inconsiderable one of irritating the hell out of the rural upper classes. This statute, half-sentimental, half-vindictive, took up massive quantities of parliamentary time that Labour backbenchers might have better employed taking an interest in the war crimes being committed, with their connivance, in Iraq.
But although the act may have made only a marginal difference to the practice of fox-hunting, it has brought about one extraordinary social change. All over rural England, the old ruling class – the class that for centuries has provided the magistrates who dispense justice in the counties – now finds itself on the very edge of the law. Its members are at one with the speeding motorists, the dope smokers, the poachers and the red-diesel duty dodgers, the types they have customarily lectured and punished: at risk of conviction under a law they find oppressive. And the old hunt saboteurs, who used to revel in getting carted off by the police, now find themselves cast as coppers’ narks. Whichever side of the argument you sit, you must admit this is rather funny.
Leicestershire is not that unattractive. The villages tend to be red-brick and straggly, their names blunt and businesslike: Barsby, Beeby, Tugby, Freeby. It also has the town of Coalville, no longer black, just grey. But the multibarrelled names take on a strange enchantment: Kibworth Harcourt, Peatling Parva, Newbold Verdon, Willoughby Waterleys, Breedon on the Hill and Frisby on the Wreake.
They can be somewhat disappointing in the flesh. But when the horn blew and the Fernie disappeared, they did so into rolling, very Midland countryside. I also crossed the county to the Vale of Belvoir, taking the route recommended to me by the cricket eminence and local cheerleader Jonathan Agnew, down the hill towards Harby. It afforded sweet views of the Vale, and also of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.
Breedon on the Hill (like Pendle Hill in Lancashire) counts as a double tautology, meaning Hillhill on the Hill. Though it is not three hills, but half a hill, part-eaten by quarrying. It contains only the priory church, on a site devoted to worship since the seventh century; it has fine views and a whipping wind, as the Saxons would have noticed.
And nearby is the sweetest-sounding town in the kingdom, Ashby-de-la-Zouch – a place of ash trees (unless the wilt gets them) that belonged to the La Zouche family – and a sweet enough spot that once had pretensions as a spa. Its reputation as the epitome of English nomenclatorial eccentricity was enhanced in the days – ended in 1964 – when Leicestershire played an annual cricket match at the Bath Grounds. It was said that the great Denis Compton, struggling after a characteristically heavy night, went straight in to bat from his bedroom at the Royal Hotel. Which, I proved by staying at the Royal and recreating the incident, was theoretically possible. Were it not for the fact that there is no record of Compton ever playing at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
Leicestershire now play all their home games in Leicester, at not very graceful Grace
Road. No one much goes there these days, including and especially the supposedly cricket-mad Indians.
November 2012
Two months later the body in the car park was confirmed as Richard III’s. In May 2014, after a tug-of-war over the bones, a High Court judge ruled that they should be reburied in Leicester Cathedral and not York Minster, as a group claiming to be his descendants had tried to insist.
23. Loosen your corset, and stay
HERTFORDSHIRE
The railway ticket office in Letchworth Garden City is an agreeable little red-brick affair, suggesting a station that does not see many trains, which is not the case. Across the bridge and in a dip, overshadowed by the new Morrisons, and half-hidden by trees even in winter, lies a factory.
It is an unusually attractive one, built in a style influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, like so much of Letchworth. With some difficulty you can just make out the sign from the road: ‘THE SPIRELLA COMPANY OF GREAT BRITAIN LTD. HIGH GRADE CORSETS’. When it opened in 1920 it was described as the Factory of Beauty. It was also known as Castle Corset.
Except for St Albans Cathedral, which is also very discreet, and the stately homes like Hatfield House and Knebworth, this may be the most famous building in Hertfordshire. Yet it is a puzzle. Corsets conjure up Victorian subjugation. Letchworth, the world’s first garden city, was meant to represent a braver, freer new century.
The founding father, Sir Ebenezer Howard, imagined – in 1898 – a unique conjunction of rus et urbe: more than a suburb, since the surrounding farms were meant to feed the population. And his vision came to happy fruition because the architects, Parker and Unwin, made the place handsome and were generous with their gardens. And the people who came to live there were the third element. They tended to be progressive but prissy, keen on fitness and fresh air, unkeen on the old vices. It was the voters who stopped Letchworth having any new pubs until the 1950s. They would describe their houses as ‘arty-crafty, ever-so-draughty’, but they were often people who liked draughts.
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