Some entrepreneur tried to make money up the road from the statue with a sort of tourist trap called Tales of Robin Hood. It didn’t trap many. Twenty miles away in Edwinstowe a remnant of Sherwood Forest has been turned into a country park, and the county council has been planning ‘a world-class visitor attraction’, the kind of phrase that strikes terror into one’s heart. But there is a further problem: though the woodlands are lovely, dark and in some places deep, the Nottinghamshire countryside is uneventful. It is far less varied than Yorkshire; much flatter than Derbyshire; has no coastline, unlike Lincolnshire.
The world-class attraction in Sherwood Forest, aside from the elusive local hero, is the Major Oak, which, having lived through three millennia, is now thirty-three feet thick with a ninety-foot spread. Gnarled and pollarded, it is not especially tall and leans wearily on metal crutches like a very old, very fat man whose only remaining desire is to fall down gently and go to sleep. But no one will let him. He is surrounded by a ring of much taller and very feminine birch trees, who appear to be nursing him, and fussing.
Over its long life, the tree has been known as the Cockpen Tree because fighting cocks were kept inside the hollow trunk awaiting their punch-ups, and then the Queen’s Tree, before Major Oak stuck, because it was immortalised in print by the eighteenth-century soldier-turned-antiquarian Major Hayman Rooke. Queen’s Tree just feels wrong as a name; it looks so indisputably masculine. And there is something about the whole of Nottinghamshire that makes these distinctions more than normally sharp.
When Emrys Bryson first arrived in Nottingham from the Black Country just after the war, he was struck by the city’s self-confidence: ‘People walked and talked as though they owned the place, instead of just scuttling around. It was as though they were on holiday. Everyone seemed full of themselves.’ He loved it and spent forty-five years on the Evening Post, mainly as the drama critic.
Neil Barnes, later a BBC producer, arrived at the university in 1956, not from the industrial North but from Portsmouth. He was immediately dazzled. ‘When you went into Slab Square, there were all these gleaming white buildings. The university was the same. Gleaming, and set in parkland. It was an amazing place.’
John Holmes also arrived as a student, started broadcasting on BBC Radio Nottingham in 1970 and was still at it more than forty years later. But he did disappear for ten years to work in Bristol: ‘They’ve got no balls in Bristol. In Nottingham they’re always up for rebellion. There’s no proper castle because the buggers kept burning it down. You could say it started with Robin Hood.’
‘They don’t pretend to be particularly blunt in the way of Yorkshiremen,’ says Bryson. ‘But if they don’t like something, they make it known.’
One might even say the refusal by most of the Nottinghamshire miners to join the national coal strike in 1984 was a manifestation of this. There was a hint of self-interest: a belief – false, it turned out – that the newer Notts pits had a chance of surviving Margaret Thatcher’s mass closure. But the refusal of the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill to call a strike ballot offended their sense of fair play.
This extends into many aspects of life. In the 1970s and 1980s the local cricketing hero Derek Randall kept being dropped from the England team in favour of Mike Gatting from posh, metropolitan Middlesex even though Randall was making more runs. ‘If the Yorkshire Ripper had come from Middlesex,’ said an unusually daring cartoon in the Evening Post, ‘they’d have given him another chance.’
Cricketing wounds tend to heal, though. There are said to be families in the old pit villages still riven because they took opposing sides in 1984. And when Notts County play teams like Chesterfield and Rotherham, they are apparently even now greeted by terrace chants of ‘scab, scab, scab, scab’ from opposing supporters who were not even born at the time.
In national folk myth, particularly male folk myth, the city of Nottingham was most famous for its women. This certainly helped bump up applications to the university, even more than the gleaming buildings. The belief existed on three different levels. Firstly, that women were in the majority: four to one in the most optimistic versions. Secondly, that they were more outgoing and more up for, um, it, than those anywhere else. And thirdly, that they were better-looking.
Oddly, there appears to be a smidgen of truth in every one of these. Census evidence suggests there were indeed more women than men (128,000 v 112,000 in 1901, for instance). These women would have had a degree of independence, and cash, because there was work for women: first in the lace industry and then for at least two of the big local companies – Boots the chemists and the tobacco firm John Player. And thirdly, all this was at the daintier end of the old working spectrum, so that the bloom of womanhood would have taken longer to fade in Nottingham than elsewhere. Furthermore, Boots workers got discounts on cosmetics, all the better for first titivating and then titillating. ‘The Queen City,’ it sometimes gets called, but perhaps only by the tourist office.
There was always a rougher, manly side to Nottingham too. It wasn’t just the penchant for rioting. In the early nineteenth century it had the worst slums in the country. As some of those were cleared, the railway was built across the Meadows, which might otherwise have remained as open space but instead turned into another notorious rookery. The third big factory, Raleigh, was very male-dominated, presumably by characters not wholly unlike Arthur Seaton, Alan Sillitoe’s creation in the most famous of Nottingham novels, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Graham Greene, who got a subediting job on one of the Nottingham papers in the 1920s, was appalled by the general squalor, turned to Catholicism as solace and exacted revenge in one of his least accomplished novels, A Gun for Sale, in which Nottingham, thinly disguised as Nottwich, is portrayed as a right dump.
Modern visitors mostly see a benign face: the Trent gleams too, on a good day; the cricket ground is efficient but still charming; you can live in a nice house in the Park and walk to town. But Nottingham is ringed by vast, depressing estates. And by the dawn of the twenty-first century the city had acquired a reputation as ‘Shottingham’ for the level of gun crime.
This was mainly due to the activities of one Colin Gunn, leader of the ‘Bestwood Cartel’, who was jailed in 2006 for life with a minimum of thirty-five years and was later deemed so dangerous that he was reported to be imprisoned in conditions similar to those used on Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Those who have seen the film will be aware how effective those turned out to be: so one should not be too condemnatory – that nice Mr Gunn’s return to Bestwood may be imminent.
Gunnless and largely gunless, the city now has instead Nottingham Contemporary, a cutting-edge art gallery produced by the great publicmoney boom of the early 2000s. ‘You can sit outside there with the new trams going by and really think the whole city has gone cool and continental,’ said one regular visitor. ‘Then you go a few yards and it’s the same old crap.’ The trams are wonderful, partly because you don’t (as in Manchester) have to wrestle with ticket machines on the cold platform: they have chummy conductors. They are also very quiet; maybe too damn quiet – ‘park and glide’ is the official exhortation. Gliders are lovely too, but they don’t sneak up on you as you’re coming out of Debenhams. The trams might cause more casualties than Colin Gunn before someone decides to install an artificial clanker. And behind all that cool is an almost unimaginable despair. When a new branch of Costa Coffee opened in the suburb of Mapperley in early 2013, there were 1,700 applications – a fair number from people with PhDs – for eight jobs, several of them part-time.
Presiding over this strangely confused city is not Robin Hood, or Colin Gunn, or Arthur Seaton, or Jesse Boot the chemist. Pride of place, above Slab Square, at the junction of King and Queen Street, goes to a statue of Brian Clough, an original, innovative and highly successful manager who took Nottingham Forest, a once-bumbling football club, to two successive European Cups in the late 1970s.
There is, however, a great deal of anecdotal evidence to
the effect that Clough took kickbacks on transfer deals on an industrial scale. Though he was fond of posturing as an anti-establishment leftie, he robbed the average football supporter to enrich himself. That Robin Hood: he didn’t understand how the world worked.
Nottinghamshire is a self-conscious county but self-contained. Its accent is little known and hard to imitate: Emrys Bryson says that neither Albert Finney nor Ian McKellen, who both played Arthur Seaton, got anywhere close. But it is persistent and distinctive, if not easy for an outsider to sort out from Derbyshire. Nottingham remains the capital of the East Midlands m’duck zone (‘Duck’ or ‘m’duck’ being the asexual term of vague endearment analogous to the general northern ‘luv’). There is also the Nottingham O-ending: Stapleford is Stabbo; the Cockington Road, Cocko; late, lamented Shipstone’s Brewery turned out pints of Shippo’s. And so on.
Local accent joke (1): Man takes cat to be seen to. ‘Is it a tom?’ says the vet. ‘Nee-ow, av gorritt wimmee in this box.’
Local accent joke (2): Golfer hits solid drive down the fairway. ‘That’s a nice tee shot,’ says his non-Nottingham partner. ‘Ta verry mooch. Burritint a tee shot, it’s a pullova.’
A friend told me of overhearing amid the crowd (or smattering) in the stands at Notts County: ‘It’s a bit Derby Road tonight.’ Rhyming slang for cold.
Pronunciation can be very complex in this county. It is said that people brought up in the old mining villages, populated between the wars by miners migrating from the already worked-out pits of the North-East, emerged with Geordie accents without straying from Nottinghamshire. Also, take the case of Southwell, or Suth’ll, an amiable if rather bungedup little town where the Norman minster beat St Mary’s Church, Nottingham, to cathedral status in an act of late Victorian giant-killing. (Nottingham and Leeds are the most significant English cities to be thus deprived.) The church always calls the place Suth’ll. So does everyone in horse racing – the possession of a manky all-weather track being the town’s other claim to fame. But I had long understood that the locals called it as spelt: South-well.
Nothing so simple. Boots on King Street seemed a suitably Nottinghamshire place to start asking the name of the town we were in.
‘Southwell,’ said the girl on the checkout with total assurance.
‘Suth’ll,’ said a man just walking out of the door.
‘South-well,’ said a woman behind me, joining in. ‘But I suppose it depends how posh you are.’
‘I went to the Minster School,’ said the checkout girl, pointing up the road. ‘Everyone says South-well.’
To the bank. ‘I grew up here,’ said the teller. ‘Suth’ll.’
At that moment the postman walked in. He must know. ‘South-well,’ he said. ‘But I’m a Newark-er. People here usually say Suth’ll.’
‘Suth’ll,’ said the cathedral guide.
‘I say Suth’ll,’ said a man in the street. ‘But I wasn’t born here. My children were. They all say South-well.’
‘Suth’ll, mostly,’ agreed another passer-by.
There seemed to be something generational involved, so I stopped two teenage girls. ‘South-well,’ they shouted in unison. One tried a bit of explanation. ‘People who live in Suth’ll all call it South –
‘Oops,’ she said.
I gave up.
The annual Nottinghamshire rite of autumn is Goose Fair, held on Slab Square until 1928, when it was exiled to the Forest, a very unforested suburban open space. Approaching it at night down the Mansfield Road, it looks like Las Vegas, shamelessly illuminating the desert sky.
Not a goose in sight these days, though plenty of sitting ducks. No shepherd fleeces his flock as gently as a showman at a travelling fair. Everyone expects to be diddled on the sideshows, just as everyone expects to be terrified by the high-tariff rides. The newcomer in 2012 was Atmosfear (‘Includes violent motion of loops of 360 degrees’). The list of exclusions ruled out anyone under fourteen, below 140 cm and over 200 cm. ‘Persons of certain body shapes may not be able to ride,’ the sign added tactfully, and it further excluded those with epilepsy, heart problems, asthma, loss of control of limbs, neck problems, back problems, recent surgery, fractured bones and pregnancy. It did not rule out the disease which, as a parent, I have rechristened teenile dementia. And its sufferers made up, at £4 a pop, all the users and queuers for Atmosfear.
In other respects Goose Fair is extremely inclusive. Like the cinema, the fair is not merely recession-proof but actually benefits from bad times: it constitutes a cheap treat in years when families have to axe their summer holidays. There are no cultural taboos, so there were a lot of Asian families, indeed groups of Asian girls. Goose Fair repels only the fastidious bourgeoisie, and outsiders. It is a very local occasion, surpassed for its size and place in local folklore only by Hull Fair, the fiesta of an even more secret and unfrequented city.
The Nottinghamshire of the global imagination, in so far as it exists, is very different from the reality. Robin Hood constituting indifferent business, he just seems like a cliché. The old mining town Eastwood used to dismiss its most famous son, D. H. Lawrence, as ‘that mucky man’. And even now the low-key trade brought in for tours of Lawrence’s home in Victoria Street and the museum up the road is dwarfed by the hordes attracted by the jumbo-sized branch of IKEA.
Coachloads of schoolchildren are brought long distances to the outskirts of the rather remote village of Laxton, east of Ollerton, for the Holocaust Museum. This is something to which it is hard to object, though its positioning is decidedly random – the house belonged to a Methodist minister’s family who became transfixed after a visit to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. And it does slightly detract from Laxton’s extraordinary significance as the only village in England that has retained the medieval system of open-field farming. This is living history, which, in this particular spot, a Holocaust Museum is not.
The fields’ survival is a complete fluke. In the eighteenth century, when the fields all around were being enclosed, Laxton was relatively prosperous and the lord of the manor, Earl Manvers, was drawing high rents, so the economics of creating big fields with a single owner was not as clear-cut as it was elsewhere. A century later, when the subject came up again, the then earl was distracted by rebuilding his stately pile, Thoresby Hall. There was a certain amount of bickering between local landowners. By the time everyone got their act together, they decided to leave the village alone. And by the twentieth century it was clear that here was now something very, very special.
The Manvers family sold up in 1950 and the Ministry of Agriculture took charge of Laxton until the Thatcherite sell-off thirty years later. The threat was such that the agricultural historian Joan Thirsk compared it to ‘dismantling Stonehenge for the sake of the building materials’. The Min of Ag kept the peace by selling it to another arm of the state, the Crown Estates.
The system has not survived intact. Some land has been hived off. The strips of land are no longer the elongated cricket pitches which the peasants ploughed in Robin Hood’s day; most are now about half as wide as a football pitch. Some land has been enclosed and there are 168 strips instead of a couple of thousand.
But the principle has been maintained. There are three huge fields, each one divided into a patchwork, split between Laxton’s fourteen farms in a manner ensuring that each farmer has his share of big bits and small bits; good land and bad. The fields have to be planted on a strict rotation – wheat one year, then another cereal or beans the next, then fallow. And each strip is separated from its neighbour only by a double furrow, leading to all kinds of border skirmishes. My guide, Stuart Rose of Bottom Farm, was told by his dad that the way to avoid problems was to make sure you got on to the land first. In practice, Laxton self-polices, with the Court Leet meeting in the Dovecote Inn every December, levying small fines on each other for infringements, and letting the ale soften any grievances.
In theory, this is unworkable. Farmers hate anyone else sticking their noses into
their business. They hate wasting time and diesel trudging from one field to the next. But there are some interesting consequences. For one thing, farming in Laxton is a lot more sociable than it is elsewhere. When everyone’s out in the fields, says Stuart, ‘there’s a lot of stopping and nattering’. Secondly, Laxton may be the most vibrant village in the county. The fourteen farms – plus a few smallholdings – are all grouped down Main Street and High Street, with small strips of their own land out the back. Contrast this to the other villages in the area, without an agricultural worker in sight and dead in the daytime.
The farmers moan, of course. But still. ‘You’d think it’d be a struggle to get tenants,’ said Stuart. ‘But whenever a farm does come up, which isn’t often, there are forty or fifty applicants.’
At the end of the Victorian era, William Straw opened a grocer’s shop in Worksop. The business prospered and in 1923 the family moved to 7 Blyth Grove, on the edge of town: not a trophy house, exactly, but a solid semi, which Mrs Straw decorated richly in a manner that may already have been a bit old-fashioned.
The Straws had three sons. The youngest died as a toddler; the middle one, Walter, went in to the business; the eldest, another William, went off to London to teach English and Latin at the City of London College. But after his father died, the younger William – rather improbably – returned to Worksop and there he stayed. When his mother died too, in 1939, he took over as housekeeper for Walter until his brother died, whereupon William lived alone until infirmity forced him into hospital in 1985.
When William himself died five years later he left the furniture to the National Trust. When officials arrived to inspect their gift, they were at first thoroughly sniffy, the individual items being worthless. ‘It was only as the afternoon wore on,’ as one of them explained later, ‘that the spell of no. 7 took hold of us.’ The place was a time capsule. Nothing had been touched. A 1932 calendar hung on the walls; the father’s hat and coat were still on their peg; the mother’s domain at the back had been preserved. Much of the stuff had been carefully labelled. There was no TV, no radio, no gramophone, no telephone. In an upstairs cupboard, there was a random collection of food in tins and jars: perhaps in case of Worksop coming under nuclear attack; perhaps in preparation for what did happen – the National Trust not just taking on the furniture but buying the house and opening it as one of its most appreciated properties, and certainly its most improbable. ‘It’s just like seeing all your granny’s bits and bobs,’ as one early visitor put it.
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