Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  What Liz wanted me to experience most of all, though, was the look of the place. When the Talbots left, a local entrepreneur opened up the gardens and the banqueting hall, and it remained a small-scale attraction until the 1970s. The Corkscrew arrived in 1980, the first double-looper in Europe, so popular it caused chaos. Since then, there has been rollercoaster hyperinflation. It all got too big for small business. Enter Merlin, now also operators of Legoland, Sea Life, Madame Tussauds and Blackpool Tower.

  The house had been carefully rendered uninhabitable just before the listed buildings regime came in. But the gardens – zestfully put together by the 15th earl – were intact, and Liz wished to make clear how well Merlin was nurturing and indeed restoring them. As you enter the grounds, the impression is of a stately home and park. Even the Smiler remains beneath the roofline and the treeline. Alton Towers is the reverse of a Disney operation, centred on a fake Mickey Mouse’s Castle. Here is a fairy-tale castle that looks fake but isn’t. You could ignore all the rides, send off the adolescents to queue for the Smiler and picnic quietly amidst the cedars.

  ‘We try to appeal to different age groups,’ said Liz. ‘We want people to bring their children, who will bring their children, who will bring their children, who will …’ The same dynastic principle as the aristocracy. And indeed I am happy to offer them my own slogan to appeal to the reluctant bourgeoisie: ‘Alton Towers – not nearly as dreadful as you think.’

  Merlin, owned mainly by private equity, is an instinctively secretive company. It does not like to reveal its visitor numbers. Liz Greenwood tried to tell me Alton Towers was simply ‘one of the biggest attractions in Staffordshire’.

  ‘One of?’

  OK, she eventually admitted, nearly half the visitors to Staffordshire go there. It takes a moment to think where the bigger half might go. Not the beach. This is not a magnet of a county. This is the not-as-dreadful-as-you-think county. Before the Industrial Revolution it was considered infamously primitive: they were already making pottery round Stoke, but had to transport it by packhorse across tracks so appalling that the breakage rate was phenomenal. Then everything changed, and Staffordshire splintered into several different pieces that had almost nothing to say to each other but were busy as industrialists by appointment to the nation and the world. The Potteries now pottered triumphantly, sending their wares safely by canal and then rail. Burton-on-Trent quenched the country’s thirst. The Black Country sent just about everything, everywhere.

  In between there was rich farmland, the lovely wooded valley round the River Churnet – which included the then little-known village of Alton – and bleak moorland in the north. But it never did cohere as a county. Until 1959 there was not even a county regiment: there were the South Staffords (two VCs at Arnhem) and the North Staffords (four VCs in the First World War and a reputation for industrial-scale swearing, I read somewhere). And the single regiment was merged again soon enough.

  Tim Cockin from Barlaston, south of Stoke, is the author of The Staffordshire Encyclopaedia – a county could not have a more assiduous enthusiast – but even he has to admit that Staffordshire is fragmented, and not just between the Potteries and the Black Country. ‘We don’t have much to do with Burton, but we are very aware they are in Staffordshire and they are very aware they are in Staffordshire.’ It is, as he likes to say, very diverse.

  But all this understates the reality of Staffordshire’s divisions. It is not just that one part of the county doesn’t speak to another, this is a place of strong but tiny communities, intensely local to an extent unimaginable elsewhere in the country. Jo Moody, the senior curator of the Black Country Living Museum, told me that, after the reorganisation and the merger of councils, Tipton’s records were moved to Smethwick: ‘So nobody consulted them any more.’ Smethwick was about ten minutes away. Keith Hodgkins of the Black Country Society was at Tipton Grammar School, where a minibus of children would arrive from Brierley Hill, five miles away: ‘They sounded almost alien.’ All across urban Staffordshire are boundaries invisible to the naked eye that the locals regard as impenetrable walls. The Wolverhampton Express & Star, once the country’s most successful evening paper (and now the least unsuccessful), built its reputation by producing multiple editions to ensure one town should not be befuddled with news about the next one. Upper and Lower Gornal, twin pit villages, were said to have had accents so impenetrable that neither place could understand the other. And even now, Hodgkins thinks, there is a difference between south of the Dudley Ridge and north, where the accent is harsher.

  Stoke-on-Trent, which is of course six towns rather than one, is even more complex for an outsider to unravel. The situation is not helped by its most famous chronicler, Arnold Bennett, with that fierce commitment to truth that marks out the great writers, rechristening Stoke the Five Towns, because he thought that sounded better.

  For most outsiders Staffordshire remains a county to rush through as fast as possible. Not an easy proposition on the M6, though the expensive alternative, the M6 Toll, is a nostalgic reminder of how joyously empty motorways were in their early days: a theme-park ride for the over-sixties. And one day, there might be an even faster way through …

  Whittington Heath Golf Club, just outside Lichfield, is an inviting course, good enough to attract occasional national boys’ and ladies’ championships, if not quite the Ryder Cup. It is not cheap (£1,400 joining fee even before the subs kick in), but nor is it snotty: on an autumnal weekday afternoon the eighteen holes, and the nineteenth, were alive with men with diamond-pattern sweaters and Midland accents. Its great asset is being built on fast-draining heathland: it had poured earlier in the week, yet the fairways still had a September springiness.

  I can claim – without false modesty – to be one of the worst golfers in the game’s history, and have a particular terror of long par fives. But there was something very appealing about the 505-yard ninth hole: oak trees to the left, oak trees to the right, but a nice straight bouncy fairway ahead. I am not the only one who has taken a shine to it. The first phase of HS2, the projected north-south rail line, is due to run, straight as a perfect clattering drive, past the clubhouse and down the ninth fairway. Tee to green in five seconds. There will be collateral damage to about half a dozen other holes. The railway will cut the course, very neatly indeed, in two.

  Despite the obsessive nature of golf, this is not quite like losing one’s house. And though members are joining in the ritualised protests, the main battle is to mitigate the damage. The club has extra land on which to rebuild: it hopes the line will be tucked away in a cutting; that it will not be too noisy (though it can hardly create more noise than the A51); that there will be a bridge or tunnel to get golfers and carts from one side to the other; and that the club can keep going during the building phase. The first rule of golf (this much I know) is never to allow outside thoughts to impinge on your concentration. And HS2 has been a long-lasting cloud on the horizon, which may or may not unleash its terrors. ‘To be honest I think the members worry more about their swing,’ said Mike Raj, the club professional.

  The problem, here and elsewhere along the route, is that there is bugger all in it for those most affected: it is a line to transport people between big cities, and the aggregate national good is in conflict with individual damage. I think the case for HS2 is a strong one, yet the government has been cruel and churlish in the way it has dealt with individual grievances, irritations and indeed tragedies. There are no plans for a stop in Staffordshire. It will be a county, more than ever, to rush through, a role it has played since the pottery stopped falling off the packhorses.

  No wonder Staffordshire people look inward, to the resources of their own communities. This book has not been much concerned with the twee end of local tradition – cheese-rolling, pancake races and furry dances, charming survivals all, but not saying much about the county in which they take place. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, I was told, was different: untwee and untouristy. And also very Staffordshire
.

  The dance dates back at least to 1532, maybe to 1226, maybe to Saxon times. It takes place, as the T-shirts say, on the first Monday after the first Sunday after 4 September. All its rituals are as precise and obscure as the date. There are twelve dancers, all male, based round two families: six carry reindeer antlers, the largest weighing nearly two stone. There is a very butch Maid Marian (‘I married into the job,’ he said), a Hobby Horse, a Fool, a boy archer, a boy playing the triangle to beat time and an accordionist. The standard uniform is an elfin pink-and-green pantomime outfit.

  And it does involve something of the very English kind of effort – serious but not serious – that other villages would put into a panto. But obviously its roots are way deeper than that. The first person I met was Steve from Bradford, who had bagged the dry slot under the Butter Cross to sell his books and CDs, mostly about morris dancing.

  ‘What’s this event got to do with morris dancing?’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ said Steve.

  ‘What is it to do with?’

  ‘It is to do with the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. It’s its own tradition.’

  The day proceeds on its own strict-ish timetable between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., involving a lunchtime trip out to Lady Bagot’s place at Blithfield Hall and then processing through the village at teatime, though tea was not foremost on the menu. The dancers stopped at the four pubs, the Bagot Arms, the Goat’s Head, the Crown and what was the Royal Oak and is now Ruchi’s Balti, where they got Cobra lager rather than ale, and at several private houses too.

  It really is old-fashioned man’s work, what with the lugging of the antlers and the downing of the beer. The music was eclectic, involving tunes as local as ‘Lili Marlene’ and ‘The Wearing of the Green’, and the dancing looked amateurish. But it must be more carefully choreographed than it looked, otherwise the participants would keep getting a face full of antlers. Maid Marian did rattle the collection tin and the couple of hundred spectators were made welcome. The atmosphere was affable and humorous. But always one felt that this was a day for Abbots Bromley, not for outsiders. And that, one senses, is why it has survived.

  But what does Staffordshire have to offer the rest of the world, beyond Alton Towers? Pottery, of course. There is an agreeably tangy cheese, only recently revived. There are Staffordshire oatcakes, but they are largely confined to the Potteries. There is the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of what someone described as ‘bloke’s bling’ – gold pommel caps for swords and so on – found in a field near Hammerwich in 2009. But Staffordshire managed to keep that quiet for about 1,300 years.

  There is the Staffordshire Bull Terrier, visually unnerving but claimed by its supporters to be so gentle it is known as ‘the nanny dog’. If true, that might make it a more appropriate county motif than the Staffordshire knot, originally the crest of the earls of Stafford. The Smiler at Alton Towers is said to look, from certain angles, a bit like the knot. But surely the county must have some way of presenting itself, to itself and its inhabitants, other than at Alton Towers? Perhaps not. In Burton I asked a girl if she was proud of being from Staffordshire. She thought for a moment. ‘I’m not not proud,’ she said.

  Even the smaller places struggle to get good publicity. The Mid-Staffs Hospital Trust (slogan: ‘Because we care’), based in Stafford and Cannock, became embroiled in a scandal about uncaring nurses and neglectful management. Tamworth was recently named as the obesity capital of Britain, although the people have some eating to do before they catch the customers of Morrisons, Jarrow. It might, however, have a reasonable chance in an ugliest-town-centre contest (possible slogan: ‘Burned by the Danes circa 874! Wrecked by the planners circa 1974!’)

  There was a time when the otherwise inoffensive town of Rugeley was the most notorious in England, owing to the infamy of William Palmer, ‘the Rugeley Poisoner’, hanged in 1856 for the murder of a racegoing companion. The case was a sensation at the time, and it still bewitches researchers, some of whom believe in his innocence. On the other hand, Palmer may also have poisoned his wife, four of his infant children and countless other victims. He was, of course, a doctor.

  Staffordshire towns exist to please themselves, not sniffy visitors, and that’s fine. And there are unexpected pleasures. Triple-spired Lichfield Cathedral, for instance. Having had an overenthusiastic makeover from the Victorians, it is not to everyone’s taste as a building – somewhere round the bottom of the second division of the ecclesiastical league table – but its setting is champion, by a lake in a particularly congenial close. Inside, it was unusually sunny and airy near the altar, which gave the building an invigorating feel. This arose, one eventually realised, from the absence of stained glass. The cathedral authorities are very proud of their stained glass: the sixteenth-century Herkendrode Windows. But they had gone away for restoration.

  ‘Is it just me?’ I asked a guide. ‘But might the cathedral actually be nicer without them?’

  She looked around furtively. ‘It certainly isn’t just you,’ she whispered. ‘But we’re not allowed to say so.’

  Outside, the scene was completely placid: most of the pupils at the cathedral school must have been in lessons. The peace was broken only by a bearded schoolmaster, staring with an agitated air in the direction of a small knot of teenage girls and focusing, as the profession has always done, on the kind of great issue that really matters in education: ‘Izzy, tuck your shirt in, please!’

  But you can never accuse Staffordshire of being samey. Barely an hour’s drive away I stood outside a more modest school building: the Flash Church of England Primary School (motto: ‘Reaching Ever Higher’). The motto was not a random cliché. Flash is the highest village not just in England, but in Britain. In 2007 experts from the Ordnance Survey ruled, for the benefit of a BBC programme, that it was more than 100 feet higher than its rival, Wanlockhead in Dumfriesshire.

  This is not what anyone expects in Staffordshire. But the signs say Flash is 1,518 feet above sea level, and the true figure was said to be 1,558 feet. I would have been willing to accept a nought on the end. The Staffordshire sliver of the Peak District is widely recognised as particularly uncompromising and this is no postcardy, tea-shoppy, bed-and-breakfasty English hill resort; even on a sunny autumn afternoon it felt wide open to the east wind. The few natives I met were very friendly, but the hours before the New Inn was due to open stretched too far ahead to encourage lingering. And the school, alas, will reach no more. It closed in 2012 after enrolment fell to zero. Staffordshire as a whole would hardly know that Flash was there.

  So here is the problem: a county of localised distinction but general incoherence. It is bipolar, but neither of the poles – the Potteries and the Black Country – is regarded as attractive. Some of it is clearly northern; much of it palpably Midland. Its eastern outpost is certainly distinctive and, one might say, attractive: Burton-on-Trent was and, to an extent, still is the brewing capital of Britain.

  Burton had nineteen breweries in 1921 and it still has eight: the sprawling old Bass plant is now owned by the North American giant Molson-Coors and almost entirely devoted to lager; Bass itself, the beer that quenched the empire’s thirst, is now brewed under licence at the Marstons plant; and there are half a dozen bijou breweries as well.

  There being no obvious alternative, I followed the signs to the National Brewing Museum. However, perhaps in obeisance to the British tradition of eccentric licensing laws, it shuts up shop shortly after lunchtime. I did have a chat with one of the guides, Des McGonigle, who went to school in the town and remembers how the air was suffused with the mingled smells: the wort from the mash tuns, with underwafts of Marmite and Robirch pork pies. If you stand on the bridge by the station now, the rebuilt Coors plant still dominates the townscape, but only a few puffs of smoke escape, and the town is usually smell-less, just as Coors products are largely tasteless.

  In the north, there is Stoke-on-Trent, whose traditional industry collapsed, partly because British womenfolk lost
interest in Sunday-best tableware, but mainly because Asia could easily undercut even low north Staffs wages. There has been a small-scale revival, led by ceramicists operating at a level somewhere between the craft fair and the old manufacturers. The Sunday Times reported in September 2013 that there were 231 ceramics-related firms in the city and gushed, ‘Now Stoke is cool.’

  Well, that’s good news. But the city’s biggest private employer is the online bookmaker Bet365. And Stoke-on-Trent remains the least inviting city to visit in Britain and perhaps (vying with Naples and Charleroi) in Western Europe. The problem with the Six Towns is just that: separate places and no obvious centre – the station is in Stoke and the shopping centre is in Hanley. ‘I call it Britain’s Los Angeles,’ said one regular visitor. He did not mean it was cool. ‘You have to drive to get anywhere. And you get traffic jams all day every day.’

  In a rainy dusk I wandered round Tunstall, northernmost of the Six, and found Bond Street, where in 2012 the council offered terraced houses for £1 to people willing to do them up. I wanted to stay in one of the Six Towns, but buying a Bond Street house would have required time to organise, and I never did discover the exotic alternative of a hotel. The only available shelter I saw anywhere was the bus station.

  In the south there is the Black Country, removed from the county in 1974 and plonked, to local disgust, in the West Midlands. If Staffordshire inspires a certain indifference elsewhere in England, West Midlands is even less popular, and neither can match the negativity evoked by what might be the least-loved geographical expression on earth: Black Country.