Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  No one quite knows how the name originated, probably the obvious one: the coal was so thick and so close to the surface, and the air was almost the same colour. Here was the very engine room of the Industrial Revolution: the whole producing the raw materials of coal and steel and iron; the individual towns having their own specialities – Willenhall for locks; Walsall for brass and saddles; Cradley Heath for chains; Wednesfield for traps; Netherton, in the old Worcestershire enclave of Dudley, for anchors. And so on.

  It is hard to know what came first in the Black Country, the fierce hyper-local pride or the contempt of the wider world. Whatever has replaced all that activity, call centres are not high on the list: for other Britons, a friendly Bangalorean voice will always beat a thick Black Country accent. Years ago, when industrial dereliction was at its worst, I used to pass through regularly on the train and see a huge sign near Smethwick: ‘WHERE WILL you SPEND ETERNITY?’ Oh, Gawd, I used to think, please, not in Smethwick.

  I repent. There could be far worse fates than an eternity comprising fish and chips in beef dripping washed down with pints of mild amidst warm people with such a powerful sense of community. And it is reasserting itself. Firms now like to use Black Country in their title (Black Country Jaguars; Black Country 4×4; Black Country Balti; Black Country Decorations …). Say it loud! I’m Black Country and proud!

  Brummies are particularly prone to patronise their Black Country neighbours as ‘yam yams’ (‘yow am’ being one of the usages), but there is a resurgence. Keith Hodgkins gives much of the credit to the Black Country Living Museum, which is a particularly fine and painstaking (if smokefree) recreation of the old townscapes. ‘To me the museum is the most powerful piece of propaganda to the outside world,’ he said. ‘It’s a constant struggle for identity, and losing the old county was a terrible tragedy because it lumped us in with Birmingham.’

  Staffordshire’s contribution to Britain’s economic history is not in doubt. Its contribution to political history rests on one speech, made in Birmingham by the MP for Wolverhampton South-West in April 1968. Enoch Powell, the Shadow Defence Secretary, warned an audience of fellow Conservatives in Birmingham of the dangers of the mass influx of non-whites. This was the speech known as ‘Rivers of Blood’.

  In his very precise yet very Brummie accent, Powell demanded that immigration should cease and that existing migrants should be encouraged to leave. He also warned about the pending Race Relations Bill, designed to prevent discrimination but which, he implied, would lead to violence. The title came from his closing quote: ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ It was that sentence that did it. Powell, the classicist turned politician, later regretted not keeping it in Latin: the newspapers might not have bothered to translate it.

  Within hours his party leader, Edward Heath, had dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet, and Powell never held high office again. He drifted away from the Conservatives and finished his career as an Ulster Unionist. ‘The Wolverhampton Wanderer’, some called him.

  Good grief, it was nearly fifty years ago. The impact at the time was extraordinary. Opinion polls showed that about three-quarters of voters agreed with him. But the political elite was both horrified and terrified and, although Powell was ostracised from mainstream politics, the speech had massive effects on what was to follow. His intervention became both a self-fulfilling prophecy and what you might call a self-rejecting one.

  On the one hand, it made discussion of immigration so taboo in polite society that violent extremism – or even Powellite extremism – could not get a foothold in the debate. British cities, with rare aberrations, have been largely placid. On the other hand, there was no debate. Scared to raise the subject, politicians did not attempt to formulate a policy either – even during the long reign of Margaret Thatcher, who was not unsympathetic to the Powell thesis. And thus his projections of numbers were proved pretty much correct: in the 2011 census 14 per cent of the population of England and Wales was described as other than ‘white British’.

  That’s the macro-picture. The speech, however, had an unexpected effect on the city he represented too. ‘Race relations in Wolverhampton have been some of the best, if not the best in the UK,’ said one prominent resident. ‘When there were mini-riots in the North-West about ten years ago, it turned out the local religious leaders hardly knew each other. That’s been unthinkable in Wolverhampton for almost forty years. And the direct reason for that was Enoch Powell.’

  This opinion, improbably enough, comes from Rob Marris, who held Powell’s old seat for Labour from 2001 to 2010. ‘Not Powell’s doing. It was a reaction against him. After the speech, the great and good got together to make sure that they knew and trusted each other. It’s a continuing process of hard work.’ Marris lost the seat to a Conservative, but hardly a Powellite: his name is Paul Uppal and he’s a Sikh. ‘Regrettable though it is to me personally and to Labour that he won,’ said Marris, ‘it is a measure of how far Wolverhampton has travelled.’

  The other controversial passage was where Powell read out a letter telling the story of one of his constituents, a widow ‘in a respectable street’ whose house was now surrounded by immigrants. She was followed to the shops by ‘charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies’ chanting ‘racialist’ at her and had excreta put through her letter box.

  Powell had got this story in a letter that was anonymous but detailed and evidently rational. For nearly forty years, however, there was no corroboration; his many enemies took it as urban myth. However, in 2007, the BBC and Daily Mail identified the woman as Druscilla Cotterill of 4 Brighton Place, a wartime widow, childless – and now long dead – who saw her area change around her and, perhaps not unreasonably, took to drink. I spent nearly an hour looking for Brighton Place. The satnav and A–Z showed it as being off the Merridale Road, but there was no sign of it. I asked one passerby: ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t live here if you paid me. All snobs.’

  That was not the picture Powell had painted. We were close to the city centre. The houses were mostly Victorian/Edwardian, with front gardens, big but a bit faded. The few people around did not seem overwhelmingly non-white. None of them had heard of Brighton Place. I was baffled. Then an elderly bloke (white) came by, with a knowing air. He tapped two bits of concrete that had once held a street name, leading up an almost rural green lane. ‘That’s what you’re looking for.’ I was not the first.

  Fearful of this story’s continuing potency, he was not going to give his name. But he sounded convincing. He had lived here for ever. He remembered Brighton Place, a cul-de-sac demolished years ago. He remembered Druscilla Cotterill: ‘She was a little bandy-legged lady but if you said anything you didn’t like, she’d clock you one.’

  ‘She drank?’

  ‘Not ’alf. But she was happy as a pig in shit. All those black people who lived round her, they looked after her.’

  ‘So did it happen? The excreta through the letter box?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ He became a bit vague now. It happened, he seemed to be saying, somewhere round here, but not to her.

  He was unhappy about what was happening along Merridale Road now. The houses were being bought up by non-white landlords. The colour was not the issue: they were turning them into flats and bedsits, and then no one looked after them. ‘Look at the front gardens,’ he said with disgust.

  He also directed me to a large white-painted, bay-fronted Edwardian semi about 100 yards down the road. It still looked pristine, except for the ‘For Sale’ sign, which appeared to have been there a long while. Its owners, a West Indian family (‘very nice people’), were selling up. There was no plaque to mark its most famous former owner: Enoch Powell had bought it in 1954 for £1,500 and made it his constituency home for the next twenty years. For two decades Powell had regularly walked down this street, always ready to stop for a chat, according to my informant. Whatever anyone said about him, no one ever denied he was an assiduous, well-attuned constituency MP.


  So why the hell did he need an anonymous letter telling him what was going on 100 yards up the road from his own house?

  According to the 1978 Shell Guide, in Upper and Lower Gornal, the allegedly non-communicating twin villages, ‘pure Chaucerian English is still spoken’. I went into the post office and asked a pink-haired girl if we were in Upper or Lower?

  ‘Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer asonder,’ she replied. ‘But he ne lafte nat for reyn ne thunder.’

  Actually, she just said ‘Lower’, rhyming it with ‘Power’, which may indeed be Chaucerian.

  ‘Is it true that Upper and Lower Gornal can’t understand what each other says?’

  ‘Hey!’ she said, with great indignation. ‘My nan lives in Upper Gornal!’

  I made an excuse and left.

  September/October 2013

  In November 2013 a primary school headmaster in the Black Country announced a zero-tolerance policy against local dialect phrases like I cor do that’ (instead of can’t) and ‘It wor me’ (instead of wasn’t). He did not specifically ban anyone from calling him a ‘blithy-ed’, which is Black Country for prat.

  35. A va-whatle?

  ESSEX

  I arrived in Frinton on a crisp, sunny morning, after the first frost of the season. I parked next to a discarded package for ‘Mixxed Up Classic Stimulating Drink’, also a Bounty wrapper and a used Greggs bag.

  It was my first visit to this legend among seaside resorts: the late Victorian town that strove to keep the horrors of the twentieth century at bay – litter, public houses, fish-and-chip shops and omnibuses. Frinton shut itself ‘inside the gates’, the railway crossing that guarded the only obvious way into town. They were more than a piece of routine street furniture and a nuisance to motorists; they were a symbol, of enclosure and defiance.

  The frost was just burning off the grass as the first conscientious bag-carrying dog walkers of the day accompanied their charges along the sweeping Greensward, the swathe of grass between the Esplanade and the shore. On a morning like this even the North Sea looked inviting, as the tide turned to reveal the spectacularly sandy beach. But the legend of Frinton is such that disappointment is inevitable. For a start, the thatched toilet block was boarded up for the winter. So much for one Essex joke, the one at the expense at Frinton’s demographics: ‘Harwich for the Continent! Frinton for the incontinent!’ Not in November. Now it’s ‘What’s the matter with you? Can’t you wait till Easter?’

  Furthermore, having ignored one century Frinton has succumbed to this one: the chippie was the harbinger, in 1992; the first pub, the Lock and Barrel, carefully designed to look unlike a pub, arrived with the millennium. There was furious opposition to both. Offshore, the wind turbines of Gunfleet Sands go about their obtrusive business. Even the level-crossing gates have gone, to be replaced by a barrier. Which caused another hullabaloo: in other countries, whole towns have disappeared with less ululation. There was even a report of a couple retreating back to London because they hated the noise of motorbikes. And heaven help us, the golf club is trying to get down with the kids: ‘A club for all ages’, insists the sign.

  I do admire Frinton’s determination to go its own way in a country that expects conformity from its communities. Close to the pub there is still the British India restaurant, serving Mountbatten Mushroom and Viceroy Bhavan. The town has so far seen off the normally irresistible force of Tesco. And there is still nothing that smacks of artificial seaside enjoyment. It is the perfect resort for perfect children: the sort who will build sandcastles all day and read a book all evening without saying a word until they are ready for adult conversation.

  It was with relief that I headed down the coast to Clacton. For one thing it was easier to find a toilet. And Clacton was a pleasant surprise. Expecting another disastrous seaside town to match Lowestoft or Margate, I thought the seafront, the beach (well, some of it) and the pier all rather jolly. Essex is a place that defies preconceptions. One does wonder what Frinton is doing in Essex. But, in the words of the writer Julia Jones: ‘Whatever you say about Essex, the opposite will also be true.’

  Just past Clacton, and a mere nine miles by road from the British India restaurant, is Jaywick, the eastern side of which in 2010 was decreed by the Index of Multiple Deprivation to be the most deprived area in the country. Posh-paper journalists find it an easy place to commit a bit of misery journalism, about the flimsy housing, youth unemployment, flooded streets, whatever. These reports sometimes lack a bit of context.

  Jaywick is the best surviving example of the Essex plotlands, built up between the wars on sites that were considered useless, either on marginal portions of the coast or on the heavy Essex clay known to dispirited farmers as ‘three-horse land’. A generation of men whose escape from the slums had been the trenches found it liberating to buy their own little patch of England, however humble.

  And they were resourceful enough to build their own holiday cottages or, as outsiders usually called them, shacks. Many were hardly bigger and perhaps less salubrious than a Frinton beach hut, but slowly – and against considerable opposition from the council – their owners made them just about habitable, into homes where many of them would choose to retire. There were complex disputes with the council and other authorities, one of which reached the Court of Appeal in 1936. Lord Justice Greer refused to believe that people were living in Jaywick by choice: ‘Nobody of ample means would go and live in this marsh!’

  The anarchist scholar Colin Ward and a colleague met many of Jaywick’s original settlers: ‘What struck us was their enormous attachment to their homes, their defensive independence and their strong community bonds,’ Ward wrote. He found that for fifty years, before a sewer was built, the residents had got groups together to empty the primitive toilets known as Elsan closets. Those who did it were called ‘the Bisto kids’

  This spirit has, perforce, not gone away. The ‘avenues’ behind the seafront stretch known as Brooklands – the most deprived section of all – are named after pre-war car marques: Alvis, Sunbeam, Talbot, Bentley, Swift … They have still not been adopted by the council and are thus not its problem. Officials have instead dumped a load of spoil from Clacton on wasteland and invited the residents to use it and do the roads themselves. Some of the avenues looked almost Frintonesquely neat; others, in a not especially wet week, were flooded.

  The place staggered me. In parts it looked like an American slum, perhaps post-apocalypse New Orleans, which is not an absurd comparison: thirty-five people died here in the 1953 east coast floods. Indeed, amid these gimcrack renderings of Essex timber buildings, it all felt more American than English, and not just in looks. It needs rugged individualism, a pioneer spirit, to thrive here. And some do. ‘I wouldn’t live anywhere else,’ said one pensioner on Brooklands.

  But there really are two classes of people: the descendants (actual or spiritual) of the original plotlanders, living in their own houses, forming about 40 per cent; and a more transient majority who came here solely because there are a lot of near-slums to rent very cheaply. Hence the crime, the unemployment, the deprivation. The local Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, says the problem derives from well-meaning officialdom, trying so hard to prevent a repetition of 1953 that it banned all new building in Jaywick. No one has been able to convert their shack to anything more substantial. ‘If you’ve got a plot of land with brambles growing on it, it’s rendered worthless because you can’t build on it,’ according to Carswell. ‘And if you’ve got a wooden house, you can’t build a brick one.’

  This is changing. Developers can now amalgamate the tiny plots and build more substantial houses – but on stilts, as protection from the next tidal surge. ‘People may only have a home worth £20,000–30,000 but they’ve scrimped and saved so that they are not living on a council estate,’ says Carswell. Just down the road there was discovered, in 1911, the Clacton Spear, now in the Natural History Museum and believed to be 450,000 years old. Jaywick may be the spiritual home
of an entity even more interesting to future palaeontologists. This could be the real birthplace of Essex Man.

  Essex is an exception to a great many rules, and it is a spectacular exception to the general decline of county loyalty and identification that has taken place elsewhere. This is the county that turned into a concept. Or rather a series of linked concepts.

  Basildon is often seen as the epitome of Essexness. It was built on old plotlands after being designated a new town in 1949, in Colin Ward’s words, ‘to make some kind of urban entity out of Pitsea and Laindon, where by the end of the war there was a settled population of about 25,000 served by seventy-five miles of grass-track roads, mostly with no sewers and with standpipes for water supply’. None of this had any place in the Attlee government’s brave new England and the owners were duly enticed with the offer of a snug and sanitary new home with garden in the new town. And if the inducement failed, they were forced out.

  To those who had not yet migrated from the war-ravaged East End, Basildon was a popular destination. It wasn’t Letchworth, but nor was it Limehouse. There was for one thing plenty of work, mostly in factories that were not too heavy-duty: Ilford cameras; Carreras tobacco; Ford radiators; Yardley cosmetics; Standard telephones. In the early days, the town was much admired by bien-pensant outsiders; they especially liked the pedestrianised town centre.

  But mistakes were made. The architects (consultant: the revered Sir Basil Spence) failed to notice that the shopping precinct would be a wind tunnel. And they failed to provide enough parking spaces anywhere, a problem exacerbated when, one by one, the factories began to close and Basildonians were forced, by hook, crook, car or train, to hunt far afield for work, often in London. A certain discontent crept in.